It’s been a while since we’ve gone through a round-up of some of my physical media treasures, hey? Between going on vacation and taking on some new projects, my writing has slowed down a bit here at Rewind and Revive. That being said, by a sheer stroke of luck, everything I’ve been consuming cinematically lately has been absolutely delicious. Whenever that happens, I feel the urge to lean into a bit of exploratory play — whether that took the form of my Robert Hossein essay from February or last month’s review of Kin-dza-dza!. Nevertheless, as my physical media stack grows, it’s getting to the point where covering them in a timely manner feels like a game of whack-a-mole.

For today’s round-up, I initially had planned to come to you with five reviews, though as I watched the first three films, I realized that I already had too much to say, and, more importantly, I had a sudden “Eureka!” moment while thinking about them in conversation with one another. Hear me out, because I know that, on paper, grouping a classic Greek tragedy, a 1970s Korean psychological drama, and a movie about an ‘80s teen girl punk band together sounds mad.

What struck me about these three films is the shared tension they carry, though presented in completely different ways. Each film follows a woman as she navigates forces that attempt to define her — whether through expectation, perception, or performance. While there is no neat resolution across any of these stories, there is something to be said for recognizing how identity shifts under those conditions. Just… noticing those forces at play, and what it means to move within them.

Even for a round-up format, I wanted to let these three titles breathe. The following films stayed with me, and I hope they give you something to think about, too.

Let’s rewind and revive.

Iphigenia (Michael Cacoyannis; 1977)

At one point in Michael Cacoyannis’ Iphigenia, King Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra (Irene Papas), tells her husband (Kostas Kazakos), “Your silence is enough,” after she discovers his cruel secret. It’s a moment that comes well into the film’s 129-minute runtime, but it speaks to what Cacoyannis does so well throughout: showing us the truth well before anyone says it out loud.

What surprised me most about this Euripidean tragedy is how much time we spend waiting. Immediately through Giorgos Arvanitis’ patient cinematography, we’re shown the Greek army halted at Aulis, stalled by windless skies. Their tempers are rising — as is the temperature itself — and you can practically feel the suffocating heat.

Agamemnon’s men are restless, so he allows them the thrill of the hunt at the nearby temple of Artemis, though, as he warns, no deer should be harmed. After the inevitable happens, we don’t even have to wait for the oracle’s demand to arrive by word of mouth; Agamemnon’s fate is instantly sealed. Arvanitis cuts to a gorgeous but ominous shot of the temple’s high priest, Calchas (Dimitris Aronis), elevated almost in a ritualistic tableau. Flanked by torchbearers against the pale sky and jagged stones, the composition feels like the gods announcing their divine judgment.

When Iphigenia (Tatiana Papamoschou) is finally named as the sacrifice, it lands to us as mere confirmation. For Agamemnon, it’s the same confirmation, though one he refuses to face, his expression contorting in agony. The divine machinery has already begun moving, and it will only stop at the cost of the very cause he claims to serve. As he later tells Iphigenia herself, “Greece is more powerful than both of us.”

In an archival 1977 interview with Cacoyannis and Papas for French television (included on the Radiance disc extras), the filmmaker mentioned that Euripides often dealt with the “corruption of war” — something he claimed he resonated with because “it’s exactly like current events.” In Iphigenia, the army becomes the living chorus, or as Agamemnon calls it, the “thousand-headed monster” that he cannot escape. Crushed between the love for his child and public expectation at the brink of cannibalization, he convinces himself that he has no other choice.

“The film was screaming out to have this physicality to it,” Cacoyannis shared during Cannes press coverage following the film’s release. By taking the first 20 minutes to ground us in the suffering of Agamemnon’s people, the simmering anticipation only drives the tragedy home more forcefully later on.

If Agamemnon embodies the paralysis of a man crushed by the system, Clytemnestra becomes its fiercest opponent. For a film built on the tension of waiting, her fury doesn’t arrive out of nowhere — it, too, simmers. Early on, before she realizes the truth, she draws a clear boundary between public power and private life, telling her husband, “The world is your dominion, so rule it! But in my household, I’m the ruler.” Initially, the line feels like bold defiance, but in hindsight, it reveals that Clytemnestra refuses to fall in line, even before she knows what she’s being asked to accept.

When Clytemnestra discovers her daughter’s fate, there’s no illusion left to maintain. She sees through Agamemnon completely, viciously cutting through every excuse he has tried to construct — or, better yet, saying aloud what the film has already shown us.

Iphigenia, on the other hand, undergoes the quietest transformation of all, yet perhaps the most unsettling. As she’s surrounded by the wails of her mother’s resistance and her father’s rationalizations, she simply… absorbs it all, turning it into something she can believe. “My weddings. My children. My glory.”

You can purchase Iphigenia via Radiance Films or MVD Shop.

Splendid Outing (Kim Soo-yong; 1978)

For a moment, Kim Soo-yong’s Splendid Outing tricks us into thinking we are moving toward a familiar image of power. It opens with a car driving from a mansion toward an imposing skyscraper in Seoul, before cutting to a first-person POV as the camera glides through hallways, past deferential figures, and into an office. When the person behind the desk is finally shown, it’s President Gong Do-hee (played brilliantly by Yoon Jeong-hee), a woman who appears completely in charge of her corporate empire. She remains composed and confident as she moves through a series of meetings, including a conference on the feminist movement in South Korea. As she approaches the stage, the camera suddenly goes out of focus — the first hint of the unraveling to come — but she nonetheless boldly declares, “The era of men symbolizing power has come to an end. All forms of power must yield before wisdom and intelligence.”

Shortly after, the film starts to shift its gaze. At a congratulatory gala that same afternoon, various men approach her with praise. However, their remarks are laced with subtle condescension, even noting that she chose to remain single after her husband’s death. Gong brushes off the comments with practiced ease, though this exchange also suggests that her authority is something she must continually assert — instead of something that would simply be granted to her if she were a man.

That same night, Gong retires to her bedroom, exhausted. Jung Il-sung’s cinematography adopts a surreal tone, enveloping her space in a blue glow as the score turns ominous, complete with spectral crooning. As dream sequences begin to blur with flashbacks of the “jokes” made at her expense earlier in the day, the composure she has maintained cracks, revealing the emotional strain that her carefully constructed image cannot contain for much longer.

The following day, after visiting a shaman who offers insight into her dream, Gong sets off on her “splendid outing,” this time, driving herself to a small seaside town. From this point on, the film descends into a nightmare, her sense of control erased under increasingly hostile conditions. Faces crowd the frame through fisheye lenses, bodies press in from all sides, their screaming voices suffocating her. It is within this disorientation that Gong is taken to an isolated island and finds herself trapped with a man who insists that she is his wife.

Released in 1978, the film managed to slip past strict censorship while still carrying its underlying critique. At first glance, Splendid Outing appears abstract, but as Gong’s sense of self continues to fracture, it’s the society she inhabits that comes into sharper focus.

What’s most unsettling is the suggestion that Gong’s sense of self was never as stable as it first appeared — it was only holding its shape at a distance.

You can purchase Splendid Outing via Radiance Films or MVD Shop.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler; 1982)

For most of its runtime, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains feels like a film about crafting an image. What’s harder to track — and something I’m still torn on — is the moment that image stops belonging to the person who made it.

Corrine Burns (15-year-old Diane Lane, alongside an equally young Laura Dern!) seems to understand the weight that an image can carry from the moment we meet her. Fake it till you make it, right? Even before she dons her signature black and red eyeliner and skunk hair, she carries herself with a defiant energy that’s both sarcastic and restless. Watching her give an early interview, where she casually applies makeup mid-conversation while plugging her band’s name, instantly brought a smile to my face. Sure, we soon find out that they can barely play (their first performance was borderline painful to watch), but it doesn’t seem to matter. What Corrine has instinctively is attitude, and, well, that’s sometimes enough to get people looking.

After the Stains’ disastrous first performance, her bandmates (Dern and Marin Kanter) look visibly uncomfortable, but Corrine holds her ground, ripping off her jacket and beret before turning on the audience itself. As she heckles them and screams that she’s perfect, you can’t help but sneer with her. Soon enough, after an incident on tour is picked up by a local news segment that interviews Corrine (complete with her own carefully shaped version of events), the Stains return to the stage to a packed crowd — and an audience decked out to look just like her. This collective, unapologetic confidence is infectious (hell, I even wanted to be swept up in it all). In a follow-up segment, the male reporter dismisses it all as a mere passing spectacle, while the female reporter leans into the sense of female empowerment. Regardless of how it’s framed, the effect is the same: the Stains have gone from being watched to being reproduced.

As Corrine leans further into the persona — even swiping Billy’s (Ray Winstone) song and performing it with her band — the line between performance and authenticity begins to blur in a different way, and it doesn’t help that the very machinery that built the Stains is just as quick to turn on them. Billy won’t let The Looters be pushed aside so easily, so when he finally calls Corrine out as a phony in front of her fans, the very crowd that so eagerly adored her recoils instantly. What was once seen as raw and unfiltered has been churned and spat out into something hollow.

It’s at this point that I was expecting to see some seeds of growth take root — not a tidy resolution, but something that’s less… flat. What follows is an ending that left me conflicted, precisely because it suggests a version of Corrine that seems strangely out of step, or, more accurately, one that doesn’t fully belong to her. Perhaps most frustrating is that the tension extends beyond the film itself. While The Fabulous Stains is directed by Lou Adler, its original script — written by Nancy Dowd with input from punk journalist Caroline Coon — reportedly ended very differently, before being reshaped in such a way that ultimately sacked its creators. In that sense, the aspect that bothers me about the film also makes for a strangely fitting conclusion: it becomes the very thing it’s been circling all along – an image no longer in control of the person who created it.

All of this to say, despite the uneasy landing, the film’s energy has moments that do resonate. Lane is already radiating star power (as is a spectacular but quiet early scene with Dern), while Corrine’s aunt (Christine Lahti) delivers an incredibly heartfelt monologue after the Stains’ early success, sharing the pride she feels in seeing her daughter and nieces escape their small-town existence. More than anything, though, it’s the lasting influence of the Stains themselves, which, fittingly, outgrew the film that first contained them, finding a new life years later on late-night television among up-and-coming musicians and audiences who saw something real in its imperfect defiance. “We don’t put out!”

You can purchase Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains via Fun City Editions or MVD Shop.

Do you ever stop and wonder how much time passes before the absurd becomes merely routine? It’s a curious exercise to keep in mind as you watch Georgiy Daneliya’s 1986 satirical sci-fi, Kin-dza-dza!.

The first few scenes of the film feel deliberately disorienting. After presenting us with opening credits over a desolate landscape of rock and sand, we’re suddenly jolted into 1980s Moscow. The camera cuts, adopting an intrusive handheld approach as we meet the Russian construction foreman, Vladimir (Stanislav Lyubshin) a.k.a. ‘Uncle Vova’ in his family home. After his wife sends him on a mission to obtain some macaroni, Vladimir runs into Gedevan (Levan Gabriadze), a Georgian student carrying a violin, who urges him to come help speak to a strange, lost man in shabby clothing. Claiming to hold a teleportation device, Vladimir tests it with the push of a button, and, with the same, jarring cut, we’ve arrived on the planet Pluke, in the galaxy of Kin-dza-dza. Soon enough, it becomes clear that for a society brandishing such advanced technology, survival depends on mastering a set of bizarre rituals.

I had known a little bit about Kin-dza-dza! through word of mouth, and was immediately intrigued by its premise. Elements of Daneliya’s film brought Karen Shakhnazarov’s Zerograd (1988) to mind, a film that, though not science fiction, delights in the same bureaucratic absurdity; operating within a world with rules that seem logical to everyone inside the system, but completely irrational to an outsider. It’s a particular sort of late-Soviet tone where humor and dread are squished together on a loveseat. The absurd isn’t the joke here; it’s that everyone keeps participating in it.

At the same time, my dystopian sci-fi brain kept circling the harsher satire of Polish filmmaker Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy — specifically The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981) or Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986). I knew that Kin-dza-dza! wouldn’t reach the grotesque or aggressively oppressive levels of Szulkin’s dystopia, but it does work with some of the same ingredients: repetition and ridiculousness while exposing the horror of the system itself. Think: deadpan absurdism versus nightmare satire, or, in layman’s terms, approaching similar ideas from totally different emotional registers.

Kin-dza-dza! ultimately reveals itself to be far stranger — and much drier — than any of those comparisons could quite prepare you for.

Life on Pluke operates on head-scratching logic… until you surrender to it. The inhabitants communicate using an incredibly reduced vocabulary: “koo” and “ku.” The latter functions as a generalized obscenity, while the former stands in for nearly everything else. Currency comes in the form of “ketse,” which are matches (yes, really).

Meanwhile, social class is determined by handheld devices that flash either orange or green, marking the difference between the ruling “Chatlans” and the subordinate “Patsaks.” Since these beings operate on constant bartering and corruption, you might wonder whether using such devices at close range is wise. Have no fear — status is encoded even further by the color of one’s pants! Crimson trousers mean you’re very wealthy in ketse, and those who come across you must respectfully utter two “koos” in greeting. Yellow means that you’re well-off enough to receive a singular “koo.” If you have neither crimson nor yellow pants, well, I’m afraid you’re a Patsak… and Patsaks must wear a tiny cowbell on their nose whenever a Chatlan is present. With these greetings, what we’re witnessing is a linguistic parody — communication reduced to ritual rather than nuance, as if bureaucratic systems have forgotten what words are even for.

In a 2010s interview, Daneliya summarized how he and co-writer Revaz Gabriadze (whose son plays Gedevan) arrived at this semantic logic for Pluke’s inhabitants. “They annulled all superfluous words, leaving just one: ‘koo,’ for the sake of convenience. So that not to differentiate them by nationality […] they invented a device — the visator.” The reason for both, of course, is exactly what Daneliya explained: convenience. While these rules seem utterly ridiculous, they are obeyed with absolute seriousness. The result? A society that keeps functioning out of habit, long after its logic has collapsed.

Much of the film’s humor comes from how quickly its protagonists begin adapting to these rituals. At first, they shake them off, with Vladimir wryly telling Gedevan that they’ve landed in a “capitalist country.” Later, once they’re called Patsaks enough times, they declare it “flagrant racism.” Fascinatingly, while these seemingly barbaric beings speak in so few words, they also possess the ability to understand any language almost instantly, immediately recognizing both Vladimir’s Russian and Gedevan’s Georgian. Bewildered by these rituals, our heroes realize they’ll need to play along, and the next thing we know, they’re greeting passersby with the correct number of “koos” and bartering for survival (see: performing songs) like seasoned pros (Gedevan’s delivery of “Strangers in the Night” had me howling, wishing I could throw an entire box of matches ketse at the screen). It’s an unsettling realization of how easily human beings can normalize the strangest systems if they’re desperate enough — or if they remain inside them long enough.

What gives Kin-dza-dza! its odd aftertaste is the pockets of melancholy to be found when the “koos” and laughter subside. At one point, Vladimir and Gedevan sit in the desert wearing paper hats, staring out across a vast landscape with no clear direction left to follow. It’s a fleeting moment, but one filled with existential resignation. By the 1980s, Soviet filmmakers mixed satire and exhaustion with ease, depicting stalled societies where, even when the film was comedic, the background hummed with sadness. As our heroes gaze at this worn-down terrain, they eventually stop resisting.

Shortly after this moment, Daneliya briefly pauses the film to provide a playful “dictionary” of Plukanian terms. Make no mistake, this is an important turning point. By now, Vladimir and Gedevan have moved from confusion to (reluctant) participation, and the audience has no choice but to follow along. Once the rules of Pluke click into place, the film becomes more engaging, allowing us to finally surrender to its peculiar logic.

The longer one spends on Pluke, the more it starts to resemble a cracked mirror of our own world. “About the fact that humankind would finally arrive at what we saw on that planet […] I’m afraid we’ll even outdo them, because we’re already doing that,” Daneliya reflected in that interview, now a decade and a half ago, which manages to feel even more prophetic — and is the film’s bleakest joke.

By the time Kin-dza-dza! ends, Daneliya lands one final joke I dare not spoil. It’s subtle, unsettling, and the perfect answer to the question that opened this piece: how long does it take before the absurd becomes routine?

Kin-dza-dza! is currently available to purchase via MVD Shop.

There is a particular kind of freedom that corrodes from within. It arrives with a jarring, pit-in-your-stomach recognition that the freedom you clung to may have been your undoing all along. Perhaps what we call “freedom” is only a more comfortable form of containment.

Robert Hossein’s cinema is built on this promise of autonomy — an obsession with moral blindness. His men move as if they are choosing, mistaking motion for agency, believing themselves above the system that encloses them. This sort of masculinity may appear stable from a distance, but up close, it’s posture. Hossein never allows that fantasy to hold. It is not motion but immobility, he would later suggest, that brings about a man’s fall. A man pacing inside a prison cell is in motion, sure — but he is not moving.

Across the three films in Radiance’s Wicked Games1 set — The Wicked Go to Hell, Nude in a White Car, and The Taste of Violence — Hossein stages variations of this very corrosion, moving from visible confinement to seductive delusion to violence stripped of ornament. The collapse is never explosive; it merely reveals what was already there.

What began as an exploration of his work gradually became something else: a way of returning to a cinematic world that became increasingly legible to me — one that understood how the very structures meant to secure us can become vehicles of erosion. It’s in this kind of acknowledgment that I was offered a strange form of solace, not because it resolves anything, but precisely because it refuses to.

Born in Paris in 1927 to a composer father and an actress mother, Hossein grew up between performance and composition, or, more accurately, between spectacle and structure. His father, André Hossein, would later score many of his films. The music lures you in at first, then returns in restrained, mournful rhythms that refuse to swell into release. As a child, Hossein described himself as silent, watching from a height, observing people below “like puppets.” In a 2007 interview with Vremya Novostei, he recalled climbing trees and looking down onto the street — “a theater that belonged only to me.” That detached, elevated vantage point never quite leaves his cinema.

After those tree-top years, Hossein formally trained under René Simon before performing at the Grand Guignol — the famously macabre theater once housed in a convent chapel. This again leaves Hossein straddling two opposites: discipline and artifice. The violence on stage was elaborate, yes, but it was choreographed. Shock has rules, too.

Even as he began directing for the stage, Hossein moved through French cinematic circles as an actor, often embodying roles marked by masculine assurance and composure. In 1955, though, the performance that truly put him on the map was Rémi Grutter in Jules Dassin’s now-legendary heist classic, Rififi. Rémi, a heroin addict embedded within his brother’s criminal machine, stands in stark contrast to the precision of Tony’s (Jean Servais) crew. In a film obsessed with time, codes, and professional restraint, he is a weak seam. His addiction keeps him circling and reactive. In motion, he is still stuck.

