The Movie:

1974 French obscurity Cry of the Heart (a.k.a. Le Cri Du Coeur) is a decent if over-the-top family drama which is given a strange treatment with its U.S. DVD release. Based on the packaging and the description on the back, it appears to be a heartfelt tale of a woman (Stephane Audran) adjusting to life after divorce with her teenage son in tow -- kind of a Gallic Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. The actual film, however, winds up being a much darker, kinkier tale that focuses squarely on the boy, played by a histrionic young actor named Eric Damian.

In the film, Damian's character Alexandre has a debilitating accident which turns him into a twisted, manipulative little brat. Personally, that sounds like a much more intriguing concept, but not so fast, amigo. This is one of those films that operates in an alternate universe free of things like logic and reason...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Killer Bride's Perfect Crime is the essence of black comedy, in that it presents death, suicide, stalking and various outré sexual obsessions alongside visual humor and musical numbers. Remarkably, though, it's not so dark that it can't be genuinely sweet at times, and of course very funny.

Hiroko is a young woman who's always had bad luck: forever falling down in grade school footraces, both literally and metaphorically, and branded a loser by nearly everyone, except her beloved grandfather. But now her life has taken a turn for the better. She's going to marry her handsome and successful fiancé Kenichi tomorrow, and quits her job to have time to get the last few things squared away at her apartment.

Her landlord Ohya, who is also her next door neighbor, stops by for a last visit, and after a series of odd circumstances ends up accidentally dying at the hands of ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
When one thinks of Korea, one doesn't necessarily think of endearing private detective films. But just such a film is exactly what writer / director Park Dae-min has created in Private Eye.

The film is set in occupied Korea in the early 20th century. Hong Jin-ho (Hwang Jung-min) works as a private detective and sometimes reporter, finding out unfaithful wives and such like, all the while saving up the money he needs to take a steamship to America. The ship leaves in just a couple of weeks, and he's a bit short. This lack of funds is the only reason he agrees to help out young medical student Gwang-soo (Ryu Deok-hwan), and break his personal rule to never do anything dangerous. Gwang-soo had found a dead body in the woods, and decided to do some dissecting to help with his studies, and only later finds out that the body is that of the Interior Minister's missing son. Desp...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Fate is a cruel mistress in director Kwon Ho-Young's Parallel Life. Although the film is propped up by a central conceit that only a paranoia junkie could love, the twists and turns in Han Jeung Ae's script are wholly original and frequently breathtaking. This is a gripping thriller that leaves its mark by promising a resolution up front and then forcing its lead character to squirm around in order to avoid it.

Suk-Hyun (Ji Jin-Hee) is a tough but honest judge. His dedication to upholding the law with often unpopular decisions has earned him quite the reputation with the public. With an important promotion bolstering his confidence, he seems to be set for bigger and better things when tragedy strikes. His wife is found bludgeoned to death, leaving Suk-Hyun to grieve alone with his young daughter. This is when the theory of parallel lives is tossed into the mix. ...Read the entire review

This is the story of my solitude / If my solitude were a fish

Fish Story represents an evolution in a problem I feel is becoming more prevalent in movies, which is that directors have an idea but not a story. An idea is enough to begin a film, but unless you have a story, you don't have a driving force, and often no beginning, middle, or end, resulting in too many films that have plenty of great moments reinforcing or playing off of the idea, and a bunch of filler surrounding those moments, all leading towards a less-than-satisfying conclusion that's not so much a resolution as it is a stopping point. Fish Story trumps those films in that the resolution of the story may be its most satisfying aspect, but there's an inherent disconnect in the structure of the film and the way it builds to its finale that hurt it more than help it.

The film takes place in 2012, five hours ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The first few scenes of Rikidozan: A Hero Extraordinaire are a good indication that this film doesn't take the contrived, inspirational route of most sports bio-pics. Opening in a Tokyo nightclub in 1963, our first shot of the "hero extraordinaire" of the title are of a drunken, bloated man stumbling his way onto a stage to sing. While it isn't too unusual to have the protagonist shown in a sorry, confused state (see: Raging Bull), this Korean production goes out of its way to show the long, slow and steady decline of its subject. That, to me, is a good thing.

