Family dramas often have the dire need to verbalize emotions via heavy-handed dramatic confrontations. Thop Nazareno‘s coming-of-age drama Kiko Boksingero spares its audience of this embarrassing rehash and instead sustains a light tone all throughout. The result remains to be a fully-fleshed earnest story efficiently utilizing its modest screen time.
Tag: FPR Recommends
Dunkirk
The beach is cinema’s favorite battlefield. Muddy trenches are best left for exposition. And once you’ve seen a desolate, run-down town, you’ve seen them all. But the shorelines are where war has been depicted at its best. And therefore its worst. In Normandy, wave after wave of American forces were
War for the Planet of the Apes
NOTE: It’s assumed that the previous movies in this series have been seen by the readers (must I expound?). Anyhoo, light spoilers from the previous films follow. What I like about good war movies is not the spectacle of seeing big sweeping, epic shots of a battlefield — bullets and
Spider-Man: Homecoming
The struggle of a new beginning is evident in Spider-Man: Homecoming. It cannot be ignored that there have already been five movies preceding it (or four, as I would like to remember), and two beloved Peter Parkers under their tow. We have seen our friendly neighborhood web-slinger struggle numerous times
Get Out
An addition to the many great horror films with socially conscious themes, Get Out is a film worthy of everyone’s viewing. Rich with thrills, a budding mystery, and a sharp script, this intense debut feature from writer-director Jordan Peele has all its hype well-deserved and its enormous success duly-earned. The
Logan
“Fuck.” Those are the first words that come out of Hugh Jackman’s mouth in Logan. He then proceeds to slice, dice, and brutalize every last vato trying to jack his ride. This is the Wolverine you’ve always dreamt of seeing on screen. All previous X-Men film have had this veneer of cleanliness whenever they’ve
Arrival
Arrival, in a way, is the anti-thesis of your standard, run-of-the-mill, alien invasion movie. The extraterrestrials here don’t enter earth’s atmosphere with a bang — there are no explosions to herald their (pun not intended) arrival— they do so with a whimper and that’s just what makes their presence all
A Monster Calls
A Monster Calls or as I’d like to call it “Me, Groot, and the Dying Girl.” A simple story told in a poignant manner; A Monster Calls affects you. Even without a personal reference to a dearly beloved succumbing to illness, I assure you that tears will be shed and hearts will
Doctor Strange
Doctor Strange is deliciously exotic: a fresh aberration from Marvel’s line-up of calculated brawn and brawl. Directed by Scott Derrickson, the film delves into a mystical multiverse, of space-time continuums, and magic wielded from ancient mythos – quite an unlikely sojourn for neurosurgeon Dr. Stephen Strange, the movie’s titular man
Pamilya Ordinaryo
The everyday routine of a Filipino family is founded on endurance and survival: surviving the traffic during rush hours, and surviving to make good on their respective jobs; and enduring the heat, the exhaustion, and the every struggle to make ends meet. That is of course unless you are privileged
Sakaling Hindi Makarating
Letters and Romance. Since time immemorial the two have been intertwined like the hands of lovers, or in some cases, the fingers of a pleading man in heartbreak. It is through letters that romance can be sparked, it is through letters that said romance can survive or flounder. Of secret notes
The Conjuring 2
Director James Wan, who is slowly becoming a household name, ups the ante with another haunted house fright fest in The Conjuring 2, following the sleeper hit that started it all three years ago. Stylish and experimental, the sequel keeps afresh the franchise-in-the-making, despite being subdued. We catch up on Ed
The Nice Guys
While there are many ways to attack the buddy cop genre, at its core are two wildly different personalities forced to work together amidst disaster. The rich history of this genre continues this month as Shane Black, writer-director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, revisits black comedy in his new neo-noir
Captain America: Civil War
Let me go just say it upfront — Captain America: Civil War is the best Marvel movie to date. It works so well not just as a continuation but as a culmination of the whole eight years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This feels like what everything was building towards to
The Jungle Book
To those who still hold any degree of skepticism for Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book—Disney’s live-action adaptation of the Rudyard Kiplingclassic—I say just sing along to “Forget about your worries and your strife…” That’s a guaranteed earworm from this really good film. Complete with splendid sound design and flabbergasting CGI
Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis
Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (Eng. title: Lullaby for the Sorrowful Mystery) is eight hours long. Everybody knows it, the producers made sure of that. This focus on runtime, daresay superfluous for a Lav Diaz film, is unfortunate because it misrepresents what Hele actually is – an epic of magic realism that overlays
The Revenant
The four-way battle of man vs. man vs. nature vs. himself has never been construed in the way The Revenant does in this Oscar-nominated epic survival film. Once again, Alejandro González Iñárritu blesses us with a masterclass visual poetry as he cements his spot into one of the world’s visionary
Honor Thy Father
When I think about Christmas, the first memories that surge through me are that of family, simbang gabi, warm bonds, and that of all things good and right in the world —even just for one day. Well Honor Thy Father, which opened Christmas Day as part of the Metro Manila Film Fest 2015,
Kakabakaba Ka Ba?
This film could not have been made today, at least not without public backlash and definitely not by a major studio. This was my immediate reaction right after I saw the restored and remastered version of Mike De Leon’s Kakabakaba Ka Ba?, which was, in 1980, a last-ditch attempt at
Dahling Nick
The extraordinary brilliance of Dahling Nick is fully realized in its interviews with figures in Nick Joaquin’s life such as: National Artists for Literature Bienvinido Lumbera and F. Sionil Jose; Nick’s niece Charo Joaquin Villegas, his ultimate companion, Elena Roco; and even Communist Party of the Philippines founder, Jose Ma.
Manang Biring
Manang Biring takes off her robe, uninhibited by the darkness of her home (which apparently has not had electricity for a long time) and caresses her right breast, cleaning a wound that has made its way to the lower part of her bosom. The actress, Erlinda Villalobos, plays out this scene with exuberance
Sicario
After seeing Sicario, I had a few questions running through my head: Is it really that bad in Juarez? Should Emily Blunt play Captain Marvel? When did Benicio Del Toro transform into Mexican Brad Pitt? How can we live in a world where Roger Deakins hasn’t won an Academy Award
The Assassin
I must admit; upon entering the movie theatre, I expected Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin to be a high-energy Wuxia drama with exploding colors, intense fight scenes, and blasting traditional Chinese soundtrack. Instead, it begins in black and white, and there we see Yinniang (Shu Qi, still looking gorgeous sans make-up)
Kapatiran
Pepe Diokno is no stranger to breaking trends in cinema. His first film Engkwentro, a film about two boys on the run from a vigilante death squad was produced under a meager budget of 20,000 USD. His second film Above the Clouds, which was a little more personal, about a grandfather and grandson’s
Apocalypse Child
From its sun-kissed cinematography of Baler to its opening monologue on myths, Apocalypse Child takes no shame in driving to the audience its theme of escape, and it is in dwelling in this longing to get away — to stick by the uncertain rather than to confront realties — that character
