A personal journal of film and documentary reviews, and reviews of anything else that intrigues me.
French and French-language Films
Georges Méliès, “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (1902) Delightful short film, the first science fiction film and the first film to feature animation as well as…
French and French-language Films
Walerian Borowczyk, Chris Marker, “Les Astronautes” (1959) An entertaining little film short, “Les Astronautes” is a stop-motion animation collage of photographs copied, cut and pasted onto…
Jan Lenica, “The Labyrinth / Labirynt” (1963) Superficially this looks like a Terry Gilliam / Monty Python animated cartoon and it is indeed very funny and…
French and French-language Films
Philippe Grammaticopoulos, “The Bellies / Les Ventres” (2009) Delightful short film inspired in part by Rene Laloux’s animated work, “The Bellies” features a simple story about…
Jindrich Polak, “Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea / Zitra vstanu a oparim se cajem” (1977) One of a number of comic science…
Shane Carruth, “Primer” (2004) A low-budget film (it cost about US$7,000 to make) about four enterpreneurial engineer / scientist friends and work colleagues working on an…
Pedro Almodóvar, “The Skin I Live In / La Piel Que Habito” (2011) Georges Franju’s sci-fi horror classic “Eyes without a Face” was overdue for a remake…
Lars von Trier, “Melancholia” (2011) Fed up with the deadbeat rate of intellectual and cultural evolution that the human species was demonstrating on planet Earth, the…
Paul Verhoeven, “Starship Troopers” (1997) Loosely adapted from the Robert Heinlein novel of the same name, this film can be read as a caricature on several…
David Blair, “Finding the Telepathic Cinema of Manchuria” (2010) After finishing “WAX or the Discovery of Television among the Bees”, director David Blair set about picking…