Rikidozan (1924-63) was Japan's equivalent of Hulk Hogan during his '50s peak, a towering figure who brought a nascent, TV-friendly sport to a generation of Japanese desperate for a commanding, virile hero to emulate. Although pro wrestling back then was a far cry from the overwrought, soap opera-like antics of...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Twisty South Korean import The Recipe follows a TV producer's mission to find out why a serial killer on death row made his last request a bowl of stew. Not just any bowl of stew, but a special type of dwinjang jjigae bean curd soup that has been known to bring tears of joy to whomever samples or smells it. The quest for this particularly intoxicating soup leads to a mysterious woman whose meticulous food preparation techniques add to her allure. Although dwinjang jjigae is apparently a common dish in Korean cuisine, the lengths that The Recipe's central character go to in order to find its origins are anything but ordinary.

The Recipe begins as TV documentary producer Choi Yu-jim (played by Ryu Seung-ryong) gains valuable knowledge of notorious mass murderer Kim Jong-gu's final request - the soup, a bowl of which he was eating when he was arrest...Read the entire review

The Film:

THE FILM:

The notorious, divisive French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl--see what I mean?) is a feminist artist whose works are primarily concerned with female liberation and empowerment, but in terms far, far removed from most of what might make you want to roll your eyes when you read that description. There is no trace of Eat, Pray, Love/First Wives' Club faux-sisterhood chick-flickery, none of that cheap, chipper affirmation; even Thelma and LouiseRead the entire review

THE MOVIE:

The South Korean movie I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay is a story of romance in a mental hospital, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by way of Romeo and Juliet. Young-goon (Lim Soo-jng, A Tale of Two Sisters) believes she is a cyborg, but after the voice on the radio tells her to cut open her arm and stick wires inside, she is sent to a psychiatric facility. Mental illness runs in her family. Her grandmother believed she was a mouse.

These kinds of ...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

Sometimes simplicity is the toughest form of art to review and the short films of Kanji Nakamura are incredibly simplistic in execution, almost to a fault. Nakamura, who recently made his feature length debut with the philosophical sci-fi film "The Clone Returns Home" showed fearlessness in filmmaking with his 1994 short "Fe" (referring to the elemental symbol for iron) and the 2003 short "The Box." Both films collected on this disc share similar themes and establish a visual style that Nakamura would take to near masterpiece levels in "The Clone Returns Home." However, "The Box" and "Fe" may not share the same audience and are likely to leave most viewers scratching their heads in frustration.

Had both films not been included in the same package, the shared themes and plot devices in both would...Read the entire review

Tapage Nocturne (or Night After Night, as it's titled on this DVD) is the second film by Catherine Breillat, who would go onto make several sexually provocative films, including Romance and Fat Girl, recently re-released on Criterion Blu-Ray. As far as subject matter goes, Tapage Nocturne is no different, exploring the sexual encounters of a promiscuous female film director, but it has the hallmarks of an "early" work, the worst being an overall lack of momentum thanks to a rough, disjointed narrative...a problem that may be exacerbated by a poor French-to-English subtitle translation.

Solange (Dominique Laffin) spends the days editing her latest film, and her nights moving from bed to bed. She has so many routine encounters, she's even devised a schedule of when and where to meet each...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Anyone who has an interest in the various non-U.S. national cinemas will be familiar with the depressing problem that seems to lie at the heart of the failure of Claude Chabrol's 1976 film The Twist (Les Folies bourgeoises). It is the same problem that Bergman had when making The Serpent's Egg, or Truffaut when making Fahrenheit 451--the same drawback Sydney Lumet observed in his book Making Movies when commenting on his difficulties with Antonioni's Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Alfred Hitchcock was a touchstone for all of the French New Wave filmmakers (Truffaut and Rohmer wrote entire books on him), but the master's influence might be most directly evident in the work of the late Claude Chabrol, the most consistently prolific of the New Wavers (he turned out more or less a film every couple of years between 1958 and his death last year). Chabrol is not so much an imitator as he is a kindred spirit; despite many stylistic and narrative differences, his films have a d...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

"People sell themselves in different ways."

In a corrupt, ruthless, dog-eat-dog world, are the bonds of friendship and loyalty more important and reliable than the fleeting connections of passion and romantic/erotic love? That is the rhetorical question posed in Claude Sautet's (Classe tous risques) Mado, a clear-eyed, somber, yet surprisingly sweet drama masquerading as a sort of noirish thriller. The film recounts the misfortunes of Simon Léotard (Michel Piccoli, Contempt, Dill...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

It has been noted many times before, but anyone finding themselves stuck watching René Gainville's 1979 French farce The Associate (L'Associé) will be reminded once again that there is nothing quite as bad as a comedy that fails to be funny. Stranded somewhere between genuinely dumb slapstick, social farce, and cultural-political satire, this tone-deaf leftover from the dawn of a relatively low period overall in le cinéma français is lame and tacky in almost every way imaginable; say what you will about Jerry Lewis and his French admirers, but the lethargy and clumsiness on display here make anything by the original nutty professor look like a sharp, deft charmer.

