celluloid consommé

Well Go USA releases the film on Blu-Ray & DVD in the US and Canada for the first time this year. Box art & disc images courtesy of Well Go USA. Mykola and his wife Nastya live a secluded, simple life in the Donbas region of Ukraine. On a typical day Mykola teaches physics at a nearby school while Nastya hunts or forages for their food. They live in a home they have both built from found materials in the wilderness and scrapped or discarded mechanical parts nearby, which even attracts some local news attention due to their zero-waste lifestyle and minimal ecological footprint. One day Mykola arrives at his school to find that it is emptied of students. He learns Russian military forces have invaded the eastern Ukrainian region in an act of war. When he returns home he finds Nastya’s life threatened by Russian soldiers, having tortured her for some time. The soldiers burn their home down after looking inside for anything worth taking, leaving shortly after murdering Nas...

The new Hiyah! original streaming title gets a solid standard release from the studio. Box art image courtesy of Well Go USA. Well Go USA continues their physical media trend of releasing their Hiyah! streaming-exclusive titles with Preman: Silent Fury for Blu-Ray and DVD for those who want to own it. The film marks the directorial debut for Randolph Zaini, who’s previously worked for about a couple dozen short films in the sound department. He writes & directs Preman , which follows a slice of the Indonesian underworld of organized crime. “Preman” is the local term for a henchman that carries out the orders of higher-ranking authorities in their respective gangs. Preman: Silent Fury centers on Sandi, a deaf gangster who we learn has only been operating in the gang to earn enough money for his son to live a more comfortable life after the departure of his wife from the two of them. His son Pandu witnesses a hit being carried out by his father’s gang and is discovered to ...

Owen Kline’s first feature-length film Funny Pages , produced by the Safdie brothers & distributed by A24, has a lot going on underneath the surface. Kline has had a history working with the Safdies as a crew member on set during their early films and acted in John’s Gone , a short film of theirs from 2010. The influence Josh and Benny Safdie has made on Kline is hard to miss. But Funny Pages isn’t wholly dependent on the Safdies’ own style; Kline’s own voice starts to emerge, using their style as a framework (let’s call it a comedy of errors) to tell a story of his own branding. It’s apparent that Kline has more stories to tell, and Funny Pages is a foundation of how he wants to tell them, serving as a mouthpiece for his personal stylings. If you’re already familiar with some of the Safdies films you’ll likely get a nice surprise in Funny Pages. Kline’s film opens on Robert, a high school student who knows he’s destined to draw comics for the rest of his life. He’s been studying ...

Anita Rocha da Silveira’s second feature film Medusa is a brutal masterwork that uniquely uses genre pastiche, tying the titular Gorgon’s mythos into its aesthetic in an impressive way. The film follows Mariana, a member of a local megachurch and part of a girl gang that stalks the streets at night to find sinful women and beat them both into submission and into accepting Jesus Christ as their lord and savior to earn new members. Mariana’s best friend Michele leads the group and touts herself as a social media influencer for respectable religious women, offering beauty and makeup tips for touching up their appearance and playing the role of a good Christian woman. Michele and other members of the group begin swooning over their pastor’s male youth groups, modeled after numerous religious armies in Brazil to uphold both a militant devotion to their god, but also physically persuade and subdue if need be. They also regularly perform for the megachurch in garish song of praise, each gan...