If anything, there’s nothing dead about Dead Kids. This new feature by Mikhail Red sure is quite lively. Perhaps way too lively. Dead Kids is quite ambitious: it tries to be a lot of things, which makes it harder for itself to become something of essence. The narrative follows Mark Sta. Maria (Kelvin Miranda), the person who sticks…

Taken as a whole, there does not seem to be any connecting points between the three films featured in the anthology Tokyo!, which was produced by Comme des Cinemas in 2008. Tapped the then-emerging world cinema auteurs Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho, this French production presented their visions and challenged the image of Tokyo from…

John Denver Trending, written and directed by Arden Rod Condez, exposes an anomaly between what passes as reality and truth. In an attempt to defend himself from his classmates who accuse him of stealing an iPad, John Denver Cabuncal (Jansen Magpusao) becomes the talk of the town after a video of him beating up one…

Despite the growing discourse surrounding suicide, very few documentary films have approached the topic in the same way as Atsushi Kasezawa’s A Step Forward does. The film tries to balance out suicide as a phenomenon and the people involved while looking at it beyond personal motivations. The result is kind of a cartography tracing roads and spaces,…

Jam is return to form for actor-director, Sabu. After some thematic and stylistic drift, which has seen him give light-hearted family drama a chance with Usagi Drop (2011) then try his hand at romantic comedy with Chasuke’s Journey (2015), Jam, along with another recent film, Mr. Long (2017), sees the return of Sabu’s signatures His better known films feature walking, running, and other…

Veteran Indian documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan takes on the case of the relatively recent political killings of rationalists in Reason. The film is clear in its voice and its form supplements its content. Much as it calls for a nation guided by reason and the film is told in such a way that it questions what…

On the surface, Kuldesak might look like a mish-mash of Western pop culture references that have been forcefully re-appropriated to then-contemporary urban Indonesia. Helmed by first-time directors Nan Triveni Achnas, Mira Lesmana, Rizal Mantovani, and Riri Riza in 1999, this film is made up of seemingly unconnected narratives and is often referred to as an omnibus. But…

Empty By Design, the directorial debut of writer-producer Andrea A. Walter, is a tale of approximation between familiarity and difference. It tells the familiar story of coming home to a foreign land, but its two main characters occupy different contexts. The tempo of Walter’s direction seems to reflect these tugging feelings, of familiarity and difference.…

Waiting for Sunset, directed by Carlo Encino Catu, tells the story of marriage, or the failure of it. It follows an old unmarried couple, Teresa (Perla Bautista) and Celso (Menggie Cobarrubias), who are celebrating their 27th year together, and Bene (Dante Rivero), Teresa’s former husband of 26 years. Bene reaches out to Teresa as he’s fallen…

Star Cinema’s Eerie, directed by Mikhail Red, is, no doubt, quite an addition to Filipino horror. It delivers what one expects from the genre reasonably well – scares, darkness, ghosts. But it suffers a little too much from its emphasis on scare tactics. These excesses mean that its addition to the genre constitutes nothing more than…