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What is it to be human? What does it take to have humanity? One might say compassion, sympathy, and mercy. Would it be possible to hold those values without a level of trust? Is trust a requirement for cooperation?

When living in a tribe, cut off from the world,

South Korean Kim Jee-Woon’s I SAW THE DEVIL may, for this programmer’s money, be the best South Korean movie of the last 10 years. But beyond that, it is one of the best movies period of the 21st century.

The movie has a dynamite premise wrapped up in an almost unbearable first twenty minutes: Serial Killer Kyung-Chul (Choi min-Sik of Oldboy) kills Joo-yeon, the pregnant fiance of South Korean Secret Service Agent Lee (Kim Soo-hyeon). When Lee’s almost father-in-law (who also happens to be a police detective) shares the four main suspects in the murder, Lee tracks down Kyung-Chul…

I had decided to make March about watching films from 2020 that I had missed, which was all of them, so a few days ago I randomly chose Disclosure (2020), a film that I had no memory of what it was about or why it was on my list.

Turns out it is a documentary about. . .

It lurks in the shadows. It hides under the bed. It's out for blood. It's coming, but what is It? Is it a tangible force or is it a figment of our imagination? Could it be a monster out to get us? Are we scared of It when we shouldn't be or should we be scared of It when we aren't? What is It? More importantly, why is It so terrifying? I put forth that IT is uncertainty, the fear of the unknown. . .

I have a habit of starting movie-watching projects, making a spreadsheet (the best part), then abandoning them unfinished, aways meaning to get back to them, but rarely doing so.

At the end of 2020, I thought of a new project that encompasses all of the old ones: 365 Films in 365 Days, watching at least one film a day for 2021…

When 70’s director extraordinaire Hal Ashby made his second feature, HAROLD & MAUDE (1971), he was still at the start of his directing career even though he’d labored over 20 years in Hollywood to get there.

In some ways, this seems the secret to the Hal Ashby paradox for this programmer. Arriving in the City of Angels in the late 40’s. . .

Released in 1983, Verhoeven's final film in Holland, The Fourth Man, stands as both a Eurohorror icon and a cinematic cipher. From religious psychosis to daydreams of death to a jewel-toned palette of murder, the film's highbrow Hitchcockian narrative is matched and arguably bested only by the outrageousness of its lysergic exposition. Crafted consciously to present as an arthouse award darling, this Dutch Giallo* is intentionally front-loaded with spiritual satire, structural sophistication, and color-saturated style…

FIRST FEATURE FIREWORKS #12: Who's That Knocking At My Door (1967, dir Martin Scorsese) To kick off the new year, let's take a look at 12 first features this programmer thinks light up cinema with fireworks. First up is Martin Scorsese's debut feature. Like many first features, KNOCKING took Scorsese years, numerous painful re-shoots and re-edits, before it finally. . .

GREAT DISRUPTIONS, GREAT MOVIES: This week, we take a look at four amazing movies made during or just after periods of tremendous disruption. As we all look to the new year and the next phase of cinema after COVID, it might be instructive to . . .