Author: Hugo Pagan Soto

Heretic: An Intense Experience

Posted on by Hugo Pagan Soto

Rating: 3 out of 5.

If there is one film genre that thrives in confined spaces and is grounded in a single location, it is horror. Heretic by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods serves as the perfect example to support this premise. The directors confine us to a house and, for much of the runtime, to a single room. Using this creative device, they manage to maximize tension and keep the viewer captivated, eagerly awaiting the story’s resolution. Of course, many other examples across different genres also take advantage of the virtues of shooting in a single location, from my perspective, none fit as seamlessly into this ecosystem as horror does.

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Anora: A Cinematic Journey Through Emotion and Resilience

Posted on by Hugo Pagan Soto

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Anora is the latest example of how director Sean Baker creates protagonists drawn from the most neglected and marginalized characters in our society. The strength of his characters stems from this fractured world, the hostile environment, and the inevitable hardships that accompany the individuals he portrays on screen. Now it’s the turn of Ani (Mikey Madison), a sex worker who crosses paths with the son of a Russian oligarch, and her world changes unexpectedly overnight.

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Little Jaffna: The Tigers of Tamil Revolution

Posted on by Hugo Pagan Soto

Rating: 3 out of 5.

In Tamil Jaffna is a phonetic combination that expresses the words harp and town. If we do a translation, we could say that Jaffna is the City of Harps. Located in the north of Sri Lanka, it is the second most important city in the country and during the Sri Lankan civil war, it was the command base of the Tamil Tigers, the separatist military group that faced the government for more than 20 years. In Little Jaffna (2024), the debut feature by director and actor Lawrence Valin, we delve into this conflict from the perspective of the Sri Lankan diaspora embodied in a suburb of Paris.

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The Shadow Strays: The Indonesian New Wave

Posted on by Hugo Pagan Soto

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Long before superheroes took over the screens. There were flesh-and-blood action heroes before Marvel and DC sought the niche of action cinema with their characters. Nostalgia always gets the better of me and I can’t resist returning to those action movies and characters from the 80s and 90s that paved my way to the movies. Stallone, Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, Bruce Lee… these legends and many others dominated the big screen with their epic adventures from which they always emerged victorious.

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The Substance: The Horror of Beauty

Posted on by Hugo Pagan Soto

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Like Faust selling his soul to the devil, so does the Elisabeth Sparkle of The Substance. Director and screenwriter Coralie Fargeat proposes a story that explores the condemnation of growing old in the entertainment industry. At Cannes, Fargeat won the award for Best Screenplay, and from that moment on, great expectations began for its release in commercial theaters.

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