Thomas Mozden 25 posts 0 comments

Blade Runner is the best designed and most meditative American science fiction film this side of 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, this statement is not without qualification forty years after its initial release. For my purposes here, I may…

Emmanuèlle (Sophie Marceau), having received an urgent phone call, is on her way out of her building before realising she isn’t wearing her contacts. Her father, André (André Dussollier), we soon learn, has had a stroke. When Emmanuèlle…

Ignoring the final twenty minutes, Night’s End delivers an hour of solid frights. I suggest ignorance because the closing scenes may as well have been glued on from a separate, entirely awful picture. It loses the plot right about…

In Front of Your Face is Hong Sang-soo’s 26th feature. He is deliriously prolific and equally lauded. In each of the last three years alone, he has been awarded a Silver Bear at Berlin. Last year, a koreanscreen.com poll of 158 critics…

Eraserhead remains David Lynch’s supreme cinematic achievement. Endlessly enigmatic, his debut feature exhibits the thematic and technical concerns that would come to shape each of his subsequent projects. Those looking for a puzzle to…

Claire Denis’ latest film will be presented as Fire. The actual title, according to the filmmaker, is taken from the name of the Tindersticks track that plays over the end credits: 'Both Sides of the Blade'. This is an intriguing title and…

A boy and a young man in a two-shot, slapping one another in the face. We later learn, by way of the young man, Tom (Mike Manning, who also co-produced), that this is how he and his younger brother, Lucas (August Maturo) work through their…

From the opening frames, there’s no doubt that Gosford Park is the work of Robert Altman. The camera, unchained, prowls through the trees. You’d be forgiven for thinking Vilmos was behind the lens. Despite this stylistic familiarity, the…

Operation Hyacinth (Hyacint) is an assured, understated police procedural set roughly between 1985 and 1987. During this period, Polish police created a database of known or suspected homosexuals and, through violence and blackmail, sought…

“We can only greet the strange and unusual with love.” This is ostensibly what film-makers Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski want to assert in Cryptozoo. For about thirty minutes, they deliver on this promise. Moreover, they do so in a…