You just don't seem real anymore.

Titled after an animal described in the film as being pretentious, this Austrian comedy circles around a man paid to be pretentious in the most literal sense of the term, posing as husbands, sons and friends as part of a companion-for-hire organisation. The movie initially seems like a mere skit-based quirky comedy with Albrecht Schuch (who is phenomenal in the lead role) hilariously under-reacting to everything in his real life in between pretending to…

There is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?

Eleven viewings later and still as fresh as ever, Videodrome is quite possibly the best film ever made about the relationship between viewers and what they view. The film's most iconic image is James Woods sticking his head inside a television set during a hallucination - an image that very much embodies what it feels like to be totally immersed in a film or a television program: the tendency…

I do not believe in forgiveness, nor in rehabilitation.

Sympathetic to a local African American who shot dead two men who raped his daughter, a Mississippi lawyer conspires to get his client acquitted by pleading temporary insanity in this morally queasy courtroom drama. The film largely circles around whether Samuel L. Jackson as the murderer can get a fair trial in a deeply racist community, and the film's most potent scenes are dedicated to a KKK rebirth as the trial…

What my angle is is my business.

Fourth viewing today; this was a rewatch on the big screen at the Backlot with an audience who laughed at all of Marie Windsor’s snappy lines and applauded loudly at the end. The film was presented by Book to Film with John mentioning in his introduction how Tarantino modeled Reservoir Dogs on The Killing, which can definitely be felt. The voiceover narration still irked me on this watch, but as John mentioned in…

Grapefruit.

Two orphaned half-siblings are placed in foster care with an eccentric woman who is still grieving over the death of her daughter in this Australian horror movie starring Sally Hawkins. While the film does not make it ambiguous whether or not Hawkins is really off her rocker (she clearly is), the film interestingly does not become overtly horror-like until its second half. The movie is more of a psychological thriller at first with Hawkins clearly gaslighting the brother, while…

When you deal in blood, there must be rules.

While set in the same "rules and consequences" universe of the John Wick movies, this is a noticeably different spin-off that tries to do its own thing and avoid copycatting the series that spawned it. The title character here is an assassin who undergoes similar training to that which Wick had, and with several scenes of Ana de Armas learning how to fight, as well as an extended back-story with a…