A decade later, in Bernard Borderie’s lush period romance Angélique (1964), Hossein embodies a very different register of masculinity. As Jeoffrey de Peyrac, the brilliant and controlled count, his composure is also his virtue, preferring intellect to force. Yet his belief that dignity will protect him leaves him exposed. The court does not respond to reason; instead, it responds with ritualized punishment.

On the opposite side of that illusion was Hossein’s role in Georges Lautner’s 1981 action-thriller The Professional2. As the unflappable Commissioner Rosen, he steps into authority stripped of romance. Rosen moves as an extension of the institution itself — not passionate, not theatrical, simply… procedural. If Jeoffrey believes dignity will protect him, Rosen behaves as though protection is irrelevant. His function is enforcement.

These performances reveal something consistent across decades. Whether volatile, dignified, or bureaucratic, Hossein’s men move through systems that promise order while making collapse inevitable. They inhabit roles that appear autonomous — criminal, nobleman, commissioner — yet each role narrows rather than frees. When Hossein begins directing for the screen, the emphasis shifts: he stops merely inhabiting these systems and starts designing them.

So, now that he is no longer solely inside the machine, what kind of worlds does he build?

The first world he builds is a prison — but not the one that ultimately traps his men. With his 1955 feature directorial debut, The Wicked Go to Hell, Hossein constructs a space where confinement is strangely coherent. The film divides itself cleanly into two: the prison and what comes after. It opens from above, with prisoners aligned in near-perfect symmetry. The frame is already imposing order before the narrative does.

It is telling where Hossein chooses to place any warmth. Behind bars, a strange communal rhythm forms, where levity becomes a means of survival. The musical interludes in which prisoners sing through cell doors suggest that confinement, however brutal, produces camaraderie. Our two leads, Macquart (Henri Vidal) and Rudel (Serge Reggiani), despise each other. At least the hatred is sustainable on the inside. Hierarchy clarifies roles, while proximity enforces a code.

Once they’re outside, though, the rules evaporate and the warmth drains almost imperceptibly. Meals are eaten in silence at gunpoint; a man collapses slowly against a wall, and the bond between our men begins to rot. When Eva (Marina Vlady) enters this fragile equilibrium, the suffocation intensifies. She isn’t the “cause” of their collapse — she’s a catalyst, revealing how little substance their loyalty ever had once the walls disappeared.

In his autobiography, La Nostalgie, Hossein describes learning early, through producers like Jules Borkon, that suggestion carries more force than repetition. While it can be easy to dismiss this “economy” as aesthetic minimalism, it’s actually a guiding principle. In The Wicked Go to Hell, that restraint is moral architecture. What destroys these men is not conflict itself, but what remains when order is gone. Even the final image withholds catharsis. From afar, the men are simply absorbed.

If The Wicked Go to Hell exposes the false promise of freedom, the second entry in Radiance’s Wicked Games set, Nude in a White Car3, makes it seductive.

The 1958 film opens with the visual polar opposite of oppressive confinement. We’re graced with sultry jazz and an evening stroll along the beach. André Hossein sets a scene with a score that feels like a hand at the back of your neck, guiding you into the seduction before you’ve had time to object. As Pierre (Hossein) walks, a blonde pulls up beside him and invites him inside her car. Hossein stages the encounter with the same compositional control as the prison in Wicked, only now the architecture is desire. Pierre accepts her invitation without hesitation, and within moments, the woman parks, disrobes, and reclines in the driver’s seat. The camera slowly pulls back as she turns the volume up on the radio, and the brassy tune takes over. We never see her face.

That absence is the first warning. Pierre asks to see her, but she refuses, drawing a gun. He’s unceremoniously kicked out of the car, and the mystery woman tries to run him down. Rather than dwell on fear, Pierre is entranced. So much so, in fact, that he memorizes the license plate so he can track her down. For a man as self-assured as Pierre, it registers as a challenge, not a threat.

Like the men in The Wicked Go to Hell, Pierre mistakes motion for agency. While the former film charted the erosion of social bonds, the failure here is erotic. Shortly after, Pierre casually shrugs off his landlord’s eviction warning. His ease permeates all aspects of his life, confusing charm with control. He’s unbothered by consequence, which is precisely why he sees the blonde’s actions as flirtation.

Pierre tracks the car to a lavish villa. Instead of one blonde, he finds two: sisters, Eva and Hélène (Vlady and Odile Versois, real-life siblings). Once inside the villa, he enters another prison in Hossein’s world, constructed from doubling rather than walls. The flightier sister uses a wheelchair, while the other is her caretaker and always composed. In some scenes, both women wear their hair up; in others, both wear it down. An early split-diopter frame holds both women in sharp focus, forcing us, like Pierre, to search each face for confirmation. As jealousy, performance, and surveillance take over, we continuously ask: who is watching whom? Who is playing at innocence?

As Vlady explains in an interview on the Radiance disc extras, most of the film was shot in the villa, which undeniably enhances its claustrophobic atmosphere. The titular “nude” becomes less a woman than a surface for Pierre’s projection — desire morphing into suspicion, then paranoia. When he finally comes to a decision, the damage is done. He has already selected the version of reality that flatters him the most. In the interview on the Radiance disc, Vlady observes, “[Hossein’s] films are full of anguish.” For Nude in a White Car, that anguish is born from seduction itself — from the moment desire becomes a trap of one’s own making.

By the time we get to 1961’s The Taste of Violence (the third and final film in the Radiance set), Hossein no longer stages seduction or confinement. Now? He stages what comes after. The violence here is inescapable — administrative, even. An outlier in the set as the only Western, The Taste of Violence still manages to fit in beautifully, compressing rather than liberating.

Set in an unspecified Latin American country at the turn of the century, the film opens with revolutionaries aboard a train as they approach a tunnel. Fog consumes the screen, and once it lifts, bodies lie where some of the men rode. The others? They’re frozen in a tableau — like a memorial. Tellingly, André Hossein’s music is missing; mechanical sounds take over. There is no invitation into fantasy here. And when the music does make an appearance later? It’s slightly mismatched, as if the consolation has come too late.

The Taste of Violence follows a group of revolutionaries, Perez (Hossein), Chamaco (Mario Adorf), and Chico (Hans H. Neubert), after they’ve kidnapped the president’s daughter, Maria (Giovanna Ralli), in hopes of returning her in exchange for their imprisoned companions. As the journey unfolds through desolate landscapes, it becomes clear that this world is full of watching and waiting. Townspeople, soldiers, women at doorways, men on horseback, everyone frozen, forever witnessing the consequences of the actions of war, even when those actions are taken in the name of “freedom” — a word that shifts meaning depending on who speaks it. Perez, ostensibly our hero, seems deflated. He continues to fight, but he’s tired.

When it comes to moments of bloodshed, only what remains is shown. In one later scene, two bodies from opposing sides lie locked together in death, their hats thrown off next to them, while their arms are outstretched. Here, the symmetry replaces ideology. Once these men leave the land of the living, they’re indistinguishable. Immediately after, a similar image places Perez and Maria side by side, lying on the shoreline. This time, they’re both alive yet still barely separated. Right on cue, music plays, almost as a clue. The crooning lyric, “Hear me, destiny,” swells, suggesting that fate may be the story’s true antagonist. As Perez’s sister wisely says at one point, “No one wins this game.” It’s no accident that the men throughout the film are in white, while the women are in black, either. Grief is made permanent, while masculine pride keeps the machinery of violence in motion. In the final scene, two figures move slowly apart across the vast landscape. What they’re heading toward is neither victory nor conclusion. In Hossein’s cinema, motion is never escape.

Once Hossein directs 1970’s Falling Point, he has learned to operate by saying very little. Stripping the world down to its residue, he trusts that the corrosion no longer needs to be demonstrated. Gone are illusion and seduction, leaving only repetition — and the brief cruelty of discovering that pockets of warmth cannot alter fate.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that between these films sits Cemetery Without Crosses (1969), another Western similar to Taste of Violence, in which revenge coagulates into futility (it is his best-known directorial effort). Yet, a mere year later, what we witness are the skeletal remains of his argument. If the earlier films we highlighted staged prisons, villas, and revolutions, Falling Point reduces the world to a beach house, three masked men, and one girl. It may begin in a manner structurally similar to the second half of The Wicked Go to Hell, but nothing needs to be proven anymore.

Three masked men kidnap Catherine (Pascale Rivault) in hopes of receiving a ransom from her father. However, the youngest criminal, Vlad (Johnny Hallyday), compromises the plan by taking his mask off and allowing her to see him. Now, Vlad is told he must eliminate the girl. Can he follow through?

Falling Point fractures time itself, opening with flashbacks and then replaying the kidnapping from multiple angles. Later, a scream on tape is rewound and replayed over and over until guilt itself becomes a form of torture. Where The Wicked Go to Hell built tension through social collapse and Taste of Violence through ideological inevitability, Falling Point does so through circularity. The past, in Hossein’s cinema, never stays put.

What unsettles most is that Hossein allows tenderness to surface. It’s almost cruel by design. Vlad cannot kill Catherine in her sleep. He cannot do it outside, either. They find themselves sharing a sandwich. A beer can explodes as he tries to open it. For a fleeting second… they laugh. This marks the film’s most human moment — and its most merciless. It changes nothing. The moral suffocation remains, though now it has settled into resignation. What once erupted now simply concludes.

Working through Hossein’s films, one thing remains clear: he does not offer redemption. We don’t see his worlds detonate in spectacle, nor does he dignify collapse with transcendence. What’s most devastating is simpler than that. He exposes the illusion of freedom.

No matter where his men reside, the pattern remains intact. While they believe they are moving towards something, be it freedom, control, vengeance, or rescue, what they’re actually moving toward is the unraveling already underway.

In this way, Hossein’s cinema resists consolation. For those of us who do not feel reconciled, who have watched promises curdle into depletion, that resistance does something unexpected. His refusal to console sharpens our instinct: to interrogate what we want, what it costs, what is sold as normal, and what we no longer consent to.

And perhaps that is the strange solace: recognition itself.

Today, I’m finally sharing a long-overdue podcast episode on a film that’s haunted me since my first watch in late November: Harry Kümel’s 1971 surreal gothic marvel, Malpertuis.

I originally planned to release this episode late last year, but the deeper I went (into the film, its production, and Kümel himself), the more it demanded patience. I found that English-language material on Kümel is scarce as of this writing, so much of this episode was shaped by a close study of the recent Radiance Films 4K release, whose essays, archival interviews, and commentaries served as my guiding light.

At a certain point, though, research gives way to trust. As such, I invited my friend and fellow physical media obsessive Philip Marinello (The Substance Podcast) to join me, and together we unpack the strange, seductive logic of Malpertuis.

I’ve included my original Letterboxd review below as a primer — otherwise, I invite you to step inside with us. Enjoy, my friends.

Harry Kümel drops you into Malpertuis the same way Jan (Mathieu Carrière) stumbles into it. From the opening alone, we watch the young sailor chase a girl through unsettlingly empty streets with no score, no noise — just footsteps echoing along narrow alleys. Then, he crosses a threshold, and suddenly a smoky, red-saturated cabaret erupts around him. The shift was disorienting. It took me a moment to realize I’d be trapped in Malpertuis, too.

At times, the film has a hyper-stylized theatricality that feels almost Fassbinderian. The bar fight cutting to close-ups of instruments, the red-beaded curtains, the perfectly curated chaos — it’s hard to know where to look, or what to focus on. Once Jan wakes up inside the labyrinthine mansion that is Malpertuis itself, the film slips into a chamber piece with hazy dream logic, flirting with Bergman’s darker work, especially Hour of the Wolf.

What struck me most is how repetitive the space is: endless corridors, looping staircases, doors that lead to nowhere, servants trekking down hallways that seem to stretch into the dark forever. I wondered how Kümel scouted such a grand location until I sat down to go through the Radiance Films extras. DP Gerry Fisher and art director Philippe Graff had the idea to hand-paint a few floors of that winding staircase on canvas to create the illusion of infinite depth. Similarly, in the sitting room where everyone gathers, Fisher thought of painting the flames on all the lamps scattered throughout. Malpertuis becomes less a house and more a funhouse — both for Jan and us.

Spoiling the late-game reveals would be a disservice. If you’ve read the Jean Ray novel, you’ll know what I mean. Once the film tips from gothic mystery into… something else, and everything clicks into place, it becomes utterly engrossing.

Next to Carrière, the cast is a joy. Michel Bouquet and Jean-Pierre Cassel are excellent, but Susan Hampshire is the undeniable star. She plays five roles, each wildly different, and earns every bit of trust Kümel placed in her (he’d initially considered Catherine Deneuve, but Hampshire had the range he needed). Of course, there’s also Orson Welles, who plays the dying estate owner, Cassavius. Imposing yet immovable in a bed draped in red — the most visually decadent area of Malpertuis — he radiates the weary and irritable gravity of a myth who very much knows he’s slipping, but seems to be enjoying it anyway.

I’m unsure if I’ll ever fully find my way out of Malpertuis. It doesn’t end so much as it settles in; illusions flickering, folding over one another, the house continuing to exist just beyond reach.

Philip Marinello’s The Substance is a semi-weekly podcast with well over 150 episodes that has conversations to help folks better appreciate goodness, truth, and beauty. There’s a strong emphasis on cinema, with regular conversations with wonderful guests from the film world, as well as shows featuring academics, advocates, and faith leaders working to make the world a better and fuller place.

Follow Philip on Instagram, Letterboxd, and check out The Substance on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

For additional resources, check out The Projection Booth’s episode on Malpertuis, hosted by our friend, Mike White.

If you’re looking to buy a copy of Malpertuis, head on over to MVD Shop, where the Radiance release is on sale, as of this writing.

You can also listen to or watch this episode on:

YouTube

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Between the holidays creeping closer, weeks of relentless Pacific Northwest rain, and a self-inflicted sugar cookie coma, things have slowed down a bit at Rewind & Revive. But rest assured — good (and riveting) things are on the way, dear reader.

Alongside working through my ever-growing Blu-ray stack (while also trying to catch up on new releases before the end of the year, help me), I’ve been developing my next podcast episode, dedicated to Harry Kümel’s Malpertuis, in honor of the recent (and gorgeous) Radiance Films release.

For today, however, I bring you yet another physical media round-up, this time with offerings from The Criterion Collection, Cult Epics, and Radiance once more. While I initially planned to add a fifth film, I opted for tasteful restraint; the four films below form a (surprisingly) coherent emotional and thematic arc. The movies I’ve chosen all operate on a distinctly human scale, tracking people under pressure and the ways they look after one another. Friendship, care, and imagination aren’t grand answers here — just the things that help everyone get through the day.

They’re all wonderful (in fact, the Aki Kaurismäki film included here has already become my favorite of the ten of his I’ve seen so far), and I hope they delight you as much as they have me. Without further ado, let’s rewind and revive.

The Ogre of Athens (Nikos Koundouros; 1956)

At the start of The Ogre of Athens, Thomas (Dinos Iliopoulos) isn’t disliked, nor is he feared. He’s simply… invisible. So when people finally begin to notice him (even if it’s out of fear), it hits a primal nerve — one he didn’t even realize he was starving for. Better to be an ogre than nobody at all.

Set in jittery post–Civil War Athens, Nikos Koundouros’ sophomore feature begins by flirting with both noir and neorealism before gradually dissolving into absurd fable. We’re shown a Greece still recovering from occupation and internal conflict, where fear spreads as fast as a rumour in a crowded street — and the city is a pressure cooker. On New Year’s Eve, the stiff, anxious bank clerk Thomas is suddenly mistaken for the titular Ogre: a crime boss who’s been impossible to capture. Seeking refuge after wading through thick paranoia, he stumbles into a taverna, and it’s a whole other world: joyous, chaotic, pulsing with music, dancing, and drink. Better yet, the morally questionable patrons here don’t fear Thomas. They revere him.

After some hesitation, Thomas embraces his role as criminal kingpin. What struck me most is that this “wrong man” trope isn’t used as a mere plot device. When Thomas gently urges love interest “Baby” (Margarita Papageorgiou) to appreciate those who care for her, we realize he and the real Ogre share the same isolating loneliness. If the absence of conscience shapes one, the absence of identity shapes the other. Of course slipping into the Ogre’s skin doesn’t feel like a costume.

As the hours pass and Thomas begins bonding with the taverna owner (Giannis Argyris) and his men, he’s swept into a heist: stealing a pillar from the Temple of Zeus for an American buyer — because nothing says “modern Greece” like exporting your ancient identity for cash. Koundouros keeps tugging at the film’s central tension: imported modernity versus tradition. On the taverna walls, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable grin down like glamorous saints of a future Athens hasn’t fully been invited into. These “criminals” aren’t hardened villains, either; they just want out of scarcity, even if it means chipping away at the stones their city was built on.

Masculinity, already brittle post-war, latches onto any power it can find, and for one intoxicating night, Thomas lets himself be lost in it. The film’s most powerful moment arrives in a whirl of zeibekiko stomps and clinking glasses as our lead joins in. Through the sweat and the sudden sense of freedom, it all fuses like a rebirth.

The Greeks love a tragedy, but the tragedy here isn’t that Thomas’ transformation was thrust upon him. Instead, he chose it, bit by bit, himself. “All my life, I’ve avoided a fuss,” he says. And that’s what undoes him.

You can purchase The Ogre of Athens via Radiance Films or MVD Shop.

School in the Crosshairs (Nobuhiko Obayashi; 1981)

Adolescence can be both magical and terrifying. In Nobuhiko Obayashi’s School in the Crosshairs, it happens to be both, often at the same time. The opening fools you into thinking this is bubbly pop-idol movie fare, with scrapbook-style cutouts of a teenage bedroom and the incredibly sweet (and very catchy) opening song “I Want to Protect You” by Yumi Matsutoya. For a moment, the film feels like the cinematic equivalent of a heart-shaped sticker… until the title card drops and the music turns ominous.

Hiroko Yakushimaru is wonderful as Yuka, a girl who suddenly discovers she has telekinetic abilities just as her school slips into the hands of a mind-controlled student government. A new transfer student (Masami Hasegawa) with the same powers becomes the student council president and, along with her nerdy yet villainous sidekick (played by Makoto Tezuka, son of the Osamu Tezuka behind Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion), builds a team of uniformed patrol guards, bans individuality, and swiftly turns students into obedient zombies. Anyone who dares to call it what it is (like the poor P.E. teacher who blurts out “fascism!”) soon finds themselves in a suspicious “accident.” Obayashi isn’t subtle about what terrifies him: youth systems that prioritize obedience over imagination and creativity.

