Personal Shopper (2014)

Irma Vep might be director Olivier Assayas’ high-point and the first film I saw of his back in the late 1990s. I’m a fan of Assayas when he also skirts with the thriller genre, the films of his that involve tracking characters through geo-political espionage such as Demonlover, Boarding Gate (one of my faves) and […]

Cemetery Of Splendour (2015)

What I most want from an art movie is to be taken to somewhere else. Another part of the world, yes, but also taken to another way of seeing. Cemetery Of Splendour (2015; Rak Ti Khon Kaen) is only my second film that I’ve watched from Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul (after Uncle Boonmee Who Can […]

News From Home (1977)

After seeing The Meetings Of Anna for the first time, and really loving it, I wanted to explore more of the filmography of Belgian director Chantal Akerman. News From Home (1977) is a critically acclaimed avant-garde documentary that she directed that I decided to take the plunge on. It’s basically a series of long takes, […]

4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011)

Continuing to complete director Abel Ferrara’s filmography, I rented from iTunes his movie 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011), one of his several collaborations with actor Willem Dafoe, after Go Go Tales and before Pasolini. Here, its a low budget version of the apocalypse set in one apartment with a couple – an actor (Dafoe) […]

Quintet (1979)

I was always intrigued by the existence of Quintet (1979), a poorly-reviewed box office flop and low point in both director Robert Altman and actor Paul Newman’s careers. As a kid leafing through my Mum’s Paul Newman books, the idea of a sci-fi flick about a death game sounded great, but this was before the […]