Critic After Dark:A Review of Philippine Cinema

Filipino films on DVD

100 Best Filipino Films

Johnny Delgado, 1948 - 2009
Johnny Delgado, 1948 - 2009Juan Marasigan Feleo was born on February 29, a leap-year child, the son of director Ben Feleo and Victorina Marasigan. He had taken up banking and

Danny Deckchair (Jeff Balsmeyer, 2003)
Up, up, and awayJeff Balsmeyer's Danny Deckchair (2003) rings one unusual variation on the meet-cute rom-com routine--instead of bumping into each other, or entangling each others' dog leashes, or finding each other through the internet, Danny Morgan (Rhys Ifans) by means of an accident flies through the air on a lawn chair lifted by a series of large helium balloons tied to said chair. It takes two of his friends to hold the chair down while they watch a game on TV, during a back yard barbie; when one of them jumps up in his excitement Danny launches into the sky, t

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
Tarantino's talkathonQuentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a clever melange of violence, suspense, slapstick, wit, movie references both arthouse and grindhouse, talk, talk, more talk, even more talk; seems to me he is more in love than ever with the sound of his own words coming out of the mouths of about a dozen different men and women, in several accents and twice as many acting styles.His initial setpiece, a variation on an early scene in Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) (Leone's outsized opera style seems to in

More Vancouver Festival Films (Sebis; Face; Lebanon; NIght and Fog)
Brillante Mendoza's SerbisDid I mention that almost nobody I talked to in the festival liked Kore-eda's Air Doll, not even

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)
King of painKathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker has been called the best film yet made about the war in Iraq, and one can see where they’re coming from--it’s crude yet coherent, understated yet intense, and it knows that first and foremost, before you even deal with the politics of war, you portray its head rush, the ‘drug’ mentioned in the film’s opening titles.Bigelow’s eminently qualified. A woman successfully working in what’s basically a man’s world, she’s done one action film after ano