Visually, it’s a treat to see Obayashi go full “live-action cartoon” mode. Neon scribbles outline characters like someone’s doodling inside the frame. A school event casually morphs into a dance sequence with the confidence (and meticulous choreography) of a full-blown musical. Another day sees a brief teenage existential crisis backed by a literal white-tuxedoed jazz band outside the school. And when the leading Bad Guy Kyogoku (Tōru Minegishi) spins through a piano solo in front of a blue-screen prism, it’s pure cinematic delirium.

What makes all this spectacle matter is Obayashi’s deep sympathy for young people. Yuka’s powers become a metaphor for puberty; frightening when suppressed, liberating when embraced. The school turns into a miniature society eager to mold kids into compliant citizens, and Obayashi makes a compelling case that rebellion, even when goofy, is how they keep their souls intact.

You can purchase School in the Crosshairs via Cult Epics.

The Island Closest to Heaven (Nobuhiko Obayashi; 1984)

How fragile and dizzying the world can feel when you’re young and uncertain.

(Nobuhiko Obayashi’s vision of youth and imagination surfaces once more in this roundup — and this film captures its gentlest form).

Perhaps the breeziest entry in Obayashi’s ouvré that I’ve seen, The Island Closest to Heaven is based on Katsura Morimura’s successful 1966 travelogue of the same name, revolving around a teenage girl, Mari (Tomoyo Harada), who heads to New Caledonia to realize her late father’s dream of finding the place “closest to heaven.” While Obayashi captures the travelogue ambiance beautifully (so many lush glimpses of flora and fauna!), the film also feels like a postcard to your younger self; the version of you who believes that if you wander far enough, maybe the world will finally start to make some sense.

Obayashi often uses narratives where youth is a site of rebellion, but here it’s much calmer. The island functions less as a location and more as a transitional space, where every interaction helps Mari make a bit more sense of what she’s actually here to do. Of course, Obayashi’s playfulness still peeks through, though much more subtly. An array of quirky supporting characters keeps things light, while color overlays and brief jump-cut moments add just enough whimsy to keep the movie from drifting into pure melancholy.

Much of The Island Closest to Heaven reminded me of what a live-action Studio Ghibli film might feel like, where a heroine’s exploratory nature and quiet coming-of-age lead to the realization that the “paradise” you’re chasing may already be all around you. Instead of a destination, it’s the people who help you get where you’re going.

I wasn’t expecting Obayashi to mix all that gentleness with these sudden flashes of MGM-style romance, but he does. Those glimmers are most evident in the title sequence, with sweeping credits set against a pastel frame and music that plays like a Technicolor fairy tale. It also has that classic Hollywood ache that promises adventure, heartbreak, and the marriage of love and loss.

I’d be remiss not to mention that The Island Closest to Heaven is still very much a product of its time. Its view of New Caledonia leans into an ’80s tourism fantasy, where nearly every local offers help with an effortless smile, and Mari’s older mentor figure, Yuichi (Tôru Minegishi), occasionally raises eyebrows with the age gap. That boundary is never crossed (their dynamic remains rooted in guidance), but it briefly jars against the story’s otherwise tender sincerity.

What ultimately stays with you is the film’s abiding kindness. It’s in the moment Yuichi tries to show Mari the “green ray,” hoping to give her a bit of emotional orientation (I beamed seeing this Jules Verne reference turn up just a few years before Rohmer’s classic), and in the way the village children gather around her bed after she wakes from an accident. By the time she returns home, it hits you that her paradise wasn’t actually a place at all. Instead, it’s the feeling of being held by the world, even when you’re still figuring out where you belong.

You can purchase The Island Closest to Heaven via Cult Epics.

La Vie de bohème (Aki Kaurismäki; 1992)

When money is scarce, making art can feel both exhilarating and ruthlessly cruel. There’s a quiet dignity in that precarity, and one that’s easy to recognize if you’ve lived it yourself. People doing their best in a world that doesn’t seem particularly interested in rewarding dreamers — at least not the ones without safety nets. And yet… they keep dreaming anyway. Art doesn’t save you, but it does give your suffering shape, and sometimes, it gives you each other.

I’ve always connected to Aki Kaurismäki’s films and the melancholy that surrounds his characters. It’s a working-class relatability he consistently nails, leaving you unsure whether to laugh or cry as he captures how life can be equally ridiculous and bitter. With 1992’s La Vie de bohème, he hits his familiar beats while reminding us that the world’s callousness is often best endured with a friend, a cigarette, and a bad cup of coffee (or whiskey).

In 1976, Kaurismäki read Henri Murger’s 1848 novel Scènes de la vie de bohème, immediately deciding he would adapt it someday. Though he initially imagined filming it in Helsinki, he recalled Murger’s declaration in the introduction — that bohemian life is only possible in Paris. Married to the idea, he waited until the opportunity arose, ultimately choosing not the capital itself but the suburb of Malakoff. Seeking authenticity, Kaurismäki realized that shooting in modern-day Paris would detract from the grimy, run-down look he wanted for the film. The result is marvelous, and I was often nudging myself to remember that this wasn’t, in fact, shot in 1950s or early ’60s France. Opening with a rooftop shot set to Damia’s crooning “Chantez pour moi, violons,” it’s hard not to be immediately whisked away.

The film brings together three men adrift in Paris: Marcel (André Wilms), a recently evicted playwright and poet; Rodolfo (Matti Pellonpää), an Albanian painter unable to sell his work; and Schaunard (Kari Väänänen), an Irish composer of stubbornly experimental music. As the trio bonds over their love of the arts, they become a bohemian version of the Three Musketeers, using friendship as a form of shelter when money, stability, and even love flutter away. Kaurismäki’s hangout energy feels oddly cozy here, inviting us to see home as the quiet solidarity found in shared meals and shared disappointments.

Life in La Vie de bohème moves in cycles. The men hover just above the poverty line, stumble into sudden bursts of creativity (and occasional luck, courtesy of an art collector played by Jean-Pierre Léaud and Sam Fuller as a gangster-publisher), enjoy fleeting moments of security, and then face the inevitable collapse of it all. Instead of melodrama, Kaurismäki offers familiarity: his characters have lived this pattern countless times, each devastation rendered routine.

Remember, though, routine devastation is easier to endure when your sense of self is bound up in the struggle itself. The women in La Vie de bohème aren’t wired this way. Where their love interests cling to ideals, both Mimi (Évelyne Didi) and Musette (Christine Murillo) navigate reality. Though they care (and oh, how deeply they care), rational self-preservation comes first. As Mimi heartbreakingly tells Rodolfo, “I love you, you know, but life is hard.”

Instead of offering escape or solutions, La Vie de bohème offers recognition. Kaurismäki never pretends this is enough to fix the world, but he does suggest that the simple act of showing up might be enough to survive it with dignity. One for all and all for one, after all.

You can purchase La Vie de bohème via The Criterion Collection.

Which parts of ourselves survive the stories we rewrite? In Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill, a man tries to escape the narrative that shaped him — as a son, as a husband, as a “disappointment.” Yet even as the land he stands on is dry and the pipes are cracked, the past keeps leaking back in. It begins as a grounded psychological drama, then slips into something feverish, laced with denial and distortion. Khatami removes the safety net of both score and certainty, stranding us in the barren Anatolian landscape — and in the barren places of the conscience.

Ali (Ekin Koç) is a university professor whose life feels like it’s narrowing rather than unfolding as the years go on. His literature course is quietly being phased out, while at home, the pressure to become a father gnaws at something he can’t fix: his infertility. His retreat comes in the form of a second home: a dusty plot of land and a garden he cannot bring to life. After the sudden and suspicious death of his mother, Ali spends more time at a place meant for renewal. Instead, it mirrors his growing unease, where the only things taking root are grief and resentment.

Eventually, Ali’s pain needs some form of direction. Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the gardener hired to make his land fertile, becomes the vessel for the emotions Ali can’t articulate. Human memory is slippery; so subjective, so readily willing to contort itself to protect one’s fragile ego.

Khatami literalizes a linguistic idea at the heart of the film: translation. In one lecture, Ali explains that in Latin, translation means “to carry meaning across,” but in Akkadian it can also mean “to stone” — to kill. When you kill the part of yourself shaped by trauma, what dark version rises in its place?

There’s a compelling tug-of-war between identity and illusion. At first glance, the landscapes recall Abbas Kiarostami’s work, and so does Khatami’s willingness to treat cinema as an unreliable narrator. I felt glimpses of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, too, especially A Moment of Innocence, where the idea of reenacting trauma can create a more “bearable” fiction. Translation equals destruction, remember? While many have pointed to David Lynch, I invite you to consider traces of Krzysztof Kieślowski as well, whose films sometimes suggest that every choice creates a shadow self. Following this lineage, Khatami amplifies the same question: What does the other version of us know that we refuse to face?

Khatami also rejects a traditional score. In the Q&A that followed the film, he explained his decision to avoid a score because music can manipulate emotion too easily. Instead, he allows the sound design to swell: footsteps, the wind, the countless dogs that bark a chorus throughout. It’s atmosphere as an emotional compass.

That vulnerability extends to performance. When I asked about his collaboration with Koç, Khatami shared: “My main job is to give them the confidence that the camera sees you … Actors are very vulnerable. They bring a lot to the table.” The hardest scene to shoot with Koç was a confession — a single shot in which Ali slips out of focus for what feels like an eternity. Crew instinct said fix it; Khatami said leave it. “Everybody on set was scared — ‘This was a mistake, nobody goes out of focus for 30 seconds.’ But it was the only way to do it.” It becomes the film’s most honest gesture. Trauma makes us look away… and the lens respects that rather than correcting it.

Even the dogs feel like a deliberate metaphor. The first, a German shepherd that lives on the garden property, is only seen by Ali and Reza. Perhaps man’s best friend is tied to shame and secrecy in this instance. In the final act, a new puppy arrives, visible only to Ali and his wife. Hope? Fertility? Denial? Khatami refuses to underline it.

If identity is a story we construct, then love, guilt, and even redemption might be as real as we need them to be. Which leaves us, quite perfectly, where we began: Which parts of ourselves survive the stories we rewrite?

With all of my film festival work finally wrapped up, it’s time to give my unwatched physical media stack a little bit of TLC. After living in a delicious fog of media overstimulation, I naturally turned to kung-fu cats, carnivorous plants, and samurai disillusionment to level me out. This collection of films reminds me why I keep chasing the next strange image.

In other news, it’s also high time I dust off the cobwebs on my podcast. I’ve been a bit bummed I haven’t given the R&R pod the love it deserves, so I’ve been spending my free moments thinking about the wonderful films I want to dive into — complete with a talented roster of industry friends and filmmakers I’m tapping to get on the mic.

More to come on that soon, but for now, let’s get weird and rewind, shall we?

Through and Through (Grzegorz Krolikiewicz; 1973)

A deeply upsetting film that leaves a sensory itch all over. Grzegorz Krolikiewicz plunges you into a disorienting headspace made of claustrophobic frames, jarring edits, and an oppressive, almost rhythmic sound design that refuses to let up.

Through and Through is based on the real-life 1933 Kraków murder case involving Jan and Maria Malisz, an impoverished couple whose intense love for one another became the centerpiece of a sensational trial. They planned to rob a mail carrier on pension day, but when it spiraled out of control, three people were left dead: the postman and the owners of the apartment they’d rented for the crime. Only the owner’s daughter survived. What shocked the public most wasn’t the brutality of the crime, but the romanticism of the courtroom: each spouse took full responsibility in hopes of saving the other. Although both were sentenced to death, Maria was ultimately pardoned — on the very day of her planned execution.

Krolikiewicz presents only fragments of these events before the courtroom scenes arrive, and with them, the film’s most extended use of dialogue. Until that point, Through and Through rejects any straightforward narrative, replacing it with a swirl of weaponized silence or layers of droning, relentless noise. Initially, Maya Deren’s spatial disorientation came to mind, yet her work moves like a dream, where Krolikiewicz’s film lurches like an abrasive nightmare. More fitting comparisons would be somewhere in the vein of a rawer Dušan Makavejev, or the suffocating symbolism of Wojciech Has.

Notably, what I found most impressive is how Through and Through avoids showing overt violence altogether. Thanks to Bogdan Dziworski’s nauseatingly intimate camera, the crime doesn’t need to be seen. Instead, it’s replaced through intrusive close-ups of the victims’ faces (and Jan’s own expression of terror). It’s overwhelming in its brutality, precisely because of what’s left out.

Emotionally, the film is full of contradictions. Tender and brutal, disheartened and furious. When the closing monologues in court finally arrive, they feel like the only form of grace Krolikiewicz allows. A catharsis, of sorts.

You can purchase Through and Through via Radiance Films here or MVD Shop here.

The Cat (Lam Nai-Choi; 1992)

As swan songs go, The Cat might be the strangest. Yet for Lam Nai-Choi, it’s also weirdly fitting. Best known for Riki-Oh and The Seventh Curse, Lam bows out with a sci-fi–horror–action mash-up that you can’t help but just have fun with. The film, based on the novel Old Cat (an installment of the Wisely series and Nai-Choi’s second Wisely adaptation), follows Wisely (Waise Lee Chi-Hung) as he joins forces with a trio of aliens — one of whom is, yes, the eponymous cat — to defeat a goopy, tentacle-thrashing parasite which also happens to possess human bodies.

Along the way, we’re treated to a generous buffet of visual excess: an animal-fu fight between a cat and dog, stop-motion and puppetry madness, levitation sequences, and face-melting gore. The practical effects are pure camp magic, and the phrase “They just don’t make ’em like this anymore” has never rung truer.

Beneath the janky pacing and delightfully awkward dialogue, there’s something genuinely heartfelt in the mix. Like everyone involved was reverting to their childhood selves and living out whatever glittery, deranged genre dreams they still had left in the tank. The tone is a beautiful soup of contradictions, and it somehow works because it refuses to settle.

The Cat wears its ’50s B-movie maximalism on its sleeve. It’s gooey and strangely charming in its earnest chaos. If you love House, The Thing, or, well, some of, if not THE best darned cat acting put to camera, this is the one. Let movies be fun and weird again.

You can preorder The Cat via 88 Films here or MVD Shop here.

Los Golfos (Carlos Saura; 1960)

Carlos Saura’s debut feature opens with a jolt: a blind newspaper vendor is robbed in broad daylight. The film then cuts to the brutal grace of a bullfight. Madrid, too, enters the frame, seen as a city from the periphery.

Shot with non-actors and a raw, neorealist aesthetic, Los Golfos follows the lives of working-class boys on the margins. They’re always on the move, swiping what they can, be it food, trinkets, fleeting pleasures, all in the name of staying afloat. Itching to climb the social ladder, the “delinquents” come up with a theory: if their friend, a novice matador, makes it big, he may be their ticket to masculine glory. Crushingly, the realization is that no matter how bravely you perform, you’re still trapped in the ring.

Los Golfos is, put simply, bleak. Veritably so. Even the sensual flashes, like dance clubs or bodies moving at the beach, are fleeting. As quickly as they appear, they vanish, eclipsed by systemic immobility and the limits of dreaming under authoritarian rule.

Ironically, Saura never intended this to be his first feature. He had previously tried to adapt two books in the 1950s, but Francoist censors rejected both. The strategy for getting a film through at the time was to make your message vague. Imply, but don’t name. Saura didn’t shy away, and Los Golfos speaks through absence: a film where everything unnamed carries the loudest weight.

The film almost didn’t make it past the censors. As the Radiance Films booklet explains, Los Golfos was trimmed by 10 minutes, with officials insisting that the boys’ plight be portrayed as personal and not in any way allude to Spanish youth at the time. Even then, they weren’t satisfied. Los Golfos debuted at Cannes in 1960, but wouldn’t reach broader audiences for two more years.

This new restoration restores three of the four censored scenes, making it the closest we’ve come to the version Saura initially sent to Cannes.

You can purchase Los Golfos via Radiance Films here.

The Betrayal (Tokuzō Tanaka; 1966)

The Betrayal begins as if it will be a familiar chanbara tale, but by the end, a hollow devastation takes over. In Tokuzō Tanaka’s film, we witness what happens when the very notion of honor corrodes under systemic decay. Loyalty is twisted into a tool of exploitation.

Takuma (Raizō Ichikawa, of the Shinobi films) is a samurai asked to take the fall for the murder of a member of a rival clan. This wasn’t just any murder, however; it was disgraceful — a strike from behind. Honorable to a fault and engaged to his clan leader’s daughter, Namie (Kaoru Yachigusa), Takuma agrees. The promise? After a year in exile, he may return when the dust settles. What unfolds is a merciless cycle of broken promises. Betrayal piles upon betrayal. Even early on, with the flicker of Namie’s eyes when her fiancé accepts, we see that fracture instantly. Love sacrificed for duty.

Formally, it’s absorbing to watch how the film mirrors Takuma’s collapse. Tanaka starts with destabilizing handheld camerawork before settling into rigid statics, suggesting a temporary return to order that will not hold. Once we get to those fixed shots, we’re also offered selective framing, where certain scenes crop out figures, like showcasing attackers only from the legs, or Takuma on the ground. We’re given a subjective, ground-level perspective of humiliation. Most fascinating, however, was witnessing the exile period come and go, as if it were an ellipsis. By denying Takuma any narrative redemption arc or sense of urgency, Tanaka insists on futility.

So, what are we left with? Disillusion. “A samurai’s word is meaningless,” spits Takuma through maniacal laughter at one point, marking the erosion of the bushidō code. Even the film’s spectacular final act (which I won’t detail — it’s best experienced) is loaded with bitter irony. We’re dazzled by edge-of-your-seat thrills… yet it rings hollow. As Takuma’s worn-down body keeps swinging, what does it matter what the outcome is? His spirit is already destroyed. In the words of one character: “In this world, the faithless win, and the faithful lose … it’s the way of the world.”

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet (Oldřich Lipský; 1978)

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet may be in the running as one of my favorite detective spoofs next to Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. Oldřich Lipský brings to the screen American sleuth Nick Carter (a dime-novel legend I admittedly didn’t know of!) as he’s summoned to Prague for a seemingly simple missing-dog case... only to find himself chasing an eccentric villain — mustache primed for twirling and all — who’s been feeding his victims to a carnivorous plant. Naturally.

