NZIFF #8
The 2nd film at the festival this year in which a child’s tongue gets cut out. Can’t say I’m a fan of this new trend in international cinema.
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Smoking Causes Coughing 2022
NZIFF #6
Definitely my favourite of the three new Quentin DuPieux this year. Feels more like a loose collection of sketches and ideas for shorts than a full film, but that works well with the casual feel of his work.
What starts as a Power Rangers parody with a group of besuited heroes using the various chemicals in cigarettes to give monsters cancer turns into a “let’s tell stories around the campfire” excuse to let anything happen. The stories that…
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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On 2021
NZIFF #5
The 2nd best movie about someone dealing with the moral implications of doing a 60 Minutes interview
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Speak No Evil 2022
NZIFF #4
The only properly bad film I saw during the festival. A reverse home invasion thriller steeped in the tensions of Dutch-Danish relations, Speak No Evil is the sort of thriller that completely falls apart after revealing its twist.
It's one of those movies where polite people hang out with some people who are initially nice and then become more erratic and demanding, imposing more and more of themselves on their timid counterparts. In the hands of someone like…
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The Ghost That Never Returns 1930
Love a good panopticon.
The editing and political stuff is top notch, the more character based scenes are less interesting.
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Crimes of the Future 2022
NZIFF #2
"They still have the old power", Martin Scorsese said of Cronenberg's films in a 1984 Fangoria essay. For almost 50 years now, his films' mix of dark comedy, mental and bodily dissolution, kinky sex, and incisive social commentary have made him the undisputed master of body horror. Right from its opening scene of a child happily taking bites out of a plastic bin, white goo frothing from his mouth, and then being smothered with a pillow by his…
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Follow the Fleet 1936
I'd known about this movie for years only for the Let's Face the Music and Dance sequence, which Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters are watching in Pennies From Heaven (1981) where they begin mirroring Fred and Ginger's movements, before entering the film itself.
Because of this, Follow the Fleet had always lived in my mind as a less frivolous, more emotional Astaire and Rogers' musical. It is not. Follow the Fleet is the most gossamer of musicals, a bunch of…
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Incredible But True 2022
NZIFF #1
Like all of Quentin Dupieux's films, Incredible But True is a short dose of high concept absurdism delivered as deadpan as possible.
A middle-aged middle-class couple (Alain Chabat and Léa Drucker) buy their first ever house, a nice two storey place in the suburbs with a secret in the basement: A hatch in the floor with a ladder leading straight down into darkness and which ends up in the master bedroom on the top floor. The real estate…
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A Day's Pleasure 1919
I love how these early Chaplin shorts are almost entirely about him petulantly beating the shit out of people who’ve mildly wronged him.