Author: Joel Fisher

Yoav’s (Oded Leopold) life is falling apart. First, he finds out that his best friend, Alma (Ruti Asarsai) is pregnant and he’s upset that she didn’t tell him sooner, then his boyfriend, Dan (Udi Persi) starts talking about babies, raising the question of them becoming parents.

After all, Yoav and Dan have been in a relationship for fifteen years, but for Yoav it’s all becoming a bit too much to handle.

15 Years is a domestic drama about a couple in Tel Aviv where one of them starts to contemplate how his life is changing and how things are getting out of his control. As soon as Alma announces to a room full of people that she’s pregnant before she tells Yoav, the cracks start to show. Yoav becomes angry and distant, falling into a spiral of self-destruction as he thinks about what life has in store for him if he decides to go down the more domestic route of family life.

Yoav has issues with his family as well, his mother died some time ago and his father is terminally ill. So, he’s feeling the pressure not only from the life that he has, but from the new life that will soon come for his best friend, and also feeling his own mortality creeping up on him.

Yoav feels that if a child were to brought into his life, either through his best friend or his relationship, then he would literally feel the years dripping away. Add to that the fact that his parents are all but gone from his life, and he makes a dramatic decision to push away those closest to him in order to sort out his feelings.

15 years is a slow-moving drama that not everybody may understand and some may not relate to, as on the surface it seems that Yoav’s behaviour is selfish and vain. However, with so many pivotal moments in his life all happening at once then perhaps some audiences will understand where he is coming from.

All they have to do is to get past the way that writer/director Yuval Hadadi pushes Yoav away from the audience as Yoav does with those that he loves.

Look at Me is a short film that tells a story of three people and how their lives interconnect with each other. Although perhaps a better description is that it’s about two people who should have been less concerned about their own lives and helped the third.

A young woman (Hadley Robinson) is at a subway train platform when she sees a man sitting on the steps, his body hunched over and it looks like he’s drooling. She calls the authorities to ask for advice as to what to do and as soon as she knows that the EMTs are on the way… she gets on the train and leaves.

The audience is then shown life from the perspective of the young man on the stairs. His name is Alex, (John Gargan) he lives with his family and like most young men his age he is desperate to fit in and to be popular.

As Look at Me’s story progresses it becomes clear that Alex is the one that the audience should be looking at, not only because of the state in which he is left in a public place to fend for himself, but because of the underlying issues that led him to that subway platform and for him to sit down on those stairs.

The story that writer/director Nika Fehmiu is telling the audience is that the way the we are today is that we are all far too obsessed with ourselves to really care about those who may need serious help, medical or psychological and it’s very effective. In such a short time, Fehmiu’s directorial debut lays out the important characters and instantly makes the audience feel sorry for Alex.

This is either because they recognise his behaviour in themselves, they’ve seen it in others or they remember the way they used to behave themselves, so Alex’s story becomes a tragedy because it seems that not enough people care – if any at all.

Look at Me shows the audience the way a lot of us are today and even at the time of writing, the audience may have to be honest with themselves as to whether they would be the one to reach out and help someone or whether they’d think of themselves first.

On October 26^th 1881, the gunfight at the OK Corral took place cementing Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday’s names at a significant moment in American history. Tombstone-Rashomon attempts to retell the story from the points of view of various people involved in the famous gunfight.

These people include Wyatt Earp (Adam Newberry) and Doc Holliday (Eric Schumacher) themselves, adding a little tongue in cheek humour as it tells its story.

The opening text of Tombstone-Rashomon tells the audience about a time travelling camera crew who went back in time and accidentally got to Tombstone the day after the notorious gunfight, saying that the following will be eye witness accounts. This firmly tells the audience that as well as the retelling of the story of the gunfight, there’s going to be a little fun had with the story and for the most part there are some comical moments. Some moments that work and some that don’t.

Unfortunately, this element, despite being partly inspired by the 1950 Japanese film, Roshomon doesn’t really lend anything to the story and in fact distracts from the way it’s told. A particular moment is spoiled when after a dramatic retelling of the story, Earp is told to hold something up for the camera, wiping out any tension from the previous scene.

There’s also the issue that if a camera crew did time travel back to the day after the gunfight, then how did they get the footage of the events as told by the interviewees?

