Movie Reviews | The Last Movie Guy

Little Jaffna: The Tigers of Tamil Revolution

Posted on November 22, 2024 by Hugo Pagan Soto

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.

The Shadow Strays: The Indonesian New Wave

Posted on November 15, 2024 by Hugo Pagan Soto

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.

The Substance: The Horror of Beauty

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Hugo Pagan Soto

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.

The Wild Robot: A Robot’s Search for Meaning

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Hugo Pagan Soto

The Wild Robot (2024) is a film that can be perceived as simple. Being an animated film aimed at children, it is normal that we have that feeling of lightness in its narrative. But what lies beneath the surface is much more complex and emotionally challenging. This is how the director and screenwriter Chris Sanders understood it when he learned about Peter Brown’s book of the same name. Since its publication in 2016, the book has not stopped receiving awards and two sequels have followed.

Pepe: Studies of the imagination Part 1

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Hugo Pagan Soto

Like Joe Gillis floating inertly in that pool of a luxurious mansion on Sunset Boulevard, Pepe’s voice tells us about his disastrous destiny from the beyond. The new proposal by Dominican director Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias won the Silver Bear awarded to Best Director at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. If the award at the Berlinale is a milestone, the film conceived by Nelson Carlo is even more surprising. We are facing a work that surprises us. Its narrative invites us to think from the auditory point of view, it is a constant challenge. The meditations of that hippopotamus are the common thread of a journey that explores themes that cross the anthropological and take us to existentialism. The origin of life, migration, and colonization, are just some of the theses that emerge from Pepe.