Like his debut, Primer, a rather simple premise becomes a larger fragmented tapestry as Carruth turns every detail of Upstream Color into a heady mash of subjective narrators and relativistic camera angles. This time around the narrative follows Kris, traumatized victim of a brainwashing, as she magnetically connects to another and they slowly, in unfolding their relationship, struggle their way back to the kidnapper’s pig farm, a space that operates both literally and metaphorically and either way the physics work out. Those concrete details do a disservice to the unbalanced, psychedelic experience of actually watching the montaged sensoratorium that this film is.

It’s been years since Primer, as he’s tried to get A Topiary together and, eventually, managed to pull things together to release Upstream Color. His high concept science fiction phantasmagoria aren’t easy rides for audiences emotionally or intellectually, and as such he may be doomed to Kubrick or Malick levels of pacing between his release.

Inglourious Basterds felt like a missed opportunity for Tarantino to do something sober and slow-boiling, an opportunity he declined in order to maintain his brand of quirk. Django Unchained in contrast feels like Tarantino pursuing every opportunity, as his string out of events takes us through more aspects of slave trade and antebellum Southern culture than would be expected…. and using those set-pieces and contexts to wax out every last joke and bloody choreography he can, sometimes even the same joke a couple-three times. The result is surprisingly balanced but overly long, as every moment a character has freedom to develop shines but we get bogged down in Too Many Endings Syndrome and sequences like the five minute long KKK joke that could be cut entirely.

–DB

Fritz lights up a joint whilst being harangued by his fed-up housewife and flashes back and forward through time to other ‘lives’ of his, largely involving druggy phenomena, 70s era insanity, and a continuation of the look into the decaying immoral backdrop of the American streets. Missing some of the intensity and slow falling apart into madness of the original Bakshi production, this sequel more or less recreates the general look and then delights in long psychedelic montages and the sort of humor that makes contemporary Adult Swim seem like it was made by the PC police.

–DB

Sold mostly for Tommy Lee Jones’ performance as General Douglas MacArthur, Emperor nevertheless is set mostly around Gen. Fellers’ search for his lost love Aya while tasked by MacArthur to investigate the culpability of Emperor Hirohito for Japan’s war crimes during World War 2. The chisel-jawed blue-eyed blond-haired Matthew Fox as Fellers is a perfect sore thumb in an already shattered, slow-burning Tokyo, and despite some hammy dialog and pathos of the swelling orchestra type, Emperor nevertheless shows how the conflict of war and contrasting cultures doesn’t necessarily end when the one country surrenders and the other emerges victorious.

–DB

Ip Man (2008):

Ip Man earned a rapid cult status beyond the scope of most contemporary martial arts movies, partly because of the targeted mention that Ip Man is the master of Bruce Lee, but also because it’s that rare breed of kung fu movie that dispenses with the contrived set-pieces-towards-boss-lair set-up and actually contains character development and a plot. The story follows Master Ip’s confrontation of the occupying Japanese Imperialist Army during World War 2 by accepting an invitation to duel the dangerous Captain Miura.

Ip Man 2 (2011):

Donnie Yen returns as Ip Man, master of famed Bruce Lee, in a movie that is much more genre kung fu than the first installment. At first it seems like a set-up for escalating duels as Master Ip attempts to start a new school in Hong Kong, only to have to bid for acceptance in the Martial Arts Club, headed by Master Wong, who is matched in skills and talent. However, the movie gladly continues with the occupation of foreigners motif started in the previous film, this time featuring an English boxing club that’s exploiting the martial arts schools’ for profit. This iteration comes complete with a moral-of-the-story speech and a variety of silly accents that can’t seem to decide whether they’re English, Australian, or American, but who’s tracking?

–DB

Orson Welles’ most financially successful film has a plot that mirrors Hitchcock’s earlier Shadow of a Doubt (with a Nazi as opposed to a serial killer), a Welles monologue on the banality of evil that warms him up for his cuckoo clock speech in Reed’s later The Third Man, and an ending right out of his very first short film, The Heart of Ages. It was also the feature where the studio held the tightest reins and shows it, as clear cuts can be seen and Welles’ own performance is kept understated by the presence of the inimitable Edward G. Robinson.

–DB

Derek Jarman delves into the homoerotic subtext of Caravaggio’s paintings as well as muses on the possible romantic entanglement with one of his models and the model’s wife, in a movie that competes with the original paintings for visual splendor with superb production design. It also contains a calculated anachronistic quality that collapses past and present (electronics, magazines, and cars appearing to distort the mythic quality of the historical context, applying its same visual representations to today). And Sean Bean dies again.

–DB