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…

Mirai finds Mamoru Hosoda recreating the dimensional experiments in content, as seen in his The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), and in form, like in Wolf Children (2012), but intimately takes place in a single setting. But this film is no downgrade. Rather, the choice of form and content pushes the technique both to its conceptual and theoretical limits.…

Inchun Oh’s NIGHTSCAPE presents a simple but admittedly scary situation via an ingenious application of first-person POV style. Found footage has been the weapon of choice of low budget filmmakers for some time now. Right away, found footage necessarily implements the film frame as the characters’ subjectivity and bypasses conventional narrative’s need for establishing sequences. Due to…

There is no escaping the visual charm of Ujicha’s conceptually playful science fiction film Violence Voyager. While being a follow up to a film with similar style, the elusiveness of availability of the director’s first feature, The Burning Buddha Man (2013), makes Violence Voyager still quite a novel treat. While the style isn’t anything new, Ujicha’s “gekimation” being a variety…

Dain Iskandar Said’s Dukun might be confusing at first, due to its choice of narrative style. The film presents itself in a non-linear way as it strives to bridge genres. At first, the narrative seems to pivot on Karim (Faizal Hussein), who’s looking for his missing daughter. The narrative structure becomes rambling as he meets Diana Dahlan…

Eisuke Naito’s adaptation of Rensuke Oshikiri’s cult manga Liverleaf (more popularly known as Hepatica) continues the theme he’s been exploring since his debut – high school students in extreme situations. What makes his new feature different from his former works is that this time the apocalypse is brought to a quiet town. Unfortunately, this is where also the…