Gino M. Santos’s follow-up to his exuberant if shrouded debut The Animals is set once again within a circle of upper-class, party-‘till-drop youth (here, a quartet of twenty-somethings) frequenting night bars as if they were their sacred intersections, flush in neon lights and pumped with skittering beats and booming synths. The
Tag: Reviews
Mariquina
Jerrold Tarog’s ingenious work in last year’s Cinemalaya-entry Sana Dati distinguishes him as a man of fine, filmic talent: his film, closing the famed Camera Trilogy (sided with Confessional and Mangatyanan), is about acceptance and closure; yet it goes in all sorts of direction, transforming a simple romantic tale into
K’na, the Dreamweaver
“When Kana, a young T’boli woman, becomes a dreamweaver, she has the chance to weave together her village’s warring clans. But, will she give up true love to do so?”
Asintado
“In the middle of the preparation for Taong Putik Festival, a young man penniless and in love, takes on a drug courier job that goes terribly wrong. To save him, his mother now makes the most difficult decision of her life.”
Guardians of the Galaxy
Our fifteen-year-old selves, as I am confident is the same for most, live in an era in which we are most willing to plunge and spike into the nerdiest depths and heights of cinematic exploration in our lifetime. By close and objective inspection, this is the most awesome! The 80’s
Snowpiercer
Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho marks his momentous English-debut in Snowpiercer, a subversive, genre-melding and timely contemplation of an all-consuming society, confronted with an earth-wide layer of permafrost that renders humanity to near-extinction. What success The Wachowskis’ have achieved with their multi-dimensional odyssey that is The Matrix, Bong successfully achieves here with only
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Thrilling in every way but one, “X-Men: Days of Future Past” is the technically virtuous, wildly entertaining film that is to redeem its enduring franchise from its ostensible death marked by Brett Ratner’s butchered third film, “The Last Stand.” If this so-redemption hasn’t been done already in Matthew Vaughn’s 2011 prequel
The Sacrament
Ti West is among the very few contemporary genre filmmakers to receive much-deserved admiration: ‘tis from both the sizable fraction of the following he has cultivated over the years, people who enjoy most of all his abrupt third-act carnage; and the rest of his admiring audience, who perhaps are more
Maleficent
Meant as a redemptive ticket for the iconic villainess (which, in all Disney-goodness, can mean Immediate Character Humanization, and this is), Robert Stromberg’s revisionist take on “Maleficent” is a curious retelling, though not exactly as great and just of the beastly wicked faery. Stromberg and writer Linda Woolverton’s logic here is
22 Jump Street
Unless Vietnamese Jesus is not enough indication, one must be able to predict that Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s overtly self-knowing sequel “22 Jump Street” is about, first of all, taking things up a notch. Hopping from twenty-one to the next is not entirely a convincing prefiguration (it is our
