It’s been a busy few weeks with SIFF starting and all. So far, I’ve caught 16 screenings at SIFF, all of which are summed up in glorious 75ish word recaps. At this point in the game, The Skeleton Twins, In Order of Disappearance, The Double, Starred Up and The Trip to Italy are the best new films I’ve caught at the festival so be sure to secure tickets to at least one of those if you’re in the area. I also got downtown to one big – some might say monstrous – screening: Godzilla, which I quite enjoyed. As for watching non-festival things in my spare time, I haven’t had a lot of opportunities in the past few weeks so things are sparse. Nonetheless, let us journey down the path of…Weekly Review.

THE MAN FROM NOWHERE (2010)

Another home run from the camp of South Korean cinema, The Man from Nowhere is a powerful parable on duty and family. Be it blood-born relations or artificially constructed circles, family is a reason to live, to fight, to survive and Lee Jeong-beom‘s film gets to the heart of how these connections guide our lives. Rife with powerful explosions of violence amongst the meaningful relationships it forges along the way, The Man from Nowhere navigates a curvy line between high drama and guff-less action spectacles.

A-

ICHI THE KILLER (2001)

Violent for the sake of violence, this Takashi Miike film takes psychosis a little too seriously, delivering a film that revels in its many bloodbaths – like a kid with rain boots in a crimson puddle – but ends up too tangled in entrails to satisfy. Maybe I’m at fault for getting the time lines confused but the trail is often unintentionally confusing and Miike’s blood-soaked touch leaves little to root for. With no heroes to speak of and an entirely evil ethos, Ichi the Killer is more snuff than cinema.

C-

HOW I LIVE NOW (2013)

Somewhere in How I Live Now a great film is trapped but it’s so repressed and hidden that it seems to have forgotten that it even exists at all. The film follows a small band of family who must stick together as WWIII breaks out in England. The sweeping cinematography is often stunning but polluted with Saoirse Ronan‘s pernicious monologuing. Even though it’s adapted from a novel, the fact that they plunged a hormone-throbbing teenager into the midst of an otherwise fascinating world event nearly ruins the entire affair. Her angsty outbursts makes us wish her amongst the piles of dead and robs us of any wistful emotional climaxes the film expects to impart.

D+

ROBOCOP (1987)

Having seen the reboot before this original “one that started it all”, I will say that I was more than a smidge let down by Robocop. Like a fan-fic of “What if the T800 had worked with the Detroit police?” this B-movie doesn’t really play around with the more interesting ideas of what makes a man a man? The effects though (aside from that very sophomoric robot chicken drone thing) are certainly appreciated, with all its over-the-top squib-bursting from many chests (many, many, many, many chests). It’s hard to parse my expectations of greatness from my overall disappointment but I can hardly come down on this with too heavy a gavel (for fear of internet pariahship) so a C it is.