Reviews

The protagonist’s journey from resentment and confusion to empathy and acceptance is the film’s emotional core. Even when people have differing values, worldviews, or ways of life, society must find a way to foster understanding. That’s clearly the film’s message. Still, the ending seems incredulous. It simply doesn’t hold up logically.

The score and the handcrafted retablos bring beauty to the film, while the boy’s emotional struggle is rendered with poignant care. The ending is heartbreaking, and it stayed with me for days. Yet in following his father’s artistic path, the son manages to honor him. It’s tragic how much he’s forced to carry at such a young age.

At its heart, "Retablo" is about the pain caused by a society that refuses to accept difference. My first instinct was to blame that society—why can’t people live freely? But after sitting with it, I realized the father doesn’t deserve that sympathy, not because of his identity, but because of his actions. He fails his wife and his son by choosing to live in disguise and inflicting harm in the process. I support diversity and empathize with his fear, but that doesn’t excuse the damage he caused.

"Silent Running" is a singular artifact of its era, a bold piece of eco-science fiction driven by radical environmentalism. The robot designs were groundbreaking at the time, especially since they were performed by disabled actors without lower limbs—a powerful choice that adds to the film’s legacy.

This is a film very much of its time. Viewed today, its dated aesthetics, scientific inaccuracies, and underwhelming story may test the viewer’s patience—yet the melancholic beauty of the ending lingers in your mind. It’s hard to dismiss it entirely.

A bit of a hit-or-miss film. I am not the biggest fan of this style of pseudodocumentary, and I agree with John(ny) Rotten/Lydon about that ending (really? a cab?). It seems a bit of a cop-out. What makes the film work for me is the acting. Both Chloe Webb and Gary Oldman really give their all in their title roles, and they really hold together a shaky narrative in a film that could have been much better if it did not attempt to play fast and loose with a history that needs a clear narrative.
So, good marks...but could show improvement.

tw // eating disorder

this is the cruelest movie i’ve ever seen. i have battled with binge-eating disorder, anorexia and bulimia for years, and this is the most triggered i’ve felt. kudos to brendan fraser for one of the best performances i’ve seen, and i feel he’s pulling a lot from his own experience to make it look as honest and raw as it was.

one of the therapist i went to treat my obesity told me once that fat people need to loose weight because we’re gonna become a burden to our close ones. and i couldn’t not see myself in him. my constant sorrys so people don’t get mad, my soft voice so as to not get attention drawn to myself, my binge eating, and my guilt. people with eating disorders… we eat our guilt or let it eat us.

the script is cruel. it hides behind metaphors but it reinforces the point of view of himself the main character has. one star for brendan and one star for hong chau (tho the rest of the cast is amazing too) but it is just a fat exploitation film.

This movie builds you up to the big moment. You know it’s coming. The part where the parents finally break down and start yelling at each other, saying things you know they mean. But even knowing it’s coming doesn’t prepare you for how good it is. The performances are so subtle that when you get to the big shouting match it completely shifts the tone of the movie. It’s no longer about the parents wanting to find out why, which is the most normal and natural thing to do, but about how are they going to continue living after something so earth-shattering.

I honestly didn’t expect to like this movie as much as I did. I don’t really like handheld camera movements, but it felt very organic and very much a part of the plot.

It feels so human, especially when you see how these type of events get so picked apart by the media, turned into a spectacle, another number to add to the list of never-ending tragedies.

“You, me and everything between us.”

I spent the last few years scared to watch this movie. I had seen the elevator scene because it popped up on tumblr a couple of times, but I didn’t want to see the movie and be disappointed if it was just another stereotypical John and Paul fight take.

It was so much more than that.

When the credits rolled in, I found myself nearly crying. I am an easy crier, but I knew if I started I wouldn’t have stopped. I didn’t expect to be moved by a movie released 20 years ago about a fictional reunion. I was born in the same year this movie was released, so maybe we were meant to find each other in the same way Paul and John found each other.

It’s not an objectively perfect movie, as I’m sure anyone who sees a clip will realise, but it feels perfect to me and that’s what cinema is about. I’ve watched some of what most people regard as the best movies ever made (Gone with the wind, Citizen Kane and The Godfather Part II), but this movie was the one that hit me so close I felt breathless when it ended.

