Screen Anarchy

Regional film festivals are the unsung heroes of the film circuit. They bring smaller titles to a local audience that might not otherwise get to see them, and they can also bring the larger films with their stars, directors, and producers, to help shine a light on the industry. It gives audiences a chance to engage with films large and small, fiction and non-fiction, live action and animated, as well as the people who make them. SCAD Savannah Film Festival has been doing that for nearly 30 years, in its beautiful corner of Georgia. Being a university-run festival means that there is a focus on education and enlightenment as much as entertainment. And the festival teams have outdone themselves this year, with a range of…

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Amir has a dark secret that he’s keeping from everyone close to him. He wants to get rid of one of his legs. The left one specifically. Amir has body dysmorphic disorder, a disorder that leaves him convinced that one of his legs is rotting away and he’ll be much happier if he were to cut it off, Above The Knee as the title suggests. So Amir sets a date and begins to plan how he’ll remove the decaying appendage.    The Norwegian thriller from writer and director Viljar Bøe, with one of his leads Freddy Singh joining him as co-writer, is at its core a domestic thriller. The difference here is that the pair use body image dysphoria (clinically called Body Dysmorphic Disorder) as…

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Jia finally makes a silent movie star out of Zhao Tao.

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Seven years ago, Dutch filmmaker Thijs Meuwese co-directed the science fiction film Molly a film overflowing with ingenuity, a no-budget post-apocalyptic superhero epic. You can read my review here… That film had an incredibly impressive finale, and it marked its directors and lead actress Julia Batelaan as people to keep track of. And there is good news on that front: Thijs and Julia reunited and made a thriller with a strong science-fiction slant called Psychonaut. Even better news: it has secured itself a World Première at the Brooklyn Horror festival this month. Senior programmer Joseph Hernandez describes the film as follows: A futuristic healing machine capable of piercing into one’s memories is Maxime’s only hope to save her dying girlfriend. Along with the help of…

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Four years after her layered character study A Leave, director Lee Ran-hee returns to the Busan International Film Festival with her sophomore film The Final Semester, a film that also examines the professional struggles of the trade-bound working class. While her first film followed a middle-aged carpenter, here she looks at the lives of several vocational students as they embark on the tricky transitioning from school to factory life. Chang-woo and Woo-jae are guided by their teacher, who helps them to secure placement in a company and suggests what kind of paths are open to them during these sensitive early steps of adulthood. Certain jobs may offer them an opportunity to be exempt from military service, others could help them obtain a subsidised spot at…

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Following his intriguing debut The Girl on a Bulldozer, which screened at the Busan International Film Festival in 2021, directed Park Ki-woong returns to the festival with the New Currents competition title The Land of Morning Calm. Set far away from the big city, the film examines social prejudice and small-mindedness in a tiny and hardy coastal town where it is impossible for anyone to get away from prying eyes and wagging tongues. Opening at the break of dawn looking at an ominously quiet sea and lighthouse under a darkening sky, with only a few seagulls showing signs of life, the film soon shows how deeply ironic its title is. The protagonist, played with crusty authenticity by Yoon Joo-sang, is the ageing captain of a…

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Possibly the highlight among the new Korean Indies on show at the Busan International Film Festival this year (though this critic hasn’t quite seen everything yet), Kike Will Hit a Home Run is a quirky, charming and assured follow-up from director Park Song-yeol. The film is very much cut from the same cloth as his debut film Hot in Day, Cold at Night, which screened in Busan three years ago, but it builds on that film’s more modest achievements with a tighter story and clear stylistic aims that heighten both the film’s visual appeal and emotional throughline. Director Park and producer Won Hyang-na, who are also married off-screen, once again appear as a married couple quietly struggling to get by in the big city. Things…

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If you’re under the age of 18 in France and you were itching to see Terrifier 3 in the cinemateques, looks like you’re shit outta luck.   The Classification Committee over in France has recommended a ban on the film for minors under 18. Well, not a ban as it’s been put out there but an age appropriate rating on the film, the equivlant of an NC-17 here in North America, the death knell for distributors.   This means, according to the film’s distributor, that tens of thousands of fans (read ticket sales) will not be able to watch the third installment of the extreme horror franchise in cinemas.   The distributor is crying foul about, deploring the decision as they put it. They’re talking…

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The Criterion Collection plays hero once again with their recent 4K UHD release of Todd Solondz’s 1998 sophomore feature, Happiness. The film had long languished on a pitiful non-anamorphic window-boxed DVD from Lionsgate and fans have been clamoring for an updated version for many, many years. The grand dame of boutique home video has finally come to the rescue, following their Blu-ray release of Solondz’s Life During Wartime, Happiness marks the filmmaker’s second release with the label, and hopefully not the last as his follow ups – the equally confronting Storytelling and the outré masterpiece Palindromes – also deserve reevaluation. Happiness is a story of small town disfunction, not unlike David Lynch’s white picket fence nightmare, Blue Velvet, but Solondz replaces the hard-boiled narrative structure…

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When a little girl vanishes straight from the playground, her parents Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) start a search that doesn’t provide any leads. That is, until they start getting DVDs with the footage of the family doing routine stuff together, shot in different public spots and, most disturbingly, through the windows of their apartment. After some sleuthing, they soon have a perfect suspect: their neighbor Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), a quiet loner who lives with his ailing mother and works as a manager at a supermarket, two clear strikes against him, according to the unspoken rules of the thriller genre. From then on, though, nothing in this film by Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua really goes as the initial setup suggests. Yeo Siew…

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