There is also some rather forced dialogue and character choices that are distracting and unnecessary. Although they may have seemed funny at the time, they don’t translate well to an audience. Little-known facts are also scattered throughout the script and brought up without prompting, seemingly only put in to show the audience that the filmmakers have done their research.

Facts such as Doc Holliday having been a dentist is brought up several time and there’s a bizarre choice to have Hungarian born Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings, here simply known as Kate (Christine Doidge) assign the incorrect gender pronouns to the men she talks about. Even if that may have been accurate to how she spoke it’s still odd, jarring and unfunny to those who don’t know the real person’s story that well.

Considering Tombstone-Rashomon’s limited budget the costumes and locations that retell the story add to the atmosphere and for a while they immerse the audience in the telling of the gunfight from such unique perspectives, despite the obvious fly-on-the-wall style filming.

However, as a link to Rashomon it doesn’t work because there have been so many mockumentaries throughout cinema that it feels like the attempt to link the two is yet another attempt to suggest the filmmakers are cleverer than they really are.

Robert Atkinson (Mike Beckingham) works in a bank in the heart of London. He’s just been dumped by his girlfriend and after and argument with his brother, Steve (Dougie Poynter) and a bag load of the bank’s money, Robert decides to indulge in his favourite pastime – gambling.

However, after some bad luck at the tables, Robert is made an offer that he can’t refuse by a local Triad gang leader Lau Hoi Ho (Togo Igawa). All Robert has to do is to deliver a package to Amsterdam and all his debt will be cleared. However, after a couple of chance encounters Robert finds himself in deeper trouble than he could ever imagine, putting his life in serious danger.

The Host is a movie that starts off as a stylish albeit slightly predictable British crime thriller, but as the story goes on it takes an unusual and unexpected turn that may throw its audience off their guard, or may put them off entirely.

Everything about The Host sets the movie firmly in place, so whereas the audience may think they know where they story is going, they still expect to be entertained by the comfortable and familiar plot.

Unfortunately, this is where The Host subverts the audience’s expectations and without giving too much away, the twist forces the audience to reassess what kind of movie they thought they were watching. It also forces them to get acquainted with some characters that they had only briefly met before.

It’s unfortunate in some ways, because if the movie ended how it began then it may have been more enjoyable, giving the audience a more suspenseful story. What the audience end up getting though is a twist about halfway through that is completely unnecessary, unsettling those who realise they are not getting what they paid for and boring some fans of the genre that know all the clichés that are about to come.

It doesn’t help that the true villain of the piece isn’t believable, nor is there any clear motive to the villain’s actions which dilutes any real sense of danger.

Therefore, The Host leaves the audience waiting for the film to be over and reach its inevitable end. It also doesn’t help that a final twist leaves the audience groaning as it is as pointless as the first.

Gabriella (Sarah Chang) is looking to avenge her family after the aswang hybrid killed them all. She teams up with some demon hunters calling themselves the Slayers, and with a hybrid killer named Bolo (Vincent Soberano) who is looking to redeem his humanity.

Their quest is to hunt down and kill Naga (Temujin Shirzada) and Gundra (Mekeal Turner), hybrid warlords of the supernatural underworld. However, after Gabriella settles into an unusual partnership with Bolo, they soon realise that their efforts to track down and kill the evil warlords is leading them right into a trap.

Blood Hunters: Rise of the Hybrids is a feature length version of writer/director and co-star Vincent Soberano’s short films set in the same universe. Soberano’s pet project brings his vision to life on a bigger screen and makes no apologies for how loud, chaotic and violent that it gets. It may also remind its audience of things they watched in the Nineties such as Mortal Kombat and Buffy the Vampire Slayer – although nowhere near as well written.

Despite the comparison to pop culture martial arts favourites, there isn’t really enough to keep an audience invested in the world that Soberano has created. That is unless audiences just want to switch their brains off and watch some weakly choreographed fight scenes that go on for far too long.

After all, Blood Hunters: Rise of the Hybrids plays as just that, like a pilot for a TV show where very little is explained in hopes that an audience will be distracted just long enough by a string of stunt men lining up to be hit in the chest.

There may be a particular style that the movie is going for that I may be missing, but the only thing that I can think it could be going for is a movie that’s so bad it’s good.

Unfortunately, despite a couple of laughable scenes, bad acting and a villain whose prosthetic teeth seem too big for his mouth, the movie doesn’t even have this kind of appeal either, leaving its audience with a wholly unearned sequel tease that nobody will want.