'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' (William Faulkner)

In Jeethu Joseph's brilliant sequel to his hit film from 2013, which was undoubtedly one of the most accomplished Malayalam films of the 21st century, avid film fan Georgekutty is once again confronted with his dark family secret that had actually seemed to be buried. The situation he is put in appears even more hopeless than in the previous film, but the viewer has already learned not to trust…

Kisapmata is a dark psychological domestic thriller released shortly after the nominal termination of Martial Law in the Philippines that has lost none of its frightening power. The story is based on a piece of literary journalism entitled "The House on Zapote Street", which depicted a real event from 1961. To research the story told in six episodes, the author Nick Joaquín conducted interviews with actual eyewitnesses. In contrast to the original story, however, Mike de Leon's film, produced two…

The restoration of Bong Joon-ho's masterpiece of the crime genre was followed by the closure of the Hwaseong case in September 2019, when the real culprit Lee Choon-jae was finally convicted almost thirty years after his last murder based on DNA results. Memories of Murder had also helped to keep the cases, which might have otherwise been forgotten, in collective memory. The dark and atmospheric film was one of the most significant works of the Korean New Wave at the…

The atmospheric drama A Tender Place, which is predominantly set in Hokkaido, deals with questions of guilt and responsibility in a very complex way. When Kasumi, a married woman, takes advantage of a family vacation to secretly meet the office worker Ishiyama, with whom she is having an affair, her daughter Yuka disappears without a trace. Kasumi's marriage breaks apart and she spends years questioning what happened on that fateful day. As the film progresses, she sets out once again…