It’s funny, intimate and angsty. It’s very much a fanfic made into a Home Video Movie, but fanfics are works of art that deserve my outmost respect. You’ve spent so much time invested in the fights and jokes and music of Paul and John that when they are sitting in a rooftop and Paul talks about what he sees, you see it too. John Lennon was no God, no Jesus, but if he was, then Paul was Peter, and even if he denied him three times, when John came back, Paul was ready to affirm his love three times.

“I see a frightened man who doesn’t realise how beautiful he is.”

A lot is talked about Paul and John, mostly about how their relationship was left in shambles after The Beatles broke up. A lot of people think that their relationship was not as close as say Paul and George, and that there was always a creative struggle within the duo. That’s bullshit, and this movie understands it.

Whether you ship McLennon or you don’t, you only have to see a video of them in the early days to get struck by how much these two men were in tune with each other. They wrote the most beautiful songs together, but their story goes beyond music and feuds, they were two men with different yet similar backgrounds, who found each other despite how little chance we have of finding our perfect match.

They were soulmates, platonic or romantic or whatever you want to think of that. This movie is one and a half hours of the imagination of someone who knew Paul and John, and this is, I think, the best interpretation of their relationship I’ve ever seen. We can be sure that after Ringo and Paul are gone (hopefully in a long time) we will get dozens of biopics of them, and I think we shall judge them basing them in this one particular Home Video Movie.

Paul and John’s relationship is something we will never understand, because it was much more than just best friends, partners or mortal enemies... But I think Two of Us is the closest we’ll ever get to witnessing the love and appreciation they had for each other.

Given that the Soviet Union suffered the heaviest military losses in WWII, Russian war films tend to serve more as collective remembrance than cinematic spectacle. This one stands out for its realism, especially in its unflinching depiction of death.

Told with a stripped-down style and clean visuals, "The Experiment" draws viewers into its disturbing progression with quiet intensity. It opens with ordinary men who are assigned random roles in a psychological study, only to watch them transform as power takes hold. The film poses a chilling question: how many of us could resist the temptation of unchecked desires?

Es muy bueno

As with most prison-break narratives, the world outside the walls symbolizes freedom—though here, freedom is as elusive as it is subjective. Manny, wild and feral, chases a kind of freedom he’ll never reach, which is why Akira Kurosawa, whose original script inspired the film, gives him such a tragic, almost mythic send-off.

"Runaway Train" is a visceral, unrelenting film, brimming with themes of freedom and primal instinct, yet it also dives deep into human morality. Jon Voight delivers a powerhouse performance, earning a well-deserved Oscar nod. He plays the rough-edged lead with raw physicality, while also giving the character a surprising emotional depth.

The ending borders on implausible, with the boy still managing to walk home even after taking that many bullets. But Sean Penn captures the protagonist’s conflicting emotions—idolization and hatred toward his father—with striking clarity. The character never truly grows up, unable to confront himself or sever his dependence. In the end, all he knows is how to mimic the very man he fears and admires.

It's a historic first-ever black-and-white 3D animated film. Yet the extreme lighting contrast becomes visually exhausting, and the heavy shadows often obscure facial expressions. The plot, a conventional American-style detective story, drags with slow pacing and overlong exposition. Thematically, it claims to explore the meaning of life but ends up offering a critique on capitalism.

The high-contrast black-and-white animation style is visually striking and certainly novel for its time. While the story itself lacks originality and the character arcs are hard to follow, the stylistic choice gave it a distinct identity in 2006. The narrative often feels muddled, and the characters’ relationships are never clearly defined.

Technically a documentary rather than a conventional film, "Touching the Void" dramatizes the real-life survival story of mountaineer Joe Simpson. Much of the film is emotionally grueling, purely due to its commitment to depicting the truth. Simpson's desperate struggle against death and despair is one of the most gut-wrenching survival tales ever put to screen.

The title says it all: women are invisible in a man’s world, and the sisters are invisible in each other’s lives. From home to body to ambition, the film exposes the subtle and brutal ways patriarchy renders women unseen. All the sisters have is the imagined version of each other’s lives to keep going.