A movie about the most vengeful bird of all! Also, genocide and sexual violence. Continue reading
Tagged with revenge films …
Review: Revenge, 2018, dir. Coralie Fargeat
In the words of Michael David Cummings, everybody needs a little vengeance, especially rape victims, and then especially rape victims left for dead in the desert by their married boyfriend and their boyfriends’ friends (one of whom is the rapist). That’s the set-up for Coralie Fargeat’s excellent debut, Revenge, a French genre exercise that’s as gory and … Continue reading
Review: You Were Never Really Here, 2018, dir. Lynne Ramsay
A note: I rarely, if ever, use the word “masterpiece” in any material I output about films either recently released or yet to be released, because in most cases that’s a bullshit word used in bullshit contexts for bullshit reasons by bullshit people. Most often, you hear about masterpieces on the festival circuit before the … Continue reading
Review: Blue Ruin, 2014, dir. Jeremy Saulnier
Note: I wrote this review of Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin around two or so years ago, give or take, which is the blink of an eye in a cosmological context but close to a fucking lifetime in the context of film criticism born in the social media era. I’m sharing it here, now, for a couple … Continue reading
Review: I Saw the Devil, 2011, dir. Ji-woon Kim
It’s hard to talk about the New Wave of South Korean cinema without at the very least touching on revenge pictures. Blame Chan-wook Park; his vengeance trilogy represents three of the best-received South Korean pictures released during the movement’s surge in the early-to-mid 2000s, and Park himself stands out as arguably the most talked about … Continue reading
Review: The Dead Man’s Shoes, 2004, dir. Shane Meadows
Eye-catching stylishness and cool fight scenes have almost become the barometers by which a revenge film is measured in contemporary pop culture, rather than the protagonist’s quest for vengeance. Take Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino’s bloated homage to all things cinematic which he adores, from chambara movies to kung fu flicks to spaghetti Westerns; the aesthetic … Continue reading
Revenge is Mine: Park Chan-wook’s Obsession (pt. 2)
(Note: I meant to pick this series up much, much sooner than I did, but as you can probably deduce my Top 25 of the Decade list demanded my full attention. You can take a look at the first entry in this two-part series here. Another note: This series is not spoiler-free in the slightest, … Continue reading
Revenge is Mine: Park Chan-wook’s Obsession (pt.1)
When did you first hear of Park Chan-wook? For those of my readership who haven’t heard this name, South Korean auteur Park technically began his career in film in 1992 with a movie called Moon is the Sun’s Dream. He followed up this entry– which was a critical and commercial failure– with a pair of … Continue reading