Visual gags abound in Adela, and they’re played entirely straight-faced, which makes them even better. It plays like Peter Sellers–era Pink Panther by way of Inspector Gadget, with a flair for sepia tones, dime-novel illustrations, slapstick choreography, and sped-up chases. Carter’s (Michal Dočolomanský) crime-fighting arsenal is a delight, from retractable hat punches to bomb-sniffing spectacles, sprinkled with a healthy dash of steampunk swagger. What particularly surprised (and shocked) me was seeing that his partner, Commissar Ledvina, was played by Rudolf Hrušínský, whom I adored in Juraj Herz’s The Cremator. Almost unrecognizable, Hrušínský’s Ledvina exists primarily to fumble, eat sausages, and down beer — often at the same time.

The carnivorous plant, which lends its name to the eponymous title, is the real showstopper. Brought to moist, grotesque life by Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, Adela goes from weirdly charming to absolutely revolting, complete with a full set of teeth and a tongue. Gross.

I first tried watching this in the middle of film festival season, but I was too exhausted, so I circled back. If you’re even slightly soup-brained from too many meaty watches, this is a perfect reset button. There’s a gag in every scene, and beneath the spoof, Lipský still manages to sneak in a satire of bureaucracy and genre tropes. Overall, though, it’s a film that delights in being ridiculous — and a goddamn treat, at that. Supper is served.

You can purchase Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet via Deaf Crocodile here (the delux limited edition) or standard edition here.

Three weeks after the Vancouver International Film Festival has come to a close, the twenty titles I saw are still swirling in the dark crevices of my mind. I always retreat into my own introspection post-festival season, allowing myself the space to soak up and trace what sticks and notice what fades — though I’m sure some of that is lofty thinking, when in reality, I’m allowing the sponge of my brain to be wrung out and placed to dry until it can begin to absorb more cinema.

I’m reaching that point now, where I’ve slowed my roll long enough that I miss the exploratory aspect of my passion. That’s good news for you, my friend, as it means more deep dives and essays are on the way very soon (along with more podcast episodes!) — I promise. But for now, let’s chat about five more titles I loved at VIFF.

For this second dispatch, I’ve selected films that find their characters teetering between control and chaos, myth and memory, or performance and collapse. When these edges blur, what we end up with is, miraculously, a glimpse of something true. Let’s begin.

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook; South Korea)

Have you ever been stuck between desperation and derangement? There’s a fine line between the two. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s The Ax (also tackled by Costa-Gavras in 2005), takes a corporate layoff and turns it into a living, breathing capitalist nightmare. A veteran of a paper mill (Lee Byung-hun’s Man-soo) is cut loose after decades of service, handed a ticking severance bomb, plus some eels for a “celebratory” barbecue. Determined to provide for his family, he vows to find work immediately — until he convinces himself he has “no other choice.” The plan curdles from there.

The film hit a personal nerve with me. In today’s job market, how could it not? Even people with no warning signs still worry, waiting for their own turn on the block. Yet this might be Park’s loosest-limbed outing: elegant rage colliding with slapstick panic. Kim Woo-hyung’s cinematography also alternates between play and precision. Frames crowd with tiny, nervy details; then the camera gets audacious, like planting us at the bottom of a glass as a drink is downed (unreal, by the way).

I loved the focus on Man-soo’s gardening passion. Gardening is an attempt to tame chaos (or, better yet, an effort to regain control). Man-soo tends leaves and trims stems while plotting his scheme: he’s “weeding out” whatever blocks his ideal life. You prune some things to let others flourish, right? The hobby seemingly flatters his self-image of being careful and gentle… until his actions expose a suppressed rot.

Color does a lot of narrative work here, as Park is fond of. Green trails Man-soo’s desire for stability (and resentment toward those still employed). Blue complements the green, particularly during familial moments, transforming the domestic into private isolation. Red needs no explanation, while purple mutates ambition into corruption.

The paper-mill metaphor is as relevant now as when Westlake published the original story. How maddening: Man-soo gives decades to a company that literally manufactures disposability. Paper is meant to be used and thrown away — just like him. “Pulp Man of the Year.” Let that sink in. It’s the working class in shorthand: extract labor → discard body. When Man-soo resorts to violence, he mirrors the industrial violence he once served. Meanwhile, the tender parts of his life sit within reach. The film juxtaposes gentleness with brutality, asking which one we choose when the rent is due.

Lee Byung-hun is excellent: he opens in cool composure, Man-soo’s confidence radiating through posture and voice. Soon after, Park nudges him into a Chaplinesque wobble, a slope he thinks he can climb and then barely clings to. You laugh and wince in the same breath, and Park lets air into the rage so you can breathe it.

The finale sees Park softly twist the knife. I cackled, then felt the aftertaste. No other choice but to laugh at the absurdity of the corporate hellscape, right?

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi; Iran/France/Luxembourg)

It Was Just an Accident begins with a road at night, and shortly after, the sound of a thud. The man driving has hit a dog. His wife consoles their daughter: “It was just an accident. Whatever will be, will be.” It’s a shrug (half prayer, half excuse) that sets the tone for Jafar Panahi’s moral labyrinth. Later in the film, another man drives down another dark road. This time, he slows down. He sees the dog. That small act of noticing stuck with me.

Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is a mechanic who suspects that a stranded motorist, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), is the man who tortured him years earlier in prison. What follows isn’t quite the revenge thriller I expected; it is rooted much more in morality. When Vahid slows to avoid the animal, it mirrors that opening. From the Iranian cinema I’ve seen, animals often stand in for the moral conscience. Abbas Kiarostami (whom Panahi started his career assisting) also used them as silent witnesses to human indifference. Panahi inherits that here: the dog becomes a litmus test for empathy. When Vahid avoids hitting it (and note which part of the film this occurs), it’s a pivotal point. Maybe it’s humanity reasserting itself, even as vengeance threatens to consume him. Can that mercy extend to his own trauma? Should it?

A line in the film stayed with me: “The further you go, the more you sink.” You can apply that to these dark roads traveled, too. The farther the story travels, the murkier things get. Once we finally reach the end of the road, one marked by vengeance and memory, Panahi leaves us stranded. Nothing ever truly ends, and perhaps we’re left only with an echo of what we’ve done. The simmering rage this concluded on left me speechless.

Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater; France)

Richard Linklater has always been one of my favorite modern hangout artists, and Nouvelle Vague stays true to form: a breezy, cinephile’s bingo card of the French New Wave versus a solemn history lesson. Chronicling the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), the film is full of playful winks: Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo, plus an entire array of legends brought to life: Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Varda, Demy, Rivette, Greco — all wandering into frame like old friends with uncanny resemblance.

Shot in 35mm black-and-white stock and in Academy aspect ratio (complete with cigarette burns, reel-change markers, and the faint crackle of a well-worn print), Nouvelle Vague so convincingly mimics the texture of 1960s French cinema that I sometimes forgot it was made in 2025, not 1959. When Godard sits down to watch The 400 Blows and we glimpse Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) sprinting toward the shoreline, I had to stop myself from applauding. (Coincidentally, Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical debut was also one of the first films I ever saw alone in a theater — yay, solo cinema!). Linklater’s own adoration for the movement pulses through every frame; hardly surprising, given how much his own Before trilogy borrows from Rohmer (whose sly cameo sparked the theater’s loudest laughs). His enthusiasm is catnip; so palpable that my face hurt from grinning.

As Nouvelle Vague drifts from moment to moment, there’s joy in its conversational rhythms and in the thrill of seeing a revolution take shape. When a director’s passion hits this hard, it’s tough not to get swept along. Nouvelle Vague doesn’t rewrite history the way Breathless once did, but it still raises a glass to one of cinema’s most cherished beginnings.

What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sangsoo; South Korea)

A polite implosion, that’s what this was. Beneath the small talk and strained courtesies of meeting a partner’s family for the first time festers a familiar humiliation: the urge to prove your worth when you already suspect you don’t have any.

Thirtysomething poet Donghwa (Ha Seongguk) accompanies his girlfriend Junhee (Kang Soyi) to her family home, where an awkward afternoon with her father gradually morphs into an extended stay… complete with home-cooked meals, strained conversation, and too much soju.

What Does That Nature Say to You is as funny as it is excruciating, and by the time that one drink that probably shouldn’t have been poured is downed, the fallout feels as mortifying as it is inevitable. Hong Sangsoo’s deliberately blurry video aesthetic mirrors the emotional haze of his lead — a man collapsing under the weight of his own performance.

It’s a deceptively simple film that feels remarkably intimate, and I’m eager to revisit it when I’m not delirious on the final legs of a ten-day film festival (though maybe that was the ideal way to see it, who knows).

Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari; Canada/Hungary)

“I struggle now to remember much of my childhood. It only comes back to me in small fragments, and even those memories are hard to trust.”

What a way to start a film. Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron pulls the curtain back to peer at those same fragile fragments: glimpses through doorways and windows, the sounds of cooking, the quiet moments that seem ordinary until you realize grief has been seeping through all along.

Set in the late 1990s, a Hungarian family moves to their new home on Vancouver Island, Canada. Sasha (Eyul Guven), age eight, settles in with her younger siblings, but it’s her eldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), who struggles. Their parents attempt to steady an unraveling situation, while Sasha quietly takes it all in.

I loved how Romvari treats recollection as both fiction and documentary — the past reconstructed by an adult filmmaker trying to understand her younger self, or better yet, make sense of her memories. The scrape of a potato peeler at work. Oil crackling in a pan for a bit too long. The rhythmic thump on a wall. All tiny acts of resurrection. Blue Heron left me quiet, the way a childhood photograph does when you look at it too long.

By the end of any festival, memory feels elastic and the brain turns to pudding. I’ve finally resurfaced after a month-long blur of pre-festival planning, red carpets, screenings, and beautiful exhaustion of the 44th Vancouver International Film Festival. There will be a couple more dispatches coming, but for this one, the connective tissue felt clear: the films I gravitated toward were all about continuity — of memory, family, labor, and creative or personal lineage.

Each one involves people clinging to meaning amid dislocation, finding ways to rebuild what’s been lost, or to keep moving even when the world forgets them. From Bi Gan’s century-spanning dreamscapes to Joachim Trier’s thorny family portrait, they all share a kind of communal heartbeat: people still trying to make sense of things, however fragile or foolish that effort may be.

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier; Norway/France/Denmark/Germany/Sweden/UK)

What does “sentimental value” really mean? Usually, it’s shorthand for a knick-knack you can’t bring yourself to toss. But in Joachim Trier’s hands, it becomes something far weightier: a house swollen with memory, and the emotional baggage we take into adulthood.

Gorgeously shot on 35mm by Kasper Tuxen (The Worst Person in the World), the film feels lived-in from its first frame. The house itself becomes the central character — cracking under grief, humor, and what it resents most: silence. Both in the ways it lays bare the messiness of familial bonds (especially with such strained close-ups) and the dry, almost mischievous moments of humor, Sentimental Value often reminded me of Ingmar Bergman, whose work is very dear to Trier himself.

If Trier’s Oslo trilogy was stripped down and intimate, Sentimental Value is sprawling — each family member carrying their own textured backstory, yet never slipping into exposition (Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, and Ibsdotter Lilleaas all had moments that almost broke me). It’s reflective in that signature Trier way, forcing you to sit with your own relationships and your own scars.

The film left me in a melancholy, contemplative state, but what surprised me most were the moments of levity. A surprise that, in the end, made it all feel so much more human. Even in our dysfunction, humor still exists. I started Sentimental Value musing about its title, which I often think of as just a phrase. By the end, it finally clicked: sentimental value is the weight of what we inherit, and the fumbling, fragile way we navigate healing.

Resurrection (Bi Gan; China/France)

In Bi Gan’s Resurrection, the world no longer knows how to dream. Imagination has been traded for immortality. We’re introduced to the concept of “Fantasmers,” the only beings (or “monsters”) capable of dreaming and doing so on our behalf. Across a century, Bi crafts six chapters, allowing one fantasmer to wander through different incarnations — each echoing a different era of cinema (quite literally, his insides run a reel of film).

We glide through a silent film, a noir, past the grounds of a temple, to a station where a child learns to “smell” playing cards, and finally, into the rain-slick streets of New Year’s Eve, 1999. Throughout it all, Bi celebrates cinema, and the frame itself keeps changing shape and color, yet so fluidly it’s never jarring. The most dazzling segment comes the night before the new century: a glorious, 30-minute, red-soaked oner that carries us through narrow streets, into a karaoke bar (complete with a brawl), and back out to the docks and onto a boat. To sit in the dark and absorb it all? Electric.

Bi has said that all of the chapters are tied to the senses. What struck me is how he grounds all that phantasmagoria with small, edible anchors — such as a potato, an orange, an apple — appearing across eras. The Fantasmer takes and eats each, tethering himself to physical sensation. These foods become a language of touch and taste, a reminder that to eat is to remain human. A proof of continuity.

The best way to approach Resurrection is to simply feel it. “Screens are getting smaller and smaller, and I want to evoke that old feeling of watching films in theaters,” Bi told Variety. “Every director creates based on their own life experiences. This film is my emotional response to this land — a celebration of the lives of people who have shared this space with me over the past century.” Honestly? By the end, that feels true for us, too.

Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou; Taiwan/France/USA/UK)

Negotiations are at the core of Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl, whether grappling with a sense of duty and freedom, or with tradition and modernity. Set in the bustle of Taipei’s night markets, the film follows a mother, Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), and her two daughters, I-Ann and I-Jing (Ma Shih-yuan and Nina Yeh, respectively), as they relocate back to Taipei to open a noodle stand. Shu-Fen and her eldest daughter, I-Ann, are bound by generational tension and economic fragility, while five-year-old I-Jing is the scrappy observer, trying to navigate a world where the adults are too burdened to guide her.

Tsou has called the film a “love letter” to Taipei, and the result feels personal and alive. Left-Handed Girl runs on the city’s crowded tempo: neon tubes stutter over mopeds, stalls narrow into single-file corridors, and the odd banquet hall moonlights as a meeting room. It’s clear-eyed about circumstances but never turns cold. These are people who care for one another; they just don’t always have the space to show it. Generational gaps aren’t always kind, so love sometimes lands sideways. Tsou draws from people she knows and shared stories, and it shows; we understand these women’s choices, even when they’re rash.

Co-written and edited by longtime collaborator Sean Baker, the film carries a rhythm that feels instinctive — even reactive — as if the characters are chasing the city’s own pulse. Shot by Chen-Ko-chin and Kao Tzu-Hao, the camera often drops to I-Jing’s height, tracking our pint-sized pilferer through tight, shoulder-to-shoulder lanes. When she slips between stalls or cuts down a side street, we follow like we’re learning her shortcut map. Taipei can feel enormous, but to I-Jing it’s simply home.

Tsou’s empathy for her characters is what sticks with me the most. The title nods to a superstition, but Left-Handed Girl answers with tenderness. What emerges is a lesson in living with your crooked bits — your family, your city, yourself. Call it a love letter to Taipei… and to the left hand that keeps reaching anyway.

Akashi (Mayumi Yoshida; Canada)

The first thing Akashi does is relax you. A frame awash with color — the greens are impossibly green, the blues so vibrant — all while dreamy synth strings float you along. A young woman walks beside a man, and she hands him a photograph. “Before I forget… don’t give up.” It’s such a gentle beginning, so full of light, that the sudden cut to black-and-white feels like a door slamming shut.

Mayumi Yoshida’s feature debut moves between two worlds. Japan and Canada, past and present, color and grayscale. Kana (Yoshida) returns home to Tokyo after ten years abroad to attend her grandmother’s funeral. Grief awaits, of course, but so does the fragile awkwardness of being a guest in a place that once felt like everything. This is what makes Akashi both personal and universal. The teasing remarks from siblings, the polite but gnawing distance of old friends… they’re all reminders that time changes our shape of belonging, and ourselves, too.

Yoshida’s command of tone is sublime. She pivots from the melancholy weight of loss to humor so naturally, it comes as a welcome pivot precisely when you’re trying not to cry (though I still did — a lot). Through a flashback, we learn of a long-buried secret that’s steeped in both sorrow and resilience. With Kana, we grow to understand that love and loss are forever intertwined. It doesn’t always need to be resolved, but learning how to sit with it is what’s crucial.

When I spoke with Yoshida on the VIFF red carpet, she told me, “Home isn’t necessarily a place; it’s people sometimes.” That sentiment feels like the soul of Akashi. It’s a film about crossing oceans (literally and emotionally) and, more importantly, about forgiving the versions of ourselves that time has left behind.

Kontinental ‘25 (Radu Jude; Romania)

What a world we’re living in. Radu Jude plants his camera (or, in this case, iPhone) like a witness and just lets the satire unspool. Orsolya, a Hungarian bailiff in Romania, oversees an eviction that ends in tragedy, and then spends the rest of the film trying (and failing) to convince herself that “legally, I’m not guilty.”

At one point, Orsolya falls asleep to Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour — a perfect companion piece for a woman convincing herself that guilt is a legal technicality. Ulmer’s hero insists on innocence; Jude’s heroine rationalizes hers through bureaucracy. Both are trapped in their own narration.

Kontinental ‘25 is bleak and hysterical all at once. People offer sympathy, but Orsolya keeps retelling the same story. Jude’s static frames and bone-dry humor turn guilt into something larger; as the grief turns into repetition, it’s swallowed up by the numbness of modern life. Even the mechanical dinosaur park in the background feels like part of the joke: monuments to our ability to distract ourselves from moral collapse.

A Useful Ghost (Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke; Thailand/France/Singapore/Germany)

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut begins as a deadpan ghost comedy: a woman dies, returns as a vacuum cleaner, and resumes her marriage. Once it hooks you, it morphs into something far more profound. The ghost story, of course, is a Trojan horse. Boonbunchachoke takes this absurd premise and threads a sociopolitical undercurrent, exploring themes of pollution, memory, and what gets erased by those in power.

Boonbunchachoke has cited Jacques Rivette as an inspiration, and you can sense that presence here, not in style, but in spirit. There’s a Rivettian rhythm to how memory loops, while the film is also attuned to repetition: of labor, of mourning, of all the quiet roles we’re expected to play until we vanish from sight. Impressively, Boonbunchachoke drifts between registers with ease, balancing both humor and devastation exactly when needed.

Ultimately, A Useful Ghost is a film about visibility — who gets remembered, and who gets swept into the margins. Dust is everywhere: on the ground, in the lungs, and thick in the air. The vacuum cleaner becomes both a tool for order and a mechanism of silence.