There is an interesting theme at the core of the film--that o...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Meet a guy you'll love to hate

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Patton Oswalt, Dark Comedies
Likes: Adam Goldstein, Margaret Cho
Dislikes: Douchebags
Hates: Ken

The Movie
Patton Oswalt has never led me wrong. It's not that he's a good friend of mine, but any time he's positively mentioned a movie or whatever, it's been something I've really enjoyed once I checked it out. So when he took up the cause of The Snake I was sure I had to check it out. While it's not the best Oswalt-approved piece of media I've ever digested, it continues his perfect streak of having similar tastes as I do.

Many films call themselves black comedy, but few are legitimately black in their comedy. Normally they are...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The cover of Pathfinder's release of Squatter Punk says, in a font resembling a ransom note not unlike the cover of The Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bullocks album, "This is not a film by Khavn. In way, that statement is absolutely true, even if the singularly named movie maker was the guy behind the camera - the film isn't really directed. Rather, it just follows around a kid with a Mohawk named Hapon as he zips around a slum in Manila, Philippines, more or less going about his business and basically trying to keep himself interested.

When the movie begins, we see him kicking a can of Coca-Cola down a grubby street (a stab at blatant American consumerism? You be the judge!) and as his can-kicking expedition takes him deeper into the slum, we get a look at the abject poverty that he and many others live in, day in and day out. Hapon, for the record, is jus...Read the entire review

The Family That Eats Soil:
Not up on your Philippine cultural and political history? Khavn's incendiary film probably won't bring you up to speed, but it will wake you up like a slap to the face with a huge hand made from frigid salt water. Filipino activists, scholars and others should feel that same stinging slap, even if they get the joke more than casual viewers. Khavn's agit-prop surrealist mélange might flirt with various levels of incomprehensibility, but if you've sat through anything by David Lynch, you're primed for the nightmare logic dispensed by this fierce filmmaker.

Drawing inspiration seemingly equally from the canons of Lynch, Harmony Korine, Takashi Miike and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Khavn throws down the gantlet early in his fractured narrative, constructing a credits-sequence around clay animation scenes of brutal, violent and graphic rape. Jan Svankmajer has nothing to wo...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Filipino director Khavn Delacruz's Vampire of Quezon City is a bold, experimental, experiential film. It is, however, also one of the most misogynistic films this reviewer has ever seen, which dwells lovingly over graphic depictions of rape and violence against women. It is not for the faint of heart.

There isn't really any story to speak of. What is shown alternates between two perspectives. The first is a jaded police officer, speaking directly to the camera, talking about the vampire killer, or aswang, that has been stalking through the streets of Quezon City the past few months, raping and disemboweling young women. The second is long sequences of rape, torture and humiliation of said women, often with no soundtrack, overlaid with Hammond organ music, dogs barking, warning sirens, compressors or other random sounds. There is very little actual dialogue, mostly the poli...Read the entire review

At the root of Guns and Talks writer/director Jin Jang's Murder, Take One (2005) is an interesting idea. An idea, never fulfilled.

The film is technically competent and, even if some characters are one-dimensional, well-preformed. That said, its not enough, and I'm about to write one of those reviews that basically touches on all the sour spots because it is that kind of film, one where most every positive has some off note attached to it.

First of all, this is a two hour film, more than enough time to leisurely set up a premise, but the setup is all rushed in the first few minutes. During the opening, we learn of the murder of a thirty-something girl in a hotel room). The investigation into her death will take place on live tv, a whole building has been assigned to house the prosecuting detectives, suspects, and the tv crew. For the next forty-five minutes (a day, more or less, in r...Read the entire review

When you say Teacher's Pet is a Korean film about the affair between a teacher and student, the knee jerk reaction is that it is probably a ho-hum, tabloidish story. Fairly well-worn, salacious subject matter, older teacher, young student, a secret dalliance hinging on an abuse of authority. Luckily the film eschews any melodrama and is instead a lightly comic charmer with some touches of magic realism.

