Compartment No. 6
With a mixture of bluntness and subtlety, two fabulous central performances, and graceful, intimate handheld camerawork, Compartment No. 6 makes what could feel like well-trodden drama territory earned and fresh.
All posts by Matt Hall
Letter to a Friend
The impression given in LETTER TO A FRIEND is that what once had a sense of perpetuity has undergone a rapid, recent, and enduring change. An accelerating transformation that has not only scarred a Bethlehem neighbourhood physically but has warped the nature of the very fabric of life.
The Year of the Discovery
THE YEAR OF THE DISCOVERY takes some dedication from the viewer due to its length, which perhaps would be better experienced in a theatre for full effect, but its runtime ultimately feels necessary to give space to the almost endless articulations of how the micro of individual life relates to the macro of world-political-economy. We are here now after the discovery, but it doesn’t mean we understand what we’ve found.
Spider
SPIDER’s message is not just that history is important to understand our present, but that history is here with us now, living on and sometimes festering, in ugly and disconcerting ways. Matt Hall reviews.
She Dies Tomorrow
It is very difficult to not acknowledge one’s own mortality or entertain notions of your own death after this impressively understated feature that wallows and lingers in its own detached chilly dread, like an unwelcome thought creeping into your head at four in the morning. Matt Hall reviews.
Tigertail
With ambitious and emotional scope and an elegantly muted central performance from Tzi Ma, Alan Yang’s debut feature TIGERTAIL is a reflective and wistful immigration story that attempts to carry more than its pastiche styling can bear in a slender 90 minutes. TIGERTAIL oscillates between the present and past, articulated through the extensive memory-flashbacks of … Continue reading Tigertail