Strangely, for all its tonal shifts, the film works beautifully and remains gentle. In a world choking on air and forgetting its ghosts, A Useful Ghost remains grounded in both sorrow and solidarity. Grief can be absurd, love can look like labor, and memory — like dust — never really settles.

Within moments of sitting down to watch Paul Vecchiali’s Rosa la rose, fille publique, a bittersweet melody swelled in my ears. It felt hauntingly familiar, yet before I could place it, it slipped away.

That rush of something beautiful arriving and vanishing all at once stayed with me. Vecchiali has a way of weaving your heart into frames that feel strangely intimate. Instead of announcing itself to you, Vecchiali’s cinema drifts into you like a half-remembered dream. And when the story ends, it stays.

What does it mean to stage life — and still arrive at something true? Vecchiali’s theatricality is the form through which his deep humanism emerges.

And that resonance? It’s worth holding on to.

Paul Vecchiali, who passed away in January 2023 at the age of 92, never fit neatly into the story of French cinema — though he undeniably helped shape it from the margins. Born in Ajaccio in 1930, he grew up in Toulon and was enamored by film at a young age, watching Anatole Litvak’s Mayerling (1936) at age six and developing a crush on Danielle Darrieux.1 Throughout the 1940s, he continued to attend the cinema during the French occupation. Once he moved to Paris, he began studying at the École Polytechnique, but was called up for military service for the Algerian War. It was there that he subscribed to Cahiers du cinéma. “It was almost my only contact with the outside world,” he recalled to Libération in 2015, reflecting that when Jean-Luc Godard later asked him why he went to war as an anarchist, he told him, “I felt capable of being responsible, in accordance with my convictions, and if I hadn't gone, they would have enlisted another guy in my place, and I don't know what he would have done.”

This sense of responsibility — a refusal to look away when others might — became the cornerstone of his cinema, where he gave voice to those so often left unheard.

Upon returning to France, Vecchiali rushed to watch Godard’s Breathless and Jacques Demy’s Lola. These experiences, according to him, were the tipping point for his own foray into cinema. In 1961, Vecchiali made Les Petits Drames. “I edited my first film alone, in the living room of Nicole Courcel and Michel Piccoli, who were acting in it and living together at the time,” he told Libération. As a final grace note, his beloved Darrieux (a Max Ophüls favorite) had her own cameo. Devastatingly, the film was destroyed in a fire, though he would work with Darrieux again for At the Top of the Stairs in 1983.

Short films were next for Vecchiali, as was criticism. Éric Rohmer, who was editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, received a letter from Vecchiali, who wrote that the magazine had published “a mistake about a film by Chabrol and one by Fuller.” While Rohmer wrote back that Vecchiali was, indeed, right, the letter remained in his office even after his dismissal — until Jacques Rivette took over and noticed it. From there, he invited Vecchiali into the fold, asking him to write about Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country. “Criticism was essential to me, to keep in touch with cinema when I was beginning to make it,” he recalled to Libération. “It is very important for me to remain whole, filmmaker and cinephile.” In the Radiance Films release of Rosa la rose, critic David Jenkins shares that Vecchiali’s most beloved review was on The Umbrellas of Cherbourg by Demy, an auteur who undeniably inspired Vecchiali and, eventually, became his closest friend.

Vecchiali's friendship with Demy rippled outward, inspiring others as well. At the 1974 Venice Film Festival, Pier Paolo Pasolini (who was in the pre-production stage of Salò) saw Vecchiali's greatest critical success, Femmes femmes. He raved, dubbing it a “ménage à trois of reality, cinema, and theater.”2 He then proceeded to cast its two leads, Hélène Surgère and Sonia Saviange (also Vecchiali’s sister), in his controversial landmark film. We also have Vecchiali to thank for the now-beloved casting of Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. As he explained to Libération, Demy initially aimed to have Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn. Vecchiali retorted, “What a pain, take the Dorléac sisters!”

Two years after the premiere of Femmes femmes in Venice, Vecchiali founded his own production company, Diagonale. It was less a business venture than a quiet revolution; a way to bypass the rigid, male-dominated systems of French cinema in the 1970s and create a sanctuary for himself and his peers. Funded largely through his own resources, Diagonale became a refuge for filmmakers with no interest in conforming. Jean-Claude Biette, Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Jean-Claude Guiguet all found support there, and Vecchiali even served as a producer on Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The goal was simple: make the films they wanted to make.

The stories born under Diagonale shared an ethos of lived experience. Communities bloom on screen, existing with total authenticity. The films carried queer currents without needing to declare themselves queer films; they also gave space to other taboo lives (sex workers, the sick, the poor), revealing people in all their contradictions and ambiguities.

To sustain this freedom, Vecchiali worked tirelessly in television. “I did everything: TF1, France 2, France 3, La Sept… They came looking for me because people knew I worked fast, and I needed to make money because I hardly paid myself on the films produced by Diagonale,” he told Libération. Between this steady work, his own financing, and government support, the system held for decades. And while it never brought him the international recognition he deserved, he found peace in his independence. “I made my films at home with my own money, and I didn’t owe anything to anyone, I was calm,” Vecchiali recalled to Caimán Cuadernos de Cine in 2015.

Even with Diagonale’s vitality, Vecchiali remained at odds with the broader industry. His refusal to conform kept him on the fringes. But it’s also there where he found his freedom. “The margins are a liberation because society is obnoxious. I prefer it kind, but it’s obnoxious,” he remarked in 2015. Luckily, a few insiders quietly took note. Rohmer, fascinated by this underground counterculture, kept tabs on Diagonale and quietly encouraged C’est la vie! in the 1980s, even as other Cahiers critics tore it apart. Vecchiali’s cinema lived in this tension: outside the establishment, yet no less important to the story of French film.

If Diagonale gave Vecchiali freedom, his grammar came from elsewhere: his cinephile past. The Ophülsian glide, Renoir’s open frame, and a 1930s humanism make room for an entire ecosystem of lives. Vecchiali composes with bodies the way those earlier masters did, so blocking becomes intimacy, and the long take gives feeling time to arrive.

For Vecchiali, theatricality went past mere performance. To stage something is to feel it with a whole heart. “For me, in the theater, the feeling is in the legs … Feelings can be communicated by the legs, not by the head or by psychology,” he explained to Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. The stage is a score; the legs play it. In cinema, the frame is that stage — motion over motive, kinesis over psyche.

You can see that grammar from the first minutes of Rosa la rose: a gliding camera, a city scored by accordion, and long takes that let Rosa’s steps do the talking. Opening like a fairy tale lit by neon (almost Demy-tinted in its exuberance), the camera moves as if it's listening. Rosa’s agency registers first in motion: she floats through streets, claims space, then slows… as if the film were measuring the cost of desire in her very steps. The emotional cadence is something we feel before any sentiments are spoken. By the end of the film, as dawn breaks, the candy-colored spell we’ve been ensnared in has thinned. The lonely, empty streets speak volumes. Heartbreak arrives without announcing itself.

The way Vecchiali adapts his cinematic language by genre is exhilarating. If Rosa floats, The Strangler measures, turning movement into ritual. The thriller opens with a hyper-stylized killing, before scrapbook credits announce Vecchiali’s playful hand — even in grisly territory. What might be sensational elsewhere becomes staged and ceremonial: tempo, distance, and touch do the work, while the recurring white scarf functions less as a prop than a ritual object. “I spent fifteen nights walking around the suburbs of Paris in a receptive state,” he recalled to Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, noting that The Strangler “was more like a poem about the night.”

Émile (Jacques Perrin) is not a stereotypical pulp monster. He knits scarves, lives under his grandmother’s photo, while The Little Prince sits by his bed like a relic of broken innocence. The camera moves as if it were a patient dance partner, holding where it needs to. Early on, a bar erupts into an almost-surreal, single-take chanson-style number, pivoting from violence into trance. As always, Vecchiali’s theatricality keeps the film from tipping into the macabre. And when authority stumbles, his usual chorus asserts itself. At one moment, sex workers band together to seize the petty thief they think is Émile, not for spectacle but for justice — as a community redrawing moral lines the police can’t hold. Tenderness meets terror, while compassion dances with compulsion.

When asked by Caimán Cuadernos de Cine if he considers passion a form of anarchy, Vecchiali replied, “Yes, let's say it's the rejection of everything around us for the benefit of one single being.” We have now come to 1988’s Encore, where that belief meets his “legs-first” credo and becomes a choreography of care. From the outset, the film declares itself a play: a camera circles the central couple in bed, then pans out so it feels as if they’re on a stage. After the first song, we hear applause. In the subway, “Stage right! Stage right!” is shouted as a stranger bangs on the window, turning the platform into a proscenium. Long takes become acts, while time passes offstage. It is not ours to witness.

Encore is often cited among the earliest French features to face AIDS directly, yet it refuses to become “issue cinema.” Small kindnesses, like money given to a homeless man, join Vecchiali’s ever-familiar chorus of the everyday. The film moves like a memory musical, singing love until the voice gives out. Vecchiali doesn’t psychologize what the body can stage.

Long before Rosa la rose, The Strangler, or Encore, Femmes femmes lays down a template for the grammar we’ve been tracing. A beautifully melancholic chamber drama, it keeps us mostly confined to one room, where friendship is staged as survival. Two aging actresses, Hélène and Sonia, share an apartment and a past they keep rehearsing. Lobby cards of iconic actresses haunt their walls, and in one perfect ritual, the two apply lipstick to each other at the same time, their faces completing one reflection. Vecchiali lets movement live in the blocking rather than speeches, and theatricality is never an ornament, but a way to cope. A love letter to actresses and faded dreams that refuse to die, their duet is one voice in a larger chorus: ensembles where community is never, ever backdrop but the meaning itself.

You can hear this chorus in Drugstore Romance, too. The age-gap affair between the mechanic and the pharmacist never blows up into a scandal; it plays out on the block. What begins as a private longing suddenly spills into the public. Suddenly, the street becomes a stage once more. We may get pockets of Sirkian melodrama, but Vecchiali always remembers to keep the scale human. The romance leads, and the chorus carries.

Vecchiali generously invites viewers into his frames and proceeds to let them live there. As he said of audiences in 2015, “The film is a way for people to communicate; you offer them a plot of land and they build their house.” Inside the fiction, his ensembles work the same way: he offers space; they fill it.

The essence of Vecchiali’s work is freedom. This is also why his stance on identity was so unboxed. “I don’t like the word gay or the word homosexual,” he told Komitid in 2016. “The word means nothing. You shouldn’t confuse the sexual act with love. I’ve had adventures with men and with women.” That resistance to labels also rhymes with his feminist lens, where agency comes first and tabooed lives are treated without panic.

An interesting film is like a river coming out of a mountain (the script), which goes to the sea (the viewer); the more vigorous it is, the more crap it carries. In short, we can talk about heterogeneity, it's more accurate. There are masterpieces full of impurities.”

- Paul Vecchiali (via Caimán Cuadernos de Cine)

If we dive into that sea, we surface in a shared dream. With humanity for oxygen, Vecchiali’s theatricality lets us breathe — and sing.

We began with a melody that slipped away before it could be named. Vecchiali’s cinema works like that, too: feeling carried by movement rather than explanation. Jacques Demy once described Lola as a “musical without music;” Vecchiali makes that sentiment entirely his own. His films hum with desire and gesture, creating music even when it isn’t there. They are theatrical without falseness, staged so we can feel with every fiber of our being. This is why his work needs to endure: Vecchiali’s theater of feeling is the stage on which we take up the chorus and carry the tune home, long after the curtain call.

August was a quiet one here on Rewind & Revive — but only on the surface. Behind the scenes, I’ve been gearing up for one of my busiest seasons yet, juggling a frankly absurd number of projects (par for the course at this point).

Next month, I’m thrilled to be working with the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) once again. You’ll find me on the red carpet conducting interviews, attending 20+ screenings, and sharing coverage through both Rewind & Revive and my socials. It’s both a pleasure and an honor to be invited back — and to speak with such talented creatives on opening night. If you're curious what I’ll be watching, my full VIFF list is up on Letterboxd.

Outside the festival, I recently wrote a piece for NUVO Magazine highlighting five standout titles at TIFF, with a VIFF-focused follow-up coming soon. I also partnered with MVD Entertainment for a giveaway featuring two Radiance Films favorites you’ve seen me rave about: A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (Seijun Suzuki) and Rosa la rose, fille publique (Paul Vecchiali). Entries are open on Instagram until September 10th.

Speaking of Vecchiali — I’ve spent the last month elbow-deep in his work, and it’s been wildly rewarding. He’s a filmmaker whose cinema deserves far more English-language attention, and I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a long-form essay that will (fingers crossed!) be live next week.

I’ve missed publishing at my usual rhythm, but I also believe in giving each piece the time and care it deserves. When you read something here, I want it to spark the same passion that moved me to write it.

In the meantime, here are a few recent watches I adored:

• Drugstore Romance (Paul Vecchiali; 1979)
  Vecchiali keeps breaking my heart over and over again. Drugstore Romance is all about impossible loves and quiet devastations, flitting between tenderness and selfishness with that swooping Ophülsian camerawork and Sirkian melodrama. Fauré's "Pavane" has never sounded this gently crushing.

• Eight Postcards from Utopia (Radu Jude, Christian Ferencz-Flatz; 2024)
  Like dispatches from a mind on the brink. Watched this in a sleep-deprived fog, which honestly felt right — and had me questioning my own sanity through splattered cackles. A graveyard of faded hope, yet Jude’s wit slices through. The multivitamins ad (“for the strength to stay calm!!”) got a howl out of me. Garish, messy, indulgent, and I loved every second.

• French Cancan (Jean Renoir; 1955)
  Like stepping into an Impressionist painting in motion. 102 minutes of uninterrupted swooning. The final sequence is cinema with a capital C. The colors, the costumes, the choreography — dazzling, decadent joy.

• Don’t Change Hands (Paul Vecchiali; 1975)
  One of the rare times I can say, “I watched an adult film for the plot” and actually mean it. A sexy noir with musical numbers, familiar on-screen collaborators, and staging that’s unmistakably Vecchiali. Parts reminded me of Fassbinder, others of Jean Rollin. Provocative, absurd, and completely its own thing.

Thanks for reading — and for sticking around. More soon. I promise.

I didn’t expect to write about another Abbas Kiarostami film so soon after revisiting Taste of Cherry, but what can I say — duty calls. With The Criterion Collection’s recent remaster and release of 1999’s The Wind Will Carry Us (and my own chat about it on The Substance Podcast — more on that later), I felt pulled back to revisit another film in his body of work that’s so near and dear to my heart.

When I first watched The Wind Will Carry Us, its gentleness caught me off guard. I often find a quiet peace through Kiarostami’s work, but something about Wind felt different. Take the aforementioned Taste of Cherry, for example — a film that feels still yet vast, where death lingers over each scene in both grand and intimate ways. Wind, made just one year later, feels almost playful by comparison. Kiarostami shows us there is humor in life’s detours. A certain warmth in waiting.

The film opens with what feels like a prank. We’re placed in familiar territory (our leads driving through the winding countryside) as a group of “engineers” (read: film crew) gets lost on their way to a Kurdish village. Once they finally get there, Kiarostami gently pokes and prods at his protagonist’s intentions. Behzad (Behzad Dorani) has come to document something concrete and finite: a death. Of course, life has its own plans.

Are we truly able to open our eyes and be present when life refuses to follow our script?

The Wind Will Carry Us works so well because it builds on a familiar tension of any creative: wanting to capture life and accidentally interfering with it. Behzad exists as both an outsider and observer in equal measure. He arrives to document a local ritual, but to the villagers, he’s a mystery. While they’re told a harmless cover story, it only deepens the disconnect between them. He is quick to walk their compact streets, eager to watch their intimate routines, and while they welcome him with open arms (for the most part), he never quite belongs.

Kiarostami cleverly makes this disconnect and distance quite literal. Throughout the film, we hear voices but don’t see faces, be it the elderly woman, the ditch digger, or even Behzad’s own film crew. Existing just outside our view, only through disembodied dialogue, they serve as a reminder that we’ll never see the full picture.

“Basically anything seen through a camera limits the view of a spectator to what’s visible through the lens, which is always much less than we can see with our own eyes,” Kiarostami told Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa in 2003, noting that he doesn’t want his audiences to simply see a reality — he wants them to feel it. “The viewer always has this curiosity to imagine what’s outside the field of vision; it’s used all the time in everyday life. But when people come to a theater, they’ve been trained to stop being curious and imaginative and simply take what’s given to them. That’s what I’m trying to change.”

Seen through a remarkably contemporary lens, Behzad mirrors us. As he constantly wanders through the village with his cell phone primed for a quick draw faster than Clint Eastwood, he never fully settles in. Whenever he suddenly has to bolt up and race to the top of a hill for reception, we see how technology pulls him away from the world around him. After all, aren’t we all thralls to the slender devices we clutch so dearly, especially when purpose itself starts to slip away? Distractions, distractions…

The village does not share Behzad’s restlessness — they don’t have time to daydream. The locals are in a symbiotic dance with their lives: tending to their fields, serving tea, or studying for exams. Behzad, on the other hand, is expecting life to deliver what he wants.

Perhaps the waiting itself is the point. If you’re patient enough to look, life is something you witness, not something you capture.

For all of Behzad’s (and our) unrest, The Wind Will Carry Us offers a gift: quiet, beautiful pauses where life unfolds without interference. In one scene, Behzad, in frustration, cruelly flips a turtle onto its back. Once he gets back into his car, the turtle corrects itself and just keeps moving. Later, as he watches a dung beetle in a Sisyphean task of pushing a heavy rock uphill, he sees it stumble — only to continue on. As you smile during this moment, you subsequently celebrate that Behzad did, too. Struggle is a part of life, but so is getting back up again. It’s the quiet, relentless work of simply being alive.

After this viewing, the cellar scene with the milkmaid has lingered in my mind. Behzad descends, asking her to fill his bowl, though likely hoping to catch a glimpse of the unseen love interest of the grave digger he’s come to know. In the dark, he recites a romantic poem (that lends the film its name) by Forugh Farrokhzad, expecting a connection. Again, life doesn’t play by his rules. About to hand back his bowl, she simply says, “It’s full.” Behzad, ever the artist, selfishly seeks something transcendent. She, meanwhile, remains grounded in her lived-in reality. That’s what matters in her world, and her refusal to play along becomes an act of quiet resistance. And yet… something still happens. As he leaves, she asks him how long Farrokhzad studied. Despite their different worlds, there’s a flicker of interest. Something lingers: it’s her curiosity, not his poetry, that creates the connection. I was left wondering, from this blink-and-you ’ll-miss-it moment, if this girl would soon spin her own prose.

