TIFF22 REVIEW: Kar ve Ayi [Snow and the Bear] [2023]

This is a strange place. Asli (Merve Dizdar) didn’t have to come. It doesn’t matter that her compulsory assignment as a nurse was to be stationed in a small Turkish village in the middle of nowhere. Her father had strings to pull to get her reassigned. The reason she went anyway isn’t about not wanting to cheat the system like her parents think when they blame “stubbornness” as the cause of their fear for her safety due to blizzards and bear attacks. It’s because Asli doesn’t want to feel as…

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TIFF22 REVIEW: Riceboy Sleeps [2023]

Keep your eyes open. So-Young (Choi Seung-yoon) didn’t want to leave South Korea. She had no choice. The father of her newborn son committed suicide and, as an orphan who was never adopted, she had no other family. So, with nowhere to turn and a boy who couldn’t legally become a citizen due to being born out of wedlock, she immigrated to Canada to start anew. There she would build a home for the two of them and a wall in front of her past. Questions about Dong-Hyun’s (Dohyun Noel…

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TIFF22 REVIEW: Muru [2022]

He’s chasing taniwha. New Zealand’s Tūhoe people have faced more than a century of aggression for daring to keep their culture alive. As relayed at the start of Tearepa Kahi‘s thriller Muru (a Māori word for their process of redressing transgressions), the facts are undeniable. In 1916, the police staged a raid to arrest Tūhoe prophet Rua Kenana on charges of sedition (he would later be acquitted and instead charged with resisting). A half-hour gunfight ensued leaving two dead and six wounded. Then the police staged another in 2007 to…

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VENICE22 REVIEW: Aus meiner Haut [Skin Deep] [2023]

What is this place? What makes a person? Mind or body? Take that line of inquiry even further and ask what it is you love about your significant other. Is it how they look or who they are? The combination of answers to these questions are infinite because we as people are too. Maybe looks or humor or generosity got you through the door, but those things can’t stop you from leaving alone. At some point you must dig deeper to discover it’s the indefinable essence beneath their skin and…

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VENICE22 REVIEW: Goliath [2022]

I totally understand you. If a local village warlord discovers he’s in a movie titled Goliath, he better watch his back. It doesn’t matter what his origin story is—and Poshaev (Daniyar Alshinov) has a bloody one—since power is never absolute. Yes, the villagers hail him as a hero for using his formidable presence to extort jobs for the community at a foreign investment firm’s tungsten mine. Yes, he works to keep drugs out of his domain by ruthlessly gunning down any rival gangs who dare to bring it across his…

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VENICE22 REVIEW: Dogborn [2023]

You’ll cope. The twins (Silvana Imam‘s Sister and Philip Oros‘ Brother) have nothing since their mother passed away. No house. No jobs. No money. Brother doesn’t even have a voice—not since they left Syria long ago. It’s therefore up to Sister to manage for them both. Finding places to squat, talking their way into odd jobs to get paid, and making connections that she can hopefully lean on when things get even tougher than they already are. That’s why it’s nice to have someone like their cousin Petri (Lukas Malinauskas)…

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TIFF22 REVIEW: A Gaza Weekend [2022]

We’re here. It’s the ‘promised’ land. Director Basil Khalil and co-writer Daniel Ka-Chun Chan waste no time setting the tone for their Middle Eastern comedy A Gaza Weekend. Conceived over a decade ago (and thus not a COVID film despite adding a couple COVID “jokes” into the script), its purpose is to satirize the very real conflict between Palestinians and Israelis to its most absurd extremes while also finding the common ground of humanity hiding beneath—much like Khalil’s enjoyable, Oscar-nominated short Ave Maria. As such, watching a scientist carelessly mill…

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REVIEW: 비상선언 [Bisang seoneon] [Emergency Declaration] [2022]

We’ve become his guinea pigs. As described at the start of Jae-rim Han disaster film in the sky, everything is supposed to stop the moment a pilot initiates a Bisang seoneon [Emergency Declaration]. It alone lets everyone involved know that the plane is in real danger of crashing. Other aircraft are instantly diverted into circling patterns, the nearest runaway is cleared for landing, and it becomes all-hands-on-deck to ensure the safety of passengers and crew on-board. And the general populace condones those measures because they don’t know when they might…

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REVIEW: Memory Box [2022]

We eat with the dead and ghosts. Christmas Eve was supposed to be a nice quiet evening for three generations of women: Alex (Paloma Vauthier), her mother Maia (Rim Turki), and her grandmother Téta (Clémence Sabbagh). Like has been happening so often, however, the youngest found herself home alone. Mom was working. Téta had yet to arrive. Alex was left wondering what her father and his new family were doing while conversing with friends via a group chat on her phone. And then a package arrives from Lebanon with a…

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FANTASIA22 REVIEW: 大怪獣のあとしまつ [Daikaijyu no Atoshimatsu] What to Do with the Dead Kaiju?] [2022]

We’re protecting people’s right not to know. The easiest way to describe the tone of Satoshi Miki‘s realization of an objectively ingenious concept (What happens to the rotting carcass of a defeated kaiju?), is to mention the question to which every journalist demands an answer after a blister filled with the gaseous byproduct of the monster’s decomposition bursts: Does it smell like poo or puke? If that sounds like your idea of a good time for two hours, Daikaijū no Atoshimatsu [What to do with the Dead Kaiju?] is for…

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FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Da-eum-so-hee [Next Sohee] [2022]

 Let’s do this. And here I thought capitalism’s hold on the American education system by way of unpaid internships was bad. As documented in July Jung‘s extern drama Da-eum-so-hee [Next Sohee], what’s happening in South Korea is even worse. It all comes down to incentives—not for the children, but the institutions profiting off their labor. When big companies with huge executive payrolls (since managers need managers who also need managers while hourly employees become statistical cogs in the slave machine) need cheap and naïve workers to fill call center desks…

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