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…

Liu Miaomiao and Hu Weijie’s Red Flowers and Green Leaves treat a very complicated matter in a very simplified way. While being a story about marriage, the film only explicitly follows one side of the story: it is told from the point of view of the groom, Gubo (Luo Kewang). At first, this might seem…

If one is to assess Killing as the work of Shinya Tsukamoto, you may find it kind of lacking as it is less spectacular than the director’s 1980s and 90s works. But that does not take away the complexity of the themes that he is dealing with. Structurally, the film is closer to Gemini (1999), which tried to expand…