These quiet ellipses are most striking when Behzad encounters the local doctor. As they drive through the countryside, the man speaks with an almost poetic ease, urging Behzad to see what’s right in front of him. The warm colors of the fields, the breeze teasing the grass before slipping away again — if you slow down enough to notice, there’s grace in the everyday.

For those familiar with Kiarostami’s filmography, you’ll easily connect to viewing Behzad as a stand-in for the filmmaker himself. Was he exploring his place in the world as an artist who arrives in rural villages, casting locals and hoping to capture something authentic… only to wrestle with the reality that his presence inevitably changes what he’s trying to observe?

I’m not off base here — Kiarostami was never shy about this parallel. In the same interview with Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa, he was asked about the moment when Behzad poses a question to Farzad, his schoolboy guide: “Do you think I’m a bad man?”

JR: When I saw that, I had the impression that it was you asking the boy precisely that question. Is that correct?

AK: Yes, I was behind the camera, and I asked him that question.

JR: It does seem very much like a personal response from the boy that isn’t an actor’s response, and for me, it was a very important moment.

AK: I had to ask him that question because he didn’t like me very much, in contrast to the actor who was playing the main character. So that’s why he wasn’t very convincing when he called me a good man!

It’s a humorous exchange, but an undeniably vulnerable one. From behind the camera, Kiarostami prompts the question spontaneously. By asking the boy this question, he’s humble enough to get a genuine answer. Never one to tell us to observe the world from a distance, he asks us — and himself — to grapple with our own roles within it.

Kiarostami always urged us to walk away from his films with our personal interpretations. The Wind Will Carry Us is no exception. It never tells us how to feel about Behzad’s endless intrusions, nor does it hand us clear morals about life or death. Instead, we’re left with space. With the room to ask our own questions.

The Criterion release includes the 90-minute documentary, A Week With Kiarostami, which chronicles the making of Wind. There’s a lovely moment captured when Behzad Dorani admitted to never being told the whole story behind the film. In fact, he didn’t even have concrete lines to learn — he was fed them on the fly. Much like his character (and Kiarostami himself), he’s figuring things out as he goes along. Art isn’t a puzzle to be solved, and neither is this strange, unresolved thing we call life.

The Wind Will Carry Us opens as a film about death. By the end, it becomes a film about life, but not in any neat, defined sense. It’s the kind that happens and gently unfolds when we simply watch. Much like Behzad, we’re left sitting in the messiness of waiting. And yet, that’s where a gentle beauty unfolds in a way we could never even predict.

Life will always keep going. Not how we planned it, but exactly how it’s meant to.

If you want a deeper dive into The Wind Will Carry Us, I urge you to head over and listen to my discussion with Philip Marinello on The Substance Podcast. The Substance is a semi-weekly podcast (about three shows a month, with one week off) with well over 150 episodes that has conversations to help folks better appreciate goodness, truth, and beauty. There’s a strong emphasis on cinema, with regular conversations with wonderful guests who work in the film world. As well as shows with academics, advocates, and faith leaders who are working to make the world a better and fuller place.

My film-watching journey this July spanned emotional extremes, mainly through my physical media collection (many of which are new restorations!). The five films highlighted here offer a rich cross-section of cinema from around the globe, each reflecting a unique directorial vision marked by distinctive aesthetics, provocative ideas, and compelling narratives.

I'll say it right now: Paul Vecchiali has easily become my favorite discovery of the year, starting with the mesmerizing Rosa la Rose, fille publique — what an introduction. I'm already diving headfirst into Vecchiali's filmography, and a dedicated essay on his work is soon to follow; I look forward to sharing it with you when the time is right.

For now, please enjoy this lovingly curated list. I hope at least one of these gems intrigues you enough to spark your own cinematic adventures.

— M

Rosa la rose, fille publique (Paul Vecchiali, 1987)

Radiance strikes again, and I’m left giddy to enter into Paul Vecchiali’s world, beginning with 1987’s Rosa la rose, fille publique. Opening with an alluring array of reds, pinks, and blues, Rosa instantly enchants, setting the stage as a fairy tale lit by neon, with gliding camerawork and music so tender. Jacques Demy’s visual enchantment immediately comes to mind, but Vecchiali’s fable trades whimsy for something more lived-in and tragic. Here, this pastel dream is grounded in the streets of Les Halles.

Marianne Basler (who received a César nomination for the role) is captivating as Rosa, a sex worker adored by her community who practically levitates through the camera with her charm. There’s a playful buoyancy to Basler’s performance, but don’t be fooled — the film never loses sight of her agency. Initially, she’s seemingly in control. She flirts, she works, she commands with her presence. As the story unfolds, however, we begin to sense the irrevocable ache she carries within her. Vecchiali doesn’t moralize, nor does he pity; instead, he places our heroine in the gnawing tension between desire and survival.

Vecchiali, who may have slipped under the radar compared to his Cahiers du cinéma contemporaries, is nonetheless an important figure in French cinema; for instance, he helped produce Chantal Akerman’s now-iconic Jeanne Dielman and later became the first French director to openly tackle AIDS onscreen. Diagonale, his production company, became a platform for championing queer narratives. First and foremost, however, he was a passionate lover of the craft he practiced, having become enamoured with cinephilia as a child. Watching Rosa la Rose feels, at times, like a blend of Demy and Rivette, with a sprinkle of Fellini (à la the colorful, carnival-esque band circling our lead’s orbit). Both theatrical and intimate, we drift down city blocks via long takes as your eyes dart around. In this world, every character has a voice, no matter how small, whether it’s a passerby on the street or the silent faces gathered around a long dinner table, frozen in a near-static tableau.

Eventually, the romantic spell begins to crack. Rosa’s comfort comes at the cost of authority. Pleasure is tethered to a slow erosion of autonomy. As the morning light creeps in through quiet Parisian streets, our fairy tale fades away, with only the lingering trace of heartache left behind. That final devastation: the realization that life rarely plays out like the movies, and that passion, more often than not, exists as a fleeting burst of joy within a world designed to wear us down.

You can buy Rosa la Rose via Radiance Films.

Wan Pipel (Pim de la Parra, 1976)

Made just after Suriname gained independence in 1975, Wan Pipel (which translates to One People) opens with a simple yet powerful text crawl that lays out Suriname’s layered colonial history: centuries under Dutch rule, followed by waves of migration from India, Indonesia, and China. That blending of cultures (and the beauty and tension of it) forms the beating heart of Wan Pipel. Yet, for a film often spoken of in political terms, it’s also deeply personal. Director Pim de la Parra poured everything into this project: his finances (which bankrupted him) and his marriage (which dissolved during production). To top it off, it took decades for the Netherlands to embrace the film with the respect it deserved.

The story centers on Roy, a Surinamese man who returns home from the Netherlands following his mother’s passing. It begins as a homecoming for him, but then slowly evolves into a journey of self-discovery and a reckoning with identity and belonging, all while navigating the cultural fractures of a newly independent nation. Roy himself is a complicated character. At times selfish and cruel, he’s hard to root for. Where Roy succeeds (despite himself) is as a lens into the complex patchwork of Surinamese life. His romance with Rubia, a nurse from a conservative Hindu family, runs parallel to his relationship with Karina, his Dutch girlfriend. There’s a clear metaphor at play here: Karina represents the lingering hold of the Netherlands, while Rubia embodies a reclamation of self and home. Wan Pipel may seem heavy-handed at times with its obvious metaphor, but it also resists a “neat” answer. It recognizes that identity is complex, especially when it is divided between languages, histories, and expectations.

While the pacing can feel loose, the experience of simply sitting with Suriname — its gatherings, street markets, music, and dance halls — transforms that looseness into something purposeful. It kept me engaged throughout, holding me in its vivid portrait of Surinamese landscapes and multicultural heartbeat.

You can buy Wan Pipel via MVD Shop.

Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004)

I survived another Todd Solondz picture, and this one almost gave me whiplash as soon as that opening card drops. With just one line, Palindromes positions itself as a spiritual sequel to Welcome to the Dollhouse… and I had no idea how even more morally disorienting this world could get. As with much of his work, Palindromes is both deliberately alienating and morally thorny in a way that left me watching with my mouth half open, hovering between an uncomfortable smile and total horror.

Through Palindromes, we’re introduced to a 13-year-old girl named Aviva who wants to have a baby. From there, the story spirals into an escapade of ideological extremism, parental failure, and warped innocence. Although the story unfolds linearly, it’s destabilized by the fact that Aviva is played by eight different actors, all of whom vary in age, race, and even gender. Initially, I registered this as a gimmick. And yet, after I watched it unfold, it struck me: Solondz is employing a jarring device intended to universalize Aviva’s experience and challenge the audience’s unconscious biases. The result is that the viewer is never allowed to settle, never allowed to project a fixed identity onto our lead — and that’s the point.

Thanks to the Radiance Films’ release of Palindromes and the plethora of extra materials, I discovered that Solondz expressed a desire to explore the contradictions embedded in American culture, particularly the hypocrisies surrounding reproductive politics. In his words, Palindromes is about “a pro-choice mom who gives her daughter no choice and a pro-life mom who kills.” That tension forms the philosophical spine, whether we’re watching Aviva transition from a sterile suburban home to a disturbingly cheery Christian fundamentalist group (my god, does “Nobody But Jesus” haunt me now). All in all, the movie demands we sit in discomfort and reckon with the moral certainty (or uncertainty). In a visual essay on the Radiance release, Lillian Crawford posits, “Is it Solondz who is cruel, or is it the world?” You tell me.

Solondz offers perhaps his most biting thesis through Mark Weiner’s late-film monologue, where he tells Aviva that people believe they can change, but they can’t. It’s a grim kind of psychological palindrome: life looping back to sameness despite the illusion of progress. Aviva, too, becomes a kind of palindrome: not just because of her name, but because she returns from a harrowing journey seemingly unchanged in her desires. It would be easy to call this outlook pessimistic, but something in me resists. Maybe that tension is the film’s most unsettling truth: that identity is elastic, and belief is never as fixed as we think.

You can buy Palindromes via Radiance Films.

Nothing Underneath (Carlo Vanzina, 1985)

Donald Pleasence eating pasta at a Wendy’s in Milan, speaking with an Italian accent, napkin bib and all. That alone justifies a watch. But Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath is more than a late-era giallo oddity: it’s a deliciously glossy slice of ’80s murder-mystery madness that feels like a lovechild of Dario Argento and Brian De Palma. With its twin telepathy premise and tense drill scene, the film blends flourishes of the former with the latter’s voyeuristic thrills.

Set in Milan’s high-fashion world, the story follows a Wyoming park ranger (Tom Schanley) who jets off to Italy after experiencing a psychic vision of his model twin sister in danger. What follows is an enjoyably stylish whodunnit full of black-gloved killers, scissor murders (a nod to Phenomena, again!), and enough garish color and nudity to remind you this is pure giallo — and proudly so.

The fashion sequences are a standout, thanks in large part to Moschino, the only designer bold enough to sign on (according to writer Enrico Vanzina, most fashion houses feared being mocked). Complementing the visuals is a slick, moody score by Pino Donaggio, which further deepens the De Palma connection and keeps the film pulsing with tension.

There’s playful camp everywhere, from a nail-polished telephone operator spilling lacquer across a Milan area code during a moment of high urgency, to Pleasence delivering deadpan one-liners as a delightfully misplaced commissioner. The tone does occasionally wobble (particularly when it shifts from self-aware playfulness to leering sensuality), but the Rustblade release’s special features reveal that some of the more gratuitous scenes were added by the producer, who felt the film wasn’t “sexy enough.” The director and writer reportedly disagreed but let it go.

For all its tonal dissonance and occasional over-the-top performances, Nothing Underneath remains charming, confident, and wildly fun. Beneath the gloss and glam, it maintains a surprisingly solid whodunnit that satisfies the giallo faithful. "The only difference is fashion is seasonal, murder is... a year-round occurrence.”

You can buy Nothing Underneath via MVD Shop.

The Beast to Die (Tōru Murakawa, 1980)

There’s a quiet chill that hangs over Tōru Murakawa’s The Beast to Die, and it all comes from the icy void at its core. Date (Yūsaku Matsuda), a former Vietnam War photojournalist, once bore witness to death through a lens. Now, he reenacts it. What the audience is left with is the slow, bone-deep unraveling of a man, punctuated by acts of swift, eerily emotionless brutality.

Matsuda, best known for his magnetic, tough-guy screen presence (Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel was famously based on his Detective Story performance!), delivers something radically opposite here. As Date, he’s a shell: posture slumped, his gaze floating lifelessly. “What’s up with your eyes? It’s like there’s no life in them,” someone remarks, and the line lingers.

In the new Radiance Films release, screenwriter Shōichi Maruyama explains that Date’s descent began in the warzone. What he witnessed there shattered something in him. “Are humans capable of this much cruelty?” Maruyama asks. For Date, the answer is yes, and once that line is crossed, there’s no way back. The horror has reshaped him into something feral: a beast, unmoored from all conscience.

This was my first Murakawa film, and I’m already eager to explore more, especially his Game series. His visual language here is striking, toggling between slick, stylized wide-angle shots of a gritty neon world and a moodier, more haunted stillness. At times, the film flirts with Seijun Suzuki’s jazzy cool, but just as you begin to settle into the cinematic swagger, the mood drastically shifts. Suddenly, you’re in proto–Kiyoshi Kurosawa territory: hollowed-out urban dread, where everything feels nihilistic and dispassionate. Importantly, the musical tone also pivots, becoming increasingly orchestral.

It’s in those moments when Date seems most alive. In a dance between the theatrical and the detached, maybe that music mirrors Date’s very own unraveling. It builds and builds, and as the beast within devours whatever remains, the score engulfs him like a requiem.

You can buy The Beast to Die via Radiance Films.

And that’s all from me today, folks! As always, you can keep up with everything I’m watching over on Letterboxd ☻

Below is a version of my original Letterboxd review, lightly edited for clarity.

On the Silver Globe should have been Andrzej Żuławski's magnum opus. It’s painful that he never got to complete it properly. Once you learn more about Żuławski’s life, the film’s sorrow hits harder. His own life and pain cut deep and bled into the movie.

Żuławski, despite coming from a well-off and literary family, lived a difficult life. His earliest memories were shaped by brutal violence during WWII — horrors that found their way into his 1971 debut, The Third Part of the Night. But that film, raw and unflinching, was pulled from theaters almost immediately by communist censors. His next, The Devil, faced an even worse fate: shelved for 18 years, forcing Żuławski to leave Poland under "suggestion" from the authorities. He spent years in France, separated from his wife and son. By the time he returned, his marriage had crumbled.

It was in this broken state that Żuławski turned to On the Silver Globe, adapting his great-uncle’s sci-fi Lunar Trilogy — books he’d first read as a teenager. Their despair resonated deeply. “They are disturbing and perhaps the saddest books I’ve ever read,” he once said.

Even his mentor, Andrzej Wajda, warned him against undertaking this project. But Żuławski, stubborn as ever, pushed forward. His passion infected the cast and crew, and together they ventured to far-flung locations, including the Gobi Desert, the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, and the Wieliczka Salt Mines near Kraków, among others.

The story of the production (now wonderfully chronicled in the 2021 doc Escape to the Silver Globe) is infamous. Some crew members suffered through mental health struggles and hallucinations; others ran away. The despair seen in the film practically matched that of everyone involved. It almost seemed to speak to lines uttered in the movie: “So many departed, but only a few have returned.”

That initial excitement, however, faded. In 1977, after nearly a year of shooting, the Polish government abruptly halted production. Costumes and props were destroyed or buried. Żuławski wept at the news.

After nearly a decade, with Poland’s political tides shifting, Żuławski finally completed the film in the only way he could: by narrating over the missing scenes with b-roll footage of modern-day Poland, openly acknowledging the project’s ruin.

On the Silver Globe is challenging to follow, no question. But its scope is staggering. Mythology, religion, philosophy, political despair… all wrapped in Żuławski’s warped wide-angles, high crane shots, and dizzying handheld tracking shots. His signature violence is also present here. I’d argue that it’s some of his most harrowing.

Could it have been a more polished, accessible film if he’d reined himself in? Maybe. But would it have been as bold, as personal, as unforgettable? Probably not. If completed as planned, On the Silver Globe would have been released just before Star Wars. Imagine that parallel universe, where a Polish sci-fi tragedy redefined the genre before Lucas’s space opera. Sure, it likely wouldn’t have had the same mass appeal, but it’s a curious thought to flirt with, of what could have been.

For me, On the Silver Globe is equal parts heartbreaking and hypnotic. As Żuławski himself said, “On the Silver Globe is both a film and a story about this film. A story of a certain life and a certain country.”

I hope this write-up inspires you to check out the full podcast episode. My guest, Van Padilla, and I dive much deeper into the frenzied production history, the film’s dense narrative, and Żuławski’s legacy. Give it a listen if you want the full story behind this sci-fi fever dream.

… And if you want to keep following what Van is up to, check him out on Linktree.

You can also listen to or watch this episode on:

YouTube
Spotify
Apple

When it comes to Japanese titles, the folks at Radiance Films consistently leave me in a state of cinematic euphoria. I turn to Radiance for the deeper cuts, always thrilled to expand my knowledge and realize how much more there is to uncover. With their release of 1961’s The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost late last month, I’ve found yet another filmmaker whose work I’m now delighted to explore in greater detail: Tai Kato. A director perhaps best known for his crime and action films, Kato’s take on one of Japan’s most enduring ghost legends shows remarkable depth and visual poetry.

The story itself, Yotsuya Kaidan, is centuries old. For 200 years, it has been depicted in paintings, kabuki, film, and television, with the original stage play premiering in 1825. It even helped shape the J-horrors we know today, inspiring everything from Ringu to (loosely, at least) Ju-On (The Grudge).

This story has been adapted so often that Radiance included a seven-minute visual essay by Lindsay Nelson in their release, which highlights various interpretations of the ghost story and the visual similarities between them all.

What’s compelling here is that Yotsuya Kaidan is a spin-off of the legend of The 47 Ronin. Based on true events that occurred in 1703, this Japanese legend recounts the story of a group of samurai avenging their master, feudal lord Asano Naganori, after he is humiliated by an influential court official. Although Naganori tries to fight back, his superiors force him to commit seppuku. As a result, the group of samurai — the 47 Ronin — decide to avenge their master by going after the man responsible: Lord Kira. Then, all 47 take their own lives in the same ritual.

