Reviews

 Pakistani filmmaker Saim Sadiq makes his directorial debut with "Joyland," a picture of considerable integrity, passion, and bravery. The movie takes you into a stifling, patriarchal household in Lahore, Pakistan. While it keeps a sharp, neo-realist-influenced eye on the everyday lives of its characters, "Joyland" often gets so intimate as to discomfit the viewer to the point of exasperation. But the movie itself never judges.                                 We begin with an adult man with a sheet over his head, playing hide and seek with some young girls. The man is Haider, and the girls are his nieces. His sister-in-law Nucchi is about to have a fourth child, and you know the family is hoping for a boy. They don't get it. While Haider is at the hospital helping his brother and sister-in-law, he spies a striking woman ... who looks back at him with something less than indifference. Even though he's in Pakistan, what he's been struck by is often called

 Released a year after Wong Kar Wai’s beloved film Chungking Express, Fallen Angels actually was originally supposed to be a third story contained within the narrative of that film. Wong actually ended up cutting this out of the original Chungking Express because he found the content to be too different than the other two narratives, and because he thought Chungking Express didn’t need a third story. At the end of the day, he was very right, because both Chungking and Fallen Angels can be very distinct from each other while also borrowing elements. More on that later though.  Let’s just dive straight into this review, shall we?  From the very beginning scene, we can see the borrowed elements from Chungking Express. Although the extreme close up at an angle to the girl’s face is something completely new for Wong’s cinematic decisions, we get a voiceover of a male character describing his relationship to a female character. Classic. Sounds like Chungking right there, which we begin with

 Love triangles are a dime a dozen in movies. It is rare to get a mature and nuanced story that somehow manages to till new soil instead of going over material that is already well-worn. Writer/director Celine Song’s debut film Past Lives somehow manages this, feeling like a fresh perspective on love, longing, the past, paths chosen, and regrets.                              The film opens in a bar with two people off camera commenting about three people sitting at the other end of the bar, two men and one woman. The woman is deep in conversation with one of them while the other man looks more and more like a third wheel with each passing minute.  The woman is Nora (Greta Lee), the one man she is in deep conversation with is Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), a childhood friend she has a strong connection with, and the apparent third wheel is Nora’s husband Arthur (John Magaro). The film then cuts to 24 years earlier to Nora and Hae Sung’s childhood in Seoul, Korea.  Young Nora (Moon Seung-ah) and yo