Joh In-yeong (Kim Jeong-eun) is a math teacher who takes a liking to a sullen young student Lee Seok (Lee Tae-seong) in part because he reminds her of her first love, who coincidentally(?) was also named- you guessed it- Lee Seok. Meanwhile, another Joh In-yeong, we'll call her Joh In-yeong II (Jeong Yu-mi), a schoolgirl, is also in love with a Lee Seok doppelganger in both appearance and name.

Initially, I thought that the film was mixing up flashbacks between the current and past...Read the entire review

The Movie:
If you like your documentaries with massive helpings of down home Americana, Jump: A Frogumentary is the film for you. Justin Bookey's documentary about the longstanding frog jumping competition in Angel's Camp, California, located in Calaveras County, highlights a number of the endearing, quirky characters involved and provides a light but interesting experience.

The frog jumping competition has been going on since 1928, and was inspired by the Mark Twain short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". As a rule, each frog gets three jumps, and the longest distance wins. The current record, of more than 21 feet, is held by Lee Giudici, whose frog Rosie the Ribeter made the leap. Giudici is interviewed numerous times for Jump, along with a number of other "frog jockeys" and members of various teams that compete year after year in the annual compe...Read the entire review

It's tempting to call "B.S." on the makers of "See You After School" when they repeatedly deny having even seen the 1987 cult favorite "Three O'Clock High," let alone having plagiarized from it. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's say they truly thought they had concocted an original storyline - completely possible, since the two films aren't too much alike beyond their shared premise, and it's highly probable that two writers working from the same idea but two decades and thousands of miles apart will come up with a few similar jokes. Let's let the filmmakers have all of that. We're still left with a painfully unfunny movie, cheaply constructed and woefully acted. When a movie is this terrible, plagiarism is the least of its concerns.

Written and directed by first-time...Read the entire review

The Film:

The Movie:

A Korean slasher film directed by In Soo Kim in 2000, aspects of Bloody Beach feel a bit dated nine years since it was made, but the film is still a fun watch that'll appeal to fans of horrordom's most beloved sub-genre.

When the movie begins, a group of internet friends who have been hanging out in the same chat room for ages but who have never actually met in person decide it's time to meet face to face. They plan a group camping weekend out at the beach, conveniently away from civilization, where they figure they'll get to know one another better and generally just hang out and have some good fun. Things start off well enough, with everyone getting along and seemingly in a good mood - one couple even heads to a car for a little conjugal alone time after having flirted with one another online for awhile, but soon things turn sour. A homicidal maniac is on the l...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The Curse of February 29th is a tepid Korean supernatural thriller that lacks many thrills or scares or a story that makes much sense.

Jiyeon is a young lady who has the misfortune to work at a cursed toll booth. There was an accident there many years ago on February 29th, which date of course only appears in leap years. A prison bus wrecks and many people die, including a female serial killer, whose body is not found, but who is presumed killed in the fire. The dead woman's spirit returns every four years to kill toll booth employees. What possible motive could be behind these killings is not discussed, or even deemed important.

Jiyeon has been working at the toll booth for a few years, but was not working there in the last leap year, and so missed out on the previous iteration of murders. She works the night shift, and this leap year as it grows closer to February 29th...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Hidden Floor is that kind of manipulative horror movie that we realize is just jerking us around with its jump scares and weird noises and freaky looking dead women wandering around, but love anyway. This is fairly standard Korean horror material, with a haunted apartment building and some horrible misdeed done in the past imposing itself on the present. It is executed so effectively, though, that the standard issue plot is not a bother. Hidden Floor provides buckets of scares and a solid hour and a half of entertainment.

Single mom Chae Min-Young moves in to a new apartment building with her daughter Juhee in the hopes that it will make her life easier with its proximity to her job. She wasn't counting on the evil spirits that inhabit the building and kill people to assuage their frustrated anger. And where do these spirits live? On the hidden fourth floor. Apparen...Read the entire review

Just as your garden-variety horror fan will know J-Horror as the movies with the stringy-haired ghosts, your garden-variety Asian horror fan will probably associate K-Horror (Korean Horror) with schoolgirls. Disregarding the works of Bong Joon-Ho, (who, in truth centered his wonderful The Host around a schoolgirl) if you think of K-Horror you'll think of things like the Whispering Corridors series and come up a cropper of young chicks in knee-high stockings. My Bloody Roommates is no exception. It's pretty much the ultimate K-Horror schoolgirl saga. Yet, though it's the ultimate, it's not terribly scary, suspenseful or visceral - attributes that many look for when thinking of a horror film.