The connection to Yotsuya Kaidan lies in the fact that the fictional antihero of the spin-off, the samurai Iemon, was once a part of this clan. But unlike the 47 who committed themselves to honor and revenge, Iemon refused to take part. His act of cowardice becomes his downfall. With no purpose left, he descends into a state of greed and manipulation. In a twist of almost cosmic irony, the woman he betrays his family for, Oume, is the granddaughter of Lord Kira. Fate comes full circle, and the past refuses to stay buried. Learning about all of this backstory and connection only elevated The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost for me.

In Kato’s version, atmosphere is everything. Although the spectral element doesn’t arrive until late in the film, the atmosphere feels haunted from the very start. The dense fog never lets up, drifting like a living thing; the moon hangs heavy above murky, swampy landscapes. Even before a ghost appears, this world feels cursed.

All of this to say, The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost doesn’t feel like much of a ghost story for the majority of its runtime. Instead, it leans into domestic tragedy. Still, the horror is ever-present through Iemon’s greed and suffocating abuse. One of the most haunting sequences comes not from a ghost, but from a moment of quiet, desperate devastation. After one brutal attack, Oiwa crawls to her crying child and softly sings a lullaby. We watch from afar as the camera frames her swallowed by the empty space around her, allowing for the tragedy to linger within.

When the film finally shifts into the realm of the supernatural, it’s a crescendo of violence, filled with vicious bursts and frantic handheld camerawork. Kato’s visual style is breathtaking throughout. Low angles (sometimes so low that the crew had to dig holes into the ground to capture them) create an overwhelming sense of scale. The film’s theatricality is in conversation with kabuki, evident in the way space is utilized and characters move within it, as well as in the way shadows stretch like stage curtains, foreshadowing the vengeance to come.

As haunting as it is, The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost holds a quiet tenderness beneath the horror. Even in grief, love refuses to disappear, entwined in the pain, yet still present.

I’m so glad to own Radiance’s beautiful restoration of this film. The special features help enrich the tale with background information, only further contextualizing the impact Yotsuya Kaidan has had on Japanese horror tales throughout countless decades.

For those drawn to the quieter tragedies within ghost stories, this version is a tale worth visiting.

Two posts in one week?! Who is she?

It’s rare for a third entry in a series to feel this tender. Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later is a surprisingly soulful continuation of a story that began with rage — quite literally. Rather than replicate the raw grit of 28 Days Later, this film leans into quiet mythos and the lingering humanity within the infected. I originally shared this review on Letterboxd, but it felt right to bring it home to Rewind & Revive, too.

A mythical folk tale disguised as a horror film — and I’m truly glad for it. To this day, 28 Days Later remains one of my favourite zombie films (yeah, yeah, technically not zombies, whatever). So when 28 Years Later was announced, I was equal parts giddy and nervous. Refreshingly, Boyle and Alex Garland refrain from lazy callbacks. They understand that the gritty, punk ethos of Days can’t be replicated over two decades later, nor should it be. That film was novel, kinetic, and raw — infected that ran at that speed? No, thank you. Instead, Years shifts its gaze: quieter, more tender. It becomes a story about growing up, about the bond between a mother and son, and about the need to continually grasp for what makes us human.

Rewatching Days before seeing Years left one moment lingering in my mind. Ironically, it was a post-production accident. In the 2002 film, as Jim (Cillian Murphy) fights off an infected boy, there’s a split-second where the child seems to gurgle, “I hate you!” Though never meant to make the final cut, it stuck with me. Boyle has always emphasized that these infected are still human; not undead in the traditional sense. That seed finds deeper expression here. Years imagines what might happen if these beings continued to evolve. Of what echoes might actually remain.

Years’ shift toward the mythic and mournful doesn’t erase its bite. When the infected do make an appearance, DP Anthony Dod Mantle (reuniting with Boyle from Days) brings back that breathless, twitchy energy. Though I wasn’t quite as scared this time, my heart definitely picked up the pace a few times.

What moved me most in Years was the tenderness, something I associate with Boyle’s work (and sorely missed in 28 Weeks Later when he wasn’t attached as director). In Days, society’s decay was mirrored in the low-grade digital footage — until its final shot on 35mm film, presented as a glimmer of hope. Here, that hope matures into something softer: grief, remembrance. In a genre that so often insists the real horror is man, Boyle chooses to plead for humanity. Ralph Fiennes’ Kelson may seem unhinged, but perhaps he’s the most human of all. Memento amoris.

Do I think we need two more sequels? Not really. But I’d be lying if I said I’m not curious to see where this strange world takes us next.

P.S. If you’d like more of my thoughts on the entire trilogy — with a focus on 28 Years Later — check out the latest episode of The SchmearCast podcast, with Gabriel Frieberg, now live wherever you get your podcasts.

Long romanticized, film remains an alluring form of escapism. It’s a cliché near and dear to the hearts of all cinephiles, but what about the films that do the opposite? The ones that invite presence: heart full, shoulders lowered, with no demands but to feel. Soft cinema, if you will — a balm for the tender-hearted. After a long season of holding it all in, after months of noise, urgency, and ambition… I decided to breathe out.

I’ve just returned from sumptuous culinary escapades abroad, and I’m noticing (ironically enough) an urgency to slow down. Time off has been nonexistent these past few years — I’ve been hyper-focused on my work, and with that came a subtle kind of numbing. Hard to describe, but easy to feel. I’ve always been soft, but when you’re constantly pivoting from one task, one work of art, to another, you encase that softness; its liquid state suffocates. Suddenly, you’re mechanical.

Time away let my softness finally burst. I cried often throughout the trip, sometimes simply from being overwhelmed by beauty. The movies I so often immerse myself in suddenly felt like they were coming to life. As the trip came to a close, I realized I want to adopt a more mindful approach to how I live. To allow myself to feel again, and to do so regularly.

Cinema has such a hold on us. As mentioned, it can be a wonderful way to bid adieu to the present and carve out your own little world, even for a few hours. But even more moving is when a film connects you to something tender, and in turn, gives you permission to be tender with yourself.

I invite you to think of a film you return to when life overwhelms you. The one that slows you down and leaves you with the emotional residue you’re looking to connect with, be it a quiet ache, a warm peace, or a moment of introspection.

To honor this new, intentional pace I aim to set for myself, I want to share with you five films that are helping me feel again. Instead of merely telling a story, they earn your attention by lingering. Cinematic ellipses. Cradles of reflection. Rocking you into gentle solitude. When they come to a close, the stillness they leave in your bones might just mutate into something unexpected: the sensation of being truly, vividly alive.

Maborosi (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1995)

Memories may reside in the past, yet they can sometimes feel ever-present. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s debut feature lives in that space of unbearable stillness; it’s an exercise in restraint.

Shot almost entirely using natural light and with a delicate beauty to each scene, Maborosi follows Yumiko (Makiko Esumi), a young mother who suddenly has to continue on with her life after an unspeakable tragedy. Years pass, not a tear is shed. She moves on, finally, marrying and taking her now-toddler to live in a seaside village. Though her former life came to a sudden stop years prior, the memories — and the grief — linger.

From the empty halls to the distant staircases, so much of the film is built on absence. Cinematographer Masao Nakabori allows us to sit in that very absence. Slowly, as time passes, we see how trauma reshapes one’s rhythms. Yumiko’s new life is compassionate. It is patient. It is warm. But her grief doesn’t vanish, and she cannot return to the person she once was, loving without abandon.

Although her grief is a part of her now, we do get moments of reprieve. The way the light sweeps across the countryside, the way the children run and play, their reflections seen in the crisp water of a lake. Sometimes, those moments of peace may suddenly be interrupted, like when a bicycle bell echoes like a memory. Even in these moments of calm, the ghosts still drift by.

Some losses cannot explain themselves to you. The sadness that they bring cannot be cured, only carried. Maborosi understands this. There is no grand epiphany to this healing. Instead, much like the sea that Yumiko gazes at, it comes and brushes against you like a gentle tide, briefly grazing your sorrow before washing away once more.

Maborosi is currently streaming on Kanopy.

The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008)

To step into one of Agnès Varda’s memoryscapes is to feel your chest loosen, swaddled in a blanket of warmth. The Beaches of Agnès, intended to be her final film, carries the weight of an auteur in her golden years, looking back not solely on her career, but also on the intimate moments that shaped her. For those who adore her work, it’s like reconnecting with an old friend — the kind you haven’t seen in ages, and when you finally do, you hold them tightly and never want to let go.

Calling The Beaches of Agnès an autobiography doesn’t quite capture it. It’s more of a collage, a drifting daydream. Old photographs, seaside reenactments, miniature sets, and snippets of Georges Brassens drift in and out, pulling you into her personal history as if it were your own. At one point, I could’ve sworn I smelled the sea.

There’s such generosity in how Varda shares her world. When she speaks of her great love, Jacques Demy, it’s impossible not to grieve with her. “As a film­mak­er, my only option was to film him in extreme close-up: his skin, his eye, his hair like a land­scape, his hands, his spots. I need­ed to do this, take these images of him, of his very mat­ter. Jacques dying, but Jacques still alive,” she says, and suddenly, the act of filming becomes an act of preservation, of love, of holding on.

“I feel like cinema is the house I live in,” she tells us. The joy is that she leaves the door wide open, welcoming us in. I never want to go.

The Beaches of Agnès is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

The Fiancés (I Fidanzati, Ermanno Olmi, 1963)

Distance dulls some romances. But for others, it sharpens the ache of absence into something crystalline.

Ermanno Olmi captures that specific ache in The Fiancés and allows it to fester in quiet spaces. Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini), a Milanese factory worker, accepts a promotion that sends him to Sicily, far from his fiancée, Liliana (Anna Canzi). However, this isn’t immediately clear. The film opens in a dance hall, where two people who clearly share a connection spend their final moments together, yet remain emotionally miles apart. Once Giovanni departs, he initially seems swallowed by the stillness of his new life. Empty spaces in a foreign town engulf him as the factory incessantly hums. Every so often, his reality is interrupted as memories come, and that distance between himself and his beloved, which they once took for granted, begins to blur with longing.

Olmi’s style is quiet, elliptical. Flashbacks and present-day scenes dissolve into one another. But emotion (or rather, loneliness) pulses faintly beneath every frame. When the couple finally exchange letters, the floodgates of the heart open. Liliana writes, “That happiness frightened me,” and I shivered with acknowledgement.

Uncertainty lingers, too. Do we ever really know what ultimately happens? The Fiancés traps us in a liminal space of life’s redirection. The love between Giovanni and Liliana feels equally real as it does bittersweet. It becomes one of those loves we carry solely in memory – that relationship that never exactly failed; it just managed to slip away. Maybe that constant hum of machinery in the background isn’t just a symbol of modern progress. Maybe it’s the stand-in for love itself. Ever-present yet too often drowned out.

The Fiancés is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)

As rain pours outside, a cinema screens its final film. Inside, a few scattered patrons isolate themselves in empty rows, while others drift through the cavernous halls, almost as specters. Goodbye, Dragon Inn takes place over the course of one wet evening in a crumbling Taipei theater, as King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967) flickers on its screen one last time.

I urge you to watch Hu’s wuxia staple before sitting down with Goodbye, Dragon Inn. While it’s not mandatory, I can assure you it’ll elevate your experience. Dragon Inn represents a cinema of the past, one that stands with a theatrical, almost mythic grandeur. Goodbye, on the other hand, offers a stark contrast with its quiet, reflective world.

Tsai’s film is an ode to the forgotten golden age of cinema, of movie-going, of the yearning for old establishments stuffed out by the glitzy and the new. To watch Goodbye, Dragon Inn is to sit with the loss of a communal ritual that once felt eternal. "People our age have the collective experience of moviegoing, but today the experience is different with DVD, satellite, etc," Tsai told Reverse Shot back in 2004. "You see these major changes over the past ten years, and it hits you the speed of things, how fast these changes are happening. But there's no way back. There's no use worrying or feeling sad about things."

Yet, as you watch the movie, it’s difficult not to feel pangs of encompassing sadness. A piece of slow cinema, as well, Goodbye gives you the space to mourn. Shot lengths linger agonizingly longer than we're accustomed to. However, if you let it lull you into an almost trance-like state, these heightened perceptions make room for emotions to take hold in your heart — a love letter to the memory of cinema.

“No one comes to the movies, and no one remembers us anymore.”

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is currently streaming on Kanopy or via rental on Apple TV.

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

Wrapping you in a tender current of stillness, Perfect Days allows you the time to breathe and sit with whatever’s stirring inside. I’ve reviewed this film to death, so I’ll keep it short: Koji Yakusho has the most expressive eyes, and Wim Wenders captures quiet beauty and resilience in life’s simplest rhythms. Sometimes, the way a song hits can shift your entire world.

“Now is now.”

Perfect Days is currently streaming on Crave (Canada) or is available to buy via The Criterion Collection.

Seijun Suzuki: the so-called “maverick” director whose name has become synonymous with visual excess and rule-breaking irreverence. If you’re early in your journey with the Japanese auteur, you’ve likely encountered 1966’s Tokyo Drifter or 1967’s Branded to Kill — the latter getting him unceremoniously fired by Nikkatsu for being too “incomprehensible” (more on that later). Blacklisted for a decade, Suzuki eventually re-emerged from TV purgatory with this 1977 oddity: A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness. It’s a bold sports melodrama that begins as a story of ambition… and then mutates into something darker, stranger, and far less categorizable.

Long overlooked, the film has finally received a proper world Blu-ray premiere via Radiance Films — and it’s one I highly recommend. What makes A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness so compelling is its in-between-ness: too strange for the mainstream, too early for the arthouse. It’s a quietly radical bridge between two careers. I’m here to tell you why it deserves your attention.

Before we get into the film, let’s rewind a bit, shall we?

Seijun Suzuki entered the film industry in 1949, but not in the way you might expect. After failing the entrance exams for the University of Tokyo, he stumbled upon a film course offered by a local academy. Better yet, it was backed by major Japanese studios, offering a direct pipeline into the industry.

Ironically, Suzuki’s career began almost accidentally — more a practical move for employment than a passionate pursuit of art. And if you wanted to survive in that studio system, you had to play nice. As we’ll come to see, Suzuki did not. His time in the sandbox ended with sand thrown in his face.

After completing his course, Suzuki rose through the ranks at various film studios. He first landed at Shochiku (the same studio where Yasujiro Ozu famously worked) before being discovered by Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film studio. Advancement happened faster at Nikkatsu, and after apprenticing under a few industry titans, Suzuki started directing his own films. Between 1956 and 1967, he made forty films. Let’s pause on that: forty films in eleven years. Even by today’s standards, that’s a staggering pace.

It’s worth noting that the mid-1960s marked a decline in theatre attendance across Japan, which inevitably meant bad news for the studios as well. Shochiku, established in 1920, had long aimed to modernize Japanese filmmaking and move it away from theatrical traditions. Somewhat ironically, Shochiku itself began as a theatre company before pivoting to film. For a time, they thrived off familial dramas and comedies (think Ozu again) until the rise of the Japanese New Wave reshaped everything.

Unlike its French counterpart, Japan’s New Wave emerged within the studio system, notably Shochiku. The idea came from studio head Shiro Kido, who wanted to emulate the success of New Wave movements in Europe and entice younger audiences. Other studios, like Nikkatsu, followed suit. After Ozu died in 1963, Japanese cinema became more prevalent with sex and violence. Movies made in the ‘60s, such as Noboru Nakamura's The Shape of Night, Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, or even Suzuki’s Gate of Flesh, started to change how the masses perceived sex work and gender roles. Many filmmakers who emerged from this period eventually broke away from the system entirely, forging bolder, more confrontational paths. In doing so, they reshaped Japan’s cinematic and cultural conversation.

Curiously, though Suzuki’s work now feels emblematic of the New Wave, Nikkatsu didn’t market him as part of the movement. To me, that’s what makes him so gripping. His films were vibrant, defiant, and unconcerned with conformity; likely the very reason the studio didn’t quite know what to do with him.

It’s also worth remembering that the New Wave’s rise coincided with the arrival of television, which further contributed to declining theater numbers. As I mentioned earlier, after his dismissal from Nikkatsu, Suzuki pivoted to television for a full decade before his cinematic return. But before we go there, let’s talk about that infamous firing.

1966’s Tokyo Drifter put Suzuki on thin ice. What was supposed to be standard gangster fare morphed into its own beast, borrowing from Hollywood musicals, spaghetti westerns, film noir, and even traditional samurai tropes. The film never takes itself too seriously; it’s wrapped in glaring color and visual opulence. An exercise in style that’s hilariously self-aware. To this day, it’s my favorite Suzuki outing, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Suzuki clearly refused to conform to Nikkatsu’s standards. The result? They slashed his budget and reportedly said something to the tune of, “Bye-bye, color stock.” So what did he do? He made Branded to Kill — in black and white, no less — and delivered something just as surreal.

After one infamous screening, Suzuki got the boot. Studio head Kyusaku Hori delivered the finishing blow, declaring Suzuki’s films wakaranai — “incomprehensible.”

“Seijun Suzuki is a director who makes incomprehensible films. As such, Seijun Suzuki’s films are bad films, and to screen them publicly would be an embarrassment for Nikkatsu. Nikkatsu cannot have an image as a company that produces films that are only comprehensible to a single faction of people.”

An entire legal battle followed, which, interestingly enough, only deepened Suzuki’s cult appeal among arthouse circles and student movements. His popularity grew in time, albeit in bittersweet fashion. As he told Tom Mes in a 2001 interview:

“The best thing for a movie is to have a lot of people come to see it when it's released. But back then, my films weren't so successful. Now, thirty years later, a lot of young people come to see my films. So either my films were too early or your generation came too late. Either way, the success is coming too late."

After his dismissal, Suzuki spent the next decade in a kind of creative limbo. Still active, but essentially persona non grata in theatrical filmmaking circles, he pivoted to television: shows, made-for-TV movies, commercials, you name it. I’ve heard 1973’s A Mummy’s Love is a wonderfully eccentric TV horror — I still need to see it myself.

While I could talk about the lead-up to A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness for hours, let’s get to the main event. With all of the above in mind, this return feels even more fascinating: Suzuki’s first theatrical feature post-blacklist. It wasn’t with Nikkatsu, but with Shochiku (of all studios), adapted from a manga by Ikki Kajiwara, and its script written by Atsushi Yamatoya — who also penned Branded to Kill.

On paper, A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness sounds straightforward. It seems so straightforward, in fact, that during a local Suzuki retrospective a few years back, I actually chose to skip it. Oh, what a fool I was.

