Film Reviews
Welcome to FilmFestSalon! Read our reviews on domestic films, foreign films and the classics.
Film: “Parasite”
The latest film of South-Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho, “Parasite”, is a razor-sharp satire about class warfare in modern society. It concerns the Kim family, which consist of the father, Mr. Kim (Song Kong-he), his wife, their young adult son and younger teenage daughter. We get to know them and, despite committing fraud and causing innocent people…
New York Film Festival 2019
I saw five narrative features this year. Here they are in the order I saw them. The Irishman The opening night selection was “The Irishman”, the latest from Martin Scorsese. An epic crime film, organized around the still unexplained disappearance of Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa, in 1975, it plays out as perfectly suited to…
2019 Hamptons International Film Festival – Highlights
It’s hard to believe that the long awaited and highly anticipated Hampton International Film Festival (HIFF) has come and gone for another year. Besides the long list of films, the five day event was filled with workshops, conferences, Conversations with and a host of industry cocktail parties and receptions. This year legendary director Brian DePalma…
2019 Hamptons International Film Festival
Round up on upcoming films at the Hamptons International Film Festival 2019
Film: “Aniara”
Aniara, an ambitious science fiction film from Sweden, takes enormous risks by imagining the end of the world – in fact of human civilization – from a realistic perspective. Written and directed by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja, it was inspired by an epic poem by Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson, which was later turned into an…
Film: “The Souvenir”
Joanna Hogg has directed and written an openly autobiographical film, “The Souvenir”, about her early career as a filmmaker. One reason it has received a lot of attention is because it stars Honor Swinton Byrne, who is Tilda Swinton’s daughter. One of Hogg’s first short films starred Swinton, who plays her daughter’s mother in this…
Film: “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile”
There were high expectations for this docudrama about serial killer Ted Bundy, which was based on the book, “The Phantom Prince”, written by Liz Kendall, the woman who lived with him for several years. As adapted by Michael Werwie, and directed by documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger, it was given the awful title, Extremely…
4 From Tribeca 2019
I’ll review the four films in the order in which I saw them. Luce Luce, directed by Julius Onah from a screenplay he co-adapted from a play with its author, J.C. Lee, is a challenging and provocative story concerning the black experience in America today. But it is a highly specialized experience. The title character…
Film: “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”
Bi Gan’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”, a peculiar but intermittently enjoyable Chinese film, has no connection to the Eugene O’Neill play other than the title. Bi Gan gave a brief introduction to the film because he realized, correctly I think, that the audience was likely to be frustrated because the “mystery” that the film’s…
Two from New Directors/New Films
I‘ve seen two films from this highly respected showcase for new talent. They make an interesting contrast. Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined is a fairly engrossing, mystifying film about modern-day Singapore. Hua’s vision is quirky, kind of all-over-the place, but he shows promise. The film opens at a major land reclamation project, where…