Opening in arch satirical fashion, Roommates displays a hopeless infomercial for a tiny college prep academy catering to girls on the brink of failure. Since getting the Best. Education...Read the entire review

The Product:
Robots used to be cool. We used to see them as our potential pool of willing programmable workers, servicing every need from the most menial to the more "kinky" within our 21st century society. Sure, there was the rogue mechanical man, someone who would turn on his master without remembering Asimov's three infamous "rules". But for every Blade Runner replicant or T-1000 Terminator, there was a Gigolo Joe, or an artificially intelligent little boy named David. With Japan currently making creepy headway into the tenuous territory of manufactured humanity, it's interesting to see how the cinematic case for robots has evolved - and recently, stalled. Instead of being cute, or cruel, today's automatons are all but an afterthought. Clearly, filmmaker David O'Connor wants to change such a perception. His approach - make a movie where a computerized tin man is one part in a regul...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Randall Kaplan isn't a household name. In fact, I'd never heard of him until Beneath The Flesh popped up in my mailbox. But you know what? This dude's got a talent for the 'scary' and this DVD from Pathfinder, which collects four of his short films, is definitely going to appeal to those who like their horror experimental, a little surreal, and atmospheric. Here's a peak:

Boxhead (23:47) - The opening salvo is a pretty effective one as this short tells the unnerving and unusual story of an aging man who lives his life as a reclusive hermit type, ignoring society and all that it has to offer and dealing with other people only when he has to. Flashbacks show us that as a boy he had a rather unorthodox friend, a creature he's dubbed 'Boxhead' but now that he's aged decades, it isn't quite as friendly as he remembers it to be. Appearing in his rundown low-rent...Read the entire review

The Metamorphosis, a short novel first published nearly a century ago, remains one of German author Franz Kafka's most memorable works. This slow-burning tale is defined by the strange fate of our central character, Gregor Samsa, a salesman who awakens one morning to discover that his body has changed completely. Gregor has become an insect-like creature for reasons unknown, and his family and friends react accordingly. Sadly, Gregor's life doesn't get any easier: he eventually succumbs to the shame and isolation caused by his terrible new identity, never returning to his former self. The Metamorphosis has been studied, written about and mulled over since 1915, and for good reason: it's a simple story well told, and one that can be interpreted on many different levels. Kafka's novell...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The Burning is a Japanese family drama, with the twist thrown in that the two sisters around whom the story revolves like to set fires. The film is sedately paced, but more interested in providing interesting visual tableaux and insinuating the viewer into the relationship between the two sisters than in storyline or plot. This will make for slow going for those who prefer strong character beats and a structured plot.

The Burning focuses on twin sisters Minako and Hinako, played by real life siblings Rika and Mika Nakamura. Minako has been away since their father died in a fire thirteen years ago. She returns to visit her sister (who has been living with an uncle) after discovering that she has a fatal brain tumor. The two set a lot of fires when they were together as children, and Hinako has continued to set blazes while Minako has been away, seemingly as an ...Read the entire review

Dutch Junkies:
Dutch Junkies does a neat job of capturing something of the feelings of addiction: jonesing and the fix. The bipartite documentary is almost exactly about what you'd think; Emoticons looks at young Dutch women nominally addicted to the Internet, while There Goes My Heart chronicles a few of Holland's oldest drug addicts. From an addict's point of view (in this case we'll assume addiction to documentaries) the Dutch Junkies blend keeps its fix in the second half, while the first half leaves the viewer jonesing.

Emoticons is a kind of grim, sometimes creepy and often depressing slog through a phenomenon that certainly exists, but bears only a glancing similarity to what's presented. Six women ranging in age from 14-years-old to middle age tell stories of finding solace and companionship in online relationships. Central to each woman's story is emotional pain - one is tea...Read the entire review

As a straightforward character drama, Vahid Mousaian's Silence of the Sea (Khamushiye Darya, 2003) is a relatively impressive effort. Our story revolves around Sia (Masoud Rayegany), an Iranian citizen who illegally left his country several years ago. Currently living in Sweden with his wife and children, Sia ponders a return visit to his home---and though it might be dangerous, his nostalgia has already gotten the better of him. Plotting the best course involves going through a port where no visa is needed; even so, his personal safety isn't guaranteed, especially when he dares to venture further inland. As the packaging succinctly describes Silence of the Sea, it's basically a struggle to decide whether the past or present is more essential.

As expected, this relatively bri...Read the entire review