The premise sees a young woman, Reiko (Yoko Shiraki), plucked from obscurity by an advertising agency and thrust into the world of professional golf with the guidance of her manager-meets-lover, Miyake (Yoshio Harada). From there, the mounting pressure begins to suffocate her: fame, media, and the masses all eager to commodify her. Sorrow and Sadness begins like a sports film, but as we know, Suzuki was never straightforward. It opens with familiar training montages and plucky underdog tropes, until we suddenly see the lurid satire take center stage. The golf drama is merely the Trojan horse; what Suzuki delivers is a media-nightmare, fresh from the world he just spent ten years engulfed in. Playful? Yes. Angry? Absolutely.

The mutating plot of Sorrow and Sadness is slow, building with small signposts, until it becomes a direct attack on celebrity, media control, consumerism, and, to a degree, idol culture. The latter began gaining traction in the 1960s, eventually ushering in the “Golden Age of Idols” by the 1980s.

Take Reiko, who quietly complies at every turn. She’s molded into the ideal media darling: stylized, sexualized, and stripped of agency — and not just by the company signing her checks. It was never really about golf, but about how she looks wielding a 9-iron in a bikini. The image crafted around her was never her own. It was built for mass consumption. The sport becomes secondary once Reiko hits the fame threshold her “handlers” envisioned. She graduates into photo shoots, her own TV show, and relentless media training.

As the film plays out, it truly becomes a tale of sorrow and sadness. Reiko is deeply lonely; a bird in a gilded cage, engineered for appeal. Even her management-gifted home, which she shares with her younger brother, resembles a sterile showroom. Cold, barren, and bisected by a fake putting green, the space is a surreal reflection of her commodified identity.

The skewering of the media machine in the film feels personal, like it’s coming from the inside. After all, Suzuki spent a decade immersed in television work. The promotional reels we see Reiko star in made me wonder how much of that was pulled from Suzuki’s work in advertising.

Of course, the pressure cracks Reiko. While she’s grasping onto that final crumb of sanity, the women who once scoffed at her soon begin to consume her in a new way. Most disturbing is Mrs. Senbo (Kyōko Enami), a neighbour-turned-fan whose parasocial obsession twists into something more grotesque. Eventually, it’s not just Mrs. Senbo who turns on her. By the film’s fever pitch, the media has chewed Reiko up and spit her out — just another product past its prime.

While everything I’ve described so far feels undeniably harrowing, Suzuki’s trademark visual playfulness brings a surreal kind of levity. The film begins in relative visual calm (for Suzuki), but his bold use of color arrives quickly. A common complaint with his work is that these antics are just for show. Yet, as in Tokyo Drifter, Suzuki’s color choices are purposeful — if you’re willing to dig deeper. The hues start loud, then become garish. A sickly green begins to seep into Reiko’s world, first clinging to objects, then washing over faces. Her nail polish shifts throughout the film, too, perhaps mirroring a selfhood that’s constantly being repackaged. By the end, Reiko has visually dissolved into the product she was made to be.

As I mentioned, this 1977 gem serves as a bridge for Suzuki, highlighting his tenacity and mischievousness, even in the light of such a difficult career. The ensemble orbiting Reiko speaks not just to his talent, but to the thematic heft of the film. Enami, although playing the deranged Mrs. Senbo, got her start in the industry after being scouted herself by Daiei Studios in 1959. Harada, who came from a theater background but often played “tough guys” onscreen, walks that line here as Miyake, too — audiences would come to see more of him in Suzuki’s films a mere three years later, starting with Zigeunerweisen. Lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the cameo by Suzuki regular Jō Shishido, who briefly reminds us of the iconic crime classics they delivered together by way of Nikkatsu.

Almost half a century later, A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness feels eerily contemporary. Its themes of consumerism, parasocial obsession, and burnout speak directly to today's celebrity and influencer spaces — the industries where every glance, misstep, or breakdown becomes fodder for scrutiny. Even Reiko’s chirpy mantra, which we hear at one point, “I’m happy,” becomes haunting. The only way to soothe. After a decade spent on the periphery, yet still absorbed in the commercial fame system, Suzuki returned, letting it all go up in flames. A tale of sorrow, sadness, yes, but above all, resilience.

You can purchase A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness via Radiance Films or MVD Shop.

References:
Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema by William Carroll
Sorrow, Sadness and The Sweet Smell of Excess essay by Jasper Sharp (via Radiance Films)

What a successful film-watching month April turned out to be, folks! As I type this, I’ve got my Letterboxd diary pulled up, and I can’t help but think, “Not too shabby, Marta. Not too shabby.” This month saw me put new releases on the back burner (oops) and finally dive into a handful of flicks that had been gathering far too much dust on the ol’ watchlist. I also checked out some stunning restorations and boutique-label re-releases that I can’t wait to highlight below.

I should also take this chance to mention that I’ll be heading off on a long-overdue vacation at the end of May. It’s been a few years since I’ve paused all of my projects, and I’ll be honest with you: the burnout is real. When you’re in the thick of the grind, it’s easy to fall into the cycle of “just one more idea, one more milestone, one more notch on the belt of mental merit badges…” until you realize you’re not really living. So, for two weeks, I’ll be pressing pause — visiting family in Italy, reconnecting with old friends in Spain (fun fact: I lived in Barcelona for over a year), and exploring Portugal for the first time. Because I’m committed to truly unplugging, Rewind & Revive will be on hiatus until I’m back. That said, don’t worry. I’ve got one more essay to post before I head off. After that, I’m excited to return feeling refreshed and ready to dive back into sharing more cinema. It’s been a while since I’ve felt properly wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, I’ll tell you that much.

But before I get too emotional about the trials and tribs of surviving on a day-to-day level… let’s rewind and revive, shall we? Here are my favorite watches from April: a mix of streaming gems and physical media discoveries that you might just want to add to your own queue.

The Working Class Goes to Heaven (Elio Petri, 1971)

Welcome to the machine. With Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven, you’re dumped headfirst into its fury. Loud, restless, and blisteringly angry, it’s a film that vibrates with rage but never loses sight of how deeply structural that rage is.

April had me continuing my newfound Petri obsession, and this 1970s gem currently holds the number one spot in his filmography for me. Lulu Massa, played by an utterly feral Gian Maria Volonté, is a workaholic cog in the industrial machine. He’s a top earner, fast worker, and a pompous jerk who provokes the ire of all his fellow employees. When an on-the-job injury finally forces him to pause, his identity starts to implode. He spirals into a full-blown crisis, politically “waking up,” only to find himself even more trapped than before.

For context, Italy in the 1970s was at its industrial peak — Fiat alone employed 140,000 workers. These factories relied on enormous numbers of assembly line workers, and much of what we see in The Working Class rings true to the reality of these employees' lives. Like eternal automatons, these workers were in a constant race under horrific working conditions, of course leading to inevitable breakdowns, frenzied violence, or total disassociation. As a result, strikes emerged nationwide, not just for better wages but for better working conditions.

Riding a career high after Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Petri was ready to make another political statement. This time, instead of targeting state power, he focuses on the dehumanization of labor under capitalism. As he declared after completing Investigation, “The only type of cinema worth making today is political cinema … I want to hold on to communicability, which is fundamental, especially in a popular art such as cinema which is also a social occurrence for people to be together.”

Petri, co-writer Ugo Pirro, and star Volonté painstakingly researched their subject, interviewing workers (and even hiring them as extras) to bring forward the most authentic portrayal of this capitalistic hellscape. The result is messy, biting, and real.

From the first few frames — workers marching to the numbing clangs of machinery and ominous overhead shots — Petri makes his statement clear: this is war. Or hell. Or both. The factory becomes both a prison and a pressure cooker. Everything is harsh and jarring, from the score (by Ennio Morricone!) to Luigi Kuveiller’s camerawork, filled with manic cuts and handheld shots so in your face that they’re almost coming out from the screen.

What’s so devastating about Lulu’s journey is that it doesn’t offer clarity. He’s mocked by union leaders, student radicals, and infantilized by both his management and his girlfriend. As he grows increasingly alienated, he becomes more mechanical. Petri isn’t interested in comfort, nor does he excuse any of Lulu’s actions. He’s showing us what happens when you realize you’re just, well, a tool. When your entire life has been shaped by work and empty promises. What, if any, relief can you find?

This is political cinema in its most visceral form. It’s messy, contradictory, and alive. Lulu is both a victim and an aggressor. There’s one moment where he speaks with his former colleague Militina (now institutionalized), and the monologue the man gives hit me like a brick:

“You see them? You see all those over there? They were all workers, peasants, unskilled laborers, builders, policemen, land office employees, gravediggers, accountants, attendants, drivers … the rich crazies are not here, they’re hidden in private clinics … We become mad because we have too little, and they because they have too much. And so, in this hell, on this planet full of hospitals, lunatic asylums, cemeteries, factories, barracks, and buses, the brain slowly runs away. It goes on strike.”

Awareness doesn’t set Lulu free — it swallows him whole. And then… the machines start roaring again.

You can stream The Working Class Goes to Heaven on YouTube or buy the physical release via Radiance Films.

Zerograd (Karen Shakhnazarov, 1988)

Kafka takes a wrong turn into Soviet absurdism, Buñuel pours a drink, and Kaurismäki quietly shrugs in the background. It shouldn’t work, but my god, does it ever. Karen Shakhnazarov’s Zerograd unfolds as a mix of all that: a surreal, bureaucratic maze of a film that left me disoriented in the best way possible. Shout-out to fellow Substack cinephile Jericho of Symbiotic Reviews for this recommendation.

We follow Alexei Varakin (Leonid Filatov), a Moscow engineer who arrives in a nameless provincial town to solve a simple factory issue. Instead… here’s a brief sliver of what he walks into: a naked secretary nobody bats an eye at, a cake shaped like his own head (that’s promptly sliced), and a museum where history is essentially fabrication. Yes, siree, this is my kind of fever dream.

Zerograd operates on dream logic, yet everything is played with straight-faced conviction. Or, at least, for everyone but Varakin, which only makes all of it more unsettling. Bureaucracy becomes so dehumanizing and numbing that even the shocking becomes banal. When he’s served his head-cake, it becomes an on-the-nose metaphor for consumption: of identity, of self.

The town won’t let Varakin leave for utterly ridiculous reasons. But does he ever even try? Even the movie’s opener — a long shot of a train leaving the station — sets the tone for the descent ahead, representing both escape and entrapment.

The museum sequence, in particular, is the film’s jaw-dropper. We see a spinning diorama of Soviet history populated by “wax figures” that are (I’m pretty sure) real people. Every corner reveals a distortion of the past, and then you start to realize… that's the point. Oh, how history can be rewritten. How lies can be told with such bold-faced conviction. When a system starts believing its own illusions, how can you know what’s real anymore?

There’s something hypnotic about Shakhnazarov’s rhythm: long static shots that stretch past comfort. The result is a comedy that somehow curdles into quiet horror. Varakin seemingly swaps resistance for resignation. What’s the point of arguing in a world such as this one?

P.S. For my Tarkovsky fans, you’ll be delighted to know that Eduard Artemyev composed the score for Zerograd.

You can stream Zerograd on Kanopy or YouTube.

Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)

When we shed every carefully constructed symbol that defines us, what is left? A critique of the system with the potential for redemption becomes a chaotic unraveling when the truth is too difficult to bear. Liberation. Damnation. Only the untainted receive transcendence.

I’ll admit it — it was the gimmicky tagline that first sold me on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema: “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema — but it says everything!” Enticing, right? The concept for the film is deceptively simple: A stranger, only known as “The Visitor” ( played to poker-faced perfection by Terence Stamp), shows up at an upper-class Italian household — we never know why — and quietly entrances each family member. Once he abruptly leaves, we watch the fraying of the wealthy.

I certainly don’t feel qualified to “review” Pasolini’s Teorema (heck, even Roger Ebert didn’t feel ready!), but a verbal vomit of the colossal number of notes I took feels acceptable. Teorema is dripping in symbolism, and I’m confident that repeated watches will help me uncover more. And yet… Pasolini offers us no answers, just glimpses. The visitor is precisely that: a vessel, a cipher, a mirror held up to reveal the emptiness of wealth and comfort.

Opposites define Teorema. The lush lawn the characters recline upon is manicured, artificial — bourgeois perfection. In contrast, we see recurring images of Mount Etna: wild, untamed, a primal truth. While Lucia (Silvana Mangano), the upper-class wife, fades into pallor and greys, the housemaid Emilia (Laura Betti) grows increasingly vibrant. Her very body transforms. Unity within the earth. A spiritual rebirth.

The visitor is not a manipulator. He seduces no one. He reflects. As he connects with each member of this household, they begin to unravel. Spiritually. Sexually. Psychologically. The shedding begins: of repression, of materiality, of identity itself.

I’m still not sure what Teorema means exactly. It almost feels like a film that resists concrete interpretation. Perhaps the answer lies in the title itself — a theorem, a proposition destined to remain abstract.

You can stream Teorema on the Criterion Channel or Apple TV.

Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) (Arie Esiri, Chuko Esiri, 2020)

“This is my desire,” Eyimofe declares. Yet, here, what does this desire lead to? Wounds, maybe, or worse, no changes at all. Arie and Chuko Esiri’s 2020 drama is split into two parallel stories. In the first, we meet Mofe (Jude Akuwudike), a printing shop technician, while in the second, we’re introduced to hairdresser Rosa (Temi Ami-Williams) and her teenage sister, Grace (Cynthia Ebijie). These Lagosians yearn to leave Nigeria — a Sisyphean task that quietly batters them with systems wholly indifferent to their struggle.

Eyimofe could have been a film about a journey. Instead, it’s a story where the journey cannot become actualized. But the Esiri brothers never resort to loud tragedy. What we witness is the quiet brutality of daily life — the kind where you’re stuck in a bureaucratic maze, where you’re chased by the weight of family burdens, and where there is a maddening price for everything.

Lagos comes to life on stunning, 16mm film, where even side characters feel fleshed out. The city thrums, unrelenting — but everywhere, something is broken and needs fixing. Each problem seemingly requires an instant solution. As our characters are continuously forced to fight, they somehow do it with dignity. With grace. A soft tenderness to be found, even encased in steel.

Eyimofe unfurls with a neorealist slant, presenting reality without judgment. By the time we reach the epilogue, the film folds in on itself and envelops you. When your desire comes with a price just out of reach… what then? Maybe it was hope you were looking for all along.

Stream Eyimofe on the Criterion Channel, Prime Video, or Apple TV.

Short Night of Glass Dolls (Aldo Lado, 1971)

I was a massive fan of Celluloid Dreams’ release of The Case of the Bloody Iris last June, so you can only imagine my excitement when another giallo was announced: Aldo Lado’s Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971). While I expected another solid entry into the genre, what I wasn’t expecting was a Kafkaesque descent into hell. Elements of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut came to mind, as did glimmers of Brian Yuzna’s Society. Still, Lado’s film is its own beast, dressed in brutalist architecture and with an icy Morricone score that always kept me on my toes.

Short Night of Glass Dolls isn’t your stereotypical giallo, and if that’s what you’re expecting, brace yourself. Yes, it opens with a corpse, but wouldn’t you know it… the body is still warm. Inside? Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel), a man fully conscious but paralyzed, unable to move or speak. From there, he mentally retraces his “final” days, and we’re drawn into a web of conspiracies, disappearances, secret societies, and sinister clubs — all set against the cold pavement of Prague.

Visually, Lado’s film also diverges from what we’ve come to expect from the genre. Gone is the garish color and blood-red stylization. Instead, it’s washed-out and clinical, much like the trap our protagonist finds himself in. Don’t be fooled by the restraint, though. Cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini floats us through hazy flashbacks with dreamlike calm, while Lado jolts us back to the morgue in sharp bursts to remind us of Moore’s reality. And as we pass through one chandelier-drenched room after another (there are many), we’re eventually plunged into a final act that is gloriously depraved.

Alongside Sorel, the supporting cast is stacked: Barbara Bach (a Bond girl and, fun fact, married to Ringo Starr since 1981!) plays Moore’s vanished girlfriend, Mira; Mario Adorf (who I loved in Weak Spot and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) brings his usual charming yet erratically unbothered energy; and Bergman regular Ingrid Thulin steals every scene as the absolute icon Jessica — she has a new headscarf in each appearance, each more glamorous than the last.

I recommend snagging the new 4K restoration from Celluloid Dreams. They’ve done a beautiful job with the transfer, and the bonus materials are a treasure trove, including a 64-page booklet and numerous interviews. Next for me is digging into the uncorrected 35mm “Grindhouse” cut included on another disc, presented as a loving “archival oddity.”

You can buy the Celluloid Dreams release of Short Night of Glass Dolls via MVD Shop or directly from their website.

Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996)

Indeed, dear reader, nestled between Petri's Marxist rage and Pasolini's spiritual rebirths was a snowy ‘90s action flick I checked out… for the first time. Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is a deliriously entertaining time — the perfect kind of movie to reset with after you’ve been punishing rewarding your brain with esoteric “high-brow” cinema. Apparently, I’m the last millennial on the planet to have watched this, and it’s thanks to Arrow Video’s recent 4K UHD limited edition release that it was put on my radar. I'm delighted to have snagged a copy.

The Long Kiss Goodnight sees Geena Davis pulling double duty, flipping between suburban mom and stone-cold assassin. As we learn at the start, she remembers nothing beyond the last eight years of her life, during which she has now settled into domestic bliss. However, after a dicey situation, her memories slowly start to return, and she teams up with a private investigator, Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson), to uncover the truth about her past.

Shane Black’s razor-sharp script is the biggest standout here: Davis and Jackson shine together, with countless back-and-forth banter and endlessly quotable quips. Sure, it’s bonkers and nonsensical sometimes, but that’s part of the charm. This is pure genre pulp soaked in practical stunts (shot in a frigid Toronto winter, no less — thanks, Arrow, for those stacked interviews and visual essays).

Beneath all the chaos lies a surprising thoughtfulness, such as the tension between domesticity and violence (the fact that the first two antagonist-ridden “incidents” occur in the kitchen, of all places? Come on). The Long Kiss Goodnight flirts with ideas of feminine duality and the roles women are cast into… and then blows them to pieces.

It may overstay its welcome, yes, but if you’re looking to shut your brain off? There’s no better way than with ‘90s action — with a capital A.

You can buy The Long Kiss Goodnight via Arrow Video or MVD Shop.

And that’s all from me today, folks! As always, you can keep up with everything I’m watching over on Letterboxd ☻

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