APPOFENIACS
Director:Chris Marrs Piliero
Cast: Sean Gunn, Jermaine Fowler, Aaron Holliday, Michael Abbott Jr
USA
If you liked "Lowlife", like hard-boiled crime fiction by the likes of Gifford and Leonard, this is sure to float your boat. Pulp ensemble, criminal and broad characters verging on the cartoonish and intersecting subplots may wear its Tarantino love too conspicuously on its sleeve, but there's plenty of escalating misunderstanding and mayhem of its own to carry you along. Mostly, all the foreshadowing pays off to a full-blown ending to leave you giddy with its excess. Also, its a film that highlights how terrifying AI in the wrong hands could be by not even exaggerating by much. Again, it's the people who are the problem.
WHAT SHE DOESN’T KNOW
Director:
Juan Pablo Arias Munoz
Cast:Sienna Agudong, Jessica Belkin, Conor Husting, Denise Richards.
USA
Despite nice performances and a big house, this is built on spoilt brat worries and all the emoting becomes tedious as the mystery becomes just as you suspect and offers nothing new. There’s meant to be a tale of friendship here, but stretched too thin and with too little payoff.
TRANSCENDING DIMENSIONS
Director: Toshiaki Toyoda
Cast: Chihara Jr., Masahiro Higashide, Haruka Imô, Yôsuke Kubozuka
Japan
Where straightforward narrative gives way to the opaque spiritual ramblings about reaching across the universe in your little finger and ghosts hiring assassins, the sensation and kaleidoscopic achievements of the visuals and dominance of the music make for a compelling if baffling journey. The meaning and intention may be hermetic, but the experience is a genuine trip.
A SERBIAN DOCUMENTARY
Director: Stephen Biro
Cast: Srdjan Spasojeviċ, Aleksandar Radivojević, Srdjan Zika Todorović, Sergej Trifunovć
USA
With access to a shipload of behind-the-scenes footage as well as interviews with cast and crew, Biro's documentary makes the best argument for this most notorious of films, "A Serbian Film". Watching the effects work is a real treat. It helps that the filmmakers are the most eloquent and understanding of their intentions: if you aren't convinced by this of their most punk disgust at exploitation and the human condition, then you are doubtlessly the closed minds they're outraged by. Five years in the making, Biro spoke on stage of how inflammatory the film and its reputation still is. Perhaps the most shocking conclusion made is that the director Srdjan Spasojevic now feels he didn't go far enough.
They fuck you when you're born, they fuck you when you're living, they fuck you when you're dead - indeed.
THE TOXIC AVENGER
Director: Macon Blair
Cast: Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon
USA
It may want to rest on its sentimentality unironically and Macon may not want to rest on Toxie's puerile nature to carry it through, but there's enough gore and gags to make this an audience pleaser. And funny how CGI bloodletting, whilst hitting the mark, still isn't as satisfying as DIY practical. Dinklage gives heartfelt, Bacon and Wood give sleazy, Tremblay gives trembly teen. Perhaps this is slicker but the original remains the real shocker.
FLUSH
Director: Gregory Morin
Cast: Jonathan Lambert, Elodie Navarre, Elliot Jenicot, Rémy Adriaens.
That a guy trapped in a Turkish toilet cubicle scenario can turn into a litany of disgust and end up a gorefest is testimony to its sheer invention. And it is funny. Wisely keeping brevity, there's no fat involved as details like drug-addict rats and trying to use ear pods while head-first in a toilet escalate into belly-laugh absurdity without ever losing its nastiness. A crowd-pleaser.
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