House of Pleasures (L'Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close) (2011)

This slice of life film features Parisian courtesans in the turn of the century on the eve of the Great War.

Just like its ideal doublebill partner Flowers of Shanghai, the film obsesses over the courtly dance between the girls and their patrons, the complex social niceties that created their social world and papered over the ugliness of their lives.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 25 April 2012.

The Raven (2012)

Mash together a couple of Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic mysteries with the writer as the detective... and you'll get The Raven.

Campy, trashy, and entertaining, John Cusack takes on a role that must have been written for Nicolas Cage - and may yet do it better than Cage.

The Raven is a literate B-movie that would go well as a doublebill with Vincent Price's The Abominable Dr Phibes.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 25 April 2012.

POV: A cursed film (POV: 呪われたフィルム) (2012)

Japan delivers a postmodern found footage horror where real-life idols (played by themselves) are harassed by ominous goings-on that Wes Craven might have devised.

What's off-putting: the low budget television film look, lack of real scares.

What's going for it: highly literate playfulness as the film deconstructs and reconstructs the horror genre.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 25 April 2012.

Delicacy (La Délicatesse) (2011)

A woman gets wooed by a romantic man. Her husband dies. She gets wooed by her charismatic, though chauvinist pig of a boss. Her boss gets rejected. She gets wooed by her unglamorous, unromantic, uncharismatic co-worker.

This is supposedly a romcom relying on the clash between naively sentimental characters and overly cynical characters, but the real (unintended) comedy comes from the incongruity between the script's focus on realistic details of life and the sentimental devices employed by the director.

Ridiculously jarring and ridiculously dependent on Audrey Tatou making mopey faces at the camera.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 18 April 2012.

Madam Butterfly 3D (2012)

Probably the most accessible, modern, and relevant opera, Puccini's Madam Butterfly gets the 3D filmed performance treatment.

Minuses: 3 acts using exactly the same set doesn't really warrant a film treatment, much less a 3D film.

Pluses: the highly naturalistic acting of the principals makes it seem like a stage repertory company doing a musical rather than an opera putting on a production.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 18 April 2012.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Attention, Wes Craven: Joss Whedon shows you how to make a successful postmodern horror film.

Clue: it's more of a comedy for horror film fans than a horror/slasher played straight.

Cabin sets up the horror film conventions, holds your hand and takes a step back to explain how the conventions work, gets all snarky and witty deconstructing the conventions before your eyes, and still tells a decently horrifying and hilarious story at the end.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 18 April 2012.

Nighfall (大追捕) (2012)

This starts off almost like a dining room mystery: an opera singer is found mutilated and burnt at the bottom of a cliff, and one obsessive cop who never lets his cases go is assigned to it.

The rule of good murder mystery writing is to keep it simple. The director-writer team throws in increasingly baroque details that leave you embarrassed to watch. The end result is way overdone.

We suggest Johnnie Toh's Milky Way productions stick to their reworkings of film noir and leave everything else alone.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 4 April 2012.

The Vow (2012)

There's a joke about how women turn out to be completely different after marriage.

This romcom/melodrama has the newlywed wife losing her memory of the past 5 years. Now the poor sod realises he's married to a cold, materialistic daddy's girl rather than a bohemian chick who ran away from home.

Hilarity doesn't quite ensue when he tries to woo her afresh; there's a fundamental problem with having this based on real life premise turned into a romcom which the film doesn't solve.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 4 April 2012.

Mirror Mirror (2012)

This isn't a feminist revisioning of Snow White but a comic deconstruction of the genre.

Julia Roberts hams it up as the genre-savvy evil stepmother, who provides a non-stop, hilariously cynical commentary on narrative conventions of fairy tales.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 4 April 2012.