ph: Quintin Perez & Ron Erick Odchigue
Saturday, May 23, 2020
The 27th Day (1957)
Aliens take 5 people, give them small capsules which can kill mankind without additional damage, with the understanding they will colonize Earth only if they use the weapons.
Unusually original Cold War sci-fi drama with a quite liberal message is suspenseful and entertaining despite its low budget.
Maltin**1/2: "Imaginative sci-fi study of human nature..."
Friday, May 22, 2020
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019)
Miles Davis: Horn player, bandleader, innovator. This documentary feature explores archival photos and home movies shot by Miles and his colleagues, his manuscripts and Miles' original paintings, to explore the man behind the music.
Good, informative documentary gives a thorough overview of the artist's life and work, complete with some fascinating archival material; however, as so often with this kind of musical biography, the music is cut too short.
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)
A satire set in the contemporary art world scene of Los Angeles, where big money artists and mega-collectors pay a high price when art collides with commerce.
This quite cynic satire has good direction and a well-cast ensemble obviously at ease in their roles, but loses perspective and its seriousness somewhere along its way into a horror tale.
Frantz (2016)
In the aftermath of WWI, a young German who grieves the death of her fiancé in France meets a mysterious Frenchman who visits the fiancé's grave to lay flowers.
A subtle, heart-wrenching tale in beautiful black-and-white imagery straightforwardly dissects the xenophobic bias and its impact on human society.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Monday, May 18, 2020
First Lines: Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume
One of his hands tugged cruelly at her hair as the other squeezed her throat.
Sunday, May 17, 2020
Climax (2018)
French dancers gather in a remote, empty school building to rehearse on a wintry night. The all-night celebration morphs into a hallucinatory nightmare when they learn their sangria is laced with LSD.
Visually brilliant, almost psychedelic dance party spiraling downwards into a void of violence and madness has a hypnotic pull to it, but causal order of events is implausible or, at best, construed and one wonders: who would want to attend such a gathering of dubious characters?
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