’37 Seconds’: Film Review

There’s a monster terrorizing screenwriter/co-director Jeremy Gardner’s protagonist in “After Midnight,” and he doesn’t know why, what it is or where it came from. After 83 minutes, we still don’t know, either, but at least it has become clear this is one of those films that “defies categorization” by identifying with a marketable genre it’s nonetheless not really interested in.

"We're going to try and make it an event, not just a film," he revealed on the red carpet at last night's NME Awards 2020

The annual Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy is to add a works-in-progress section to its Focus Asia industry services for the first time this year.

Landlocked by South Africa on all sides, the kingdom of Lesotho is a place of high skies, wide landscapes and narrow prospects for its two million inhabitants: a set of dimensions somehow captured in every exquisitely constructed, square-cut frame of “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.” A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born

The Osaka Asian Film Festival, Western Japan’s largest showcase of films from Asia, has announced the line-up of its 15th edition, which will unspool March 6-15 at venues in Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city.

The horror, in Japanese Australian first-timer Natalie Erika James’ “Relic” manifests in many ways. There are frightening dreams that are both portents of things to come and deeply buried memories of traumas past.

A leisurely, somewhat hazy travelogue compared to the piercing political indictments of his acclaimed prior “We Come as Friends” and Oscar-nominated “Darwin’s Nightmare,” Austrian documentarian Hubert Sauper’s new “Epicentro” looks at Cuba on the brink of colossal transition, as the old Communist system is in its apparent death throes, and free-market capitalism waits in the wings. It’s a fascinating moment for cultural stock-taking.

Tokyo’s annual TIFFCOM film rights market will relocate to a new, hotel venue closer to the Tokyo International Film Festival. The market will also return to dates which coincide with the movie showcase.

It’s exciting, and fascinating, to see a great director of documentaries try his or her hand at a dramatic feature, since in theory the essential skill set should all be there. The best documentarians possess an acute visual sense, and they are all, of course, potent storytellers.

Sultry music swells as the camera swoons over a young couple in a tender nighttime embrace. The 1950s residential New York City street is carefully rain-slicked and lined with shiny classic cars: an obvious stage set.

There’s mannered, there’s manic, and then there’s the malfunctioning pinball-machine delirium that Ben Whishaw brings to “Surge”: a blinking, buzzing, flashing clatter of hyper-accelerated impulses, chicken-fried synapses and staggered hypnic jerks that never culminate in sleep.

Inventor Nikolai Tesla is more popular today than when he died penniless in a New York hotel in 1943. Back then, he was the futurist who swore he could summon unlimited, clean, wireless electromagnetic energy from the earth — a neat idea, but surely coal and oil were fine.

Actress Romola Garai makes a distinctive feature directorial debut with “Amulet,” even if this upscale horror drama is ultimately more impressive in the realm of style than substance. It’s some style, though: She hasn’t just created a stylish potboiler, but a densely textured piece that makes for a truly arresting viewing experience to a point. A shame then that the film succumbs somewhat to the more pretentious and silly aspects of Garai’s initially cryptic puzzle of a script.

At the risk of overselling Edson Oda’s ultra-original, meaning-of-life directorial debut, there’s a big difference between “Nine Days” and pretty much every other film ever made. You see, most movies are about characters, real or imagined, and the stuff that happens to them, whereas “Nine Days” is about character itself — as in, the moral dimension that constitutes who a person is, how he or she treats others, and the choices that define us as humans.

Late in the film “Lance,” a documentary that depicts the ascent and the crash of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, the subject recalls the disappearance of his lucrative sponsorships. These deals — with a massive market value and a perhaps more important intangible value of keeping him in the public eye as a figure of rectitude and hard work — were in some sense his life’s work, and they vanished after his 2013 admission that he had used illegal doping throughout his cycling career.

There have been some good dramas about people sliding into dementia, like “Away From Her” and “Still Alice,” but I confess I almost always have a problem with them. As the person at the center of the movie begins to recede from her adult children, from the larger world, and from herself, he or she also recedes — at least, this is my experience — from the audience.

A small town already down on its luck receives a few fresh kicks in “The Evening Hour.” Based on Carter Sickels’ 2012 novel, this second narrative feature from director Braden King is more plot-driven than his first, 2011’s “Here,” a leisurely and slight, if pleasant, road-trip romance.

Imagine a high-ratings, high-stakes game show that trivializes a convict’s life-or-death fate for public consumption. As wild as it sounds, a version of this reality TV entertainment apparently really exists in modern-day Iran, where writer-director Massoud Bakhshi’s “Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness” is set, and where a wildly popular edition of it has been airing for nearly a decade.

Fishy metaphors abound in Kim Yong-hoon's smart port-city neo-noir Beasts Clawing at Straws (Jipuragirado Jabgo Sipeun Jimseungdeul), which looks set to hook audiences in its native Korea following a high-profile bow in the main competition at Rotterdam.Overseas it will find welcoming berths at festivals receptive to audience-friendly genre fare; the adaptation of Sone Keisuke's Japanese novel also has considerable English-language remake appeal at a time when Korean cinema has never enjoyed