SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     Everybody hustles, but in Monti Puno Parungao's The Escort (Lexuality Entertainment, Treemount Pictures, 2011) hustling (in the hard core sense of selling your body for sex) is a way of life. For all its depiction of lurid subject matter, The Escort also balances its heavy drama with a strong dose of romance. It's a precarious and potentially disastrous juggling act and one that The Escort pulls off with genuine flair. There was a time when most people didn't know men sold sex and didn't want to know. The Escort dramatizes the lifestyle at the same time it tells a cautionary tale. The viewer gets to meet the escorts while keeping a safe distance. The world of The Escort seems terribly real,  it even smells that way. Parungao does a good job of capturing the unsprung rhythm of the street. The characters form a loose-knit community at the mercy of strangers. They may spend hours together and not see one another for a week. Parungao shows Karlo’s encounters, one is an old man with peculiar tastes. Miko Pasamonte finds the right note for Karlo. He has plans and dreams, but vague ones and he's often sort of detached, maybe because his life is on hold in between tricks. Karlo has fallen into a lifestyle that offers him up during every waking moment for any stranger. He does it for money, but it pays so badly, he can't save up enough to pay his rent. 

     A film driven by atmosphere and a sense of foreboding dread, Pasahero (Viva Films, JPHILX, 2024)  proves that even though you may think you are done with the past, the past isn’t always necessarily done with you. There’s very little surprise to the movie, as Juvy Galamiton’s screenplay pretty much lays out just who is stalking the six passengers on the last trip of an MMR train and what the apparition’s ultimate intent is rather early on. Instead, director Roman Perez Jr. makes this an affair that’s a bit more about creating a palpable mood filled with tension and dreamlike uncertainty, where viewers are never quite sure just what is fantasy and what is reality. The film’s ensemble of actors all do a wondrous job bringing a sense of gravitas to the picture. Bea Binene (Angel) and Louise delos Reyes (Michelle) give intriguing performances, especially the former, who plays her role with an indescribable, transcendental quality. The mystery driving the haunting is so cold-blooded and practical that you won’t even think twice about its motivation. The movie is told with style. It goes without saying that style is the most important single element in every ghost story, since without it even the most ominous events disintegrate into silliness. And Pasahero, is aware that if characters talk too much they disperse the tension, adopting a very economical story-telling approach. Dialogue comes in straightforward sentences. Background is provided without distracting from the story. Characters are established with quick, subtle strokes. 

     Pasahero adds an extra layer through it’s sense of melancholy. Angel’s personal grief gives a stronger emotional link between her and the spirit - she sympathizes with the dead by trying to help solve their issues so they can be at peace. In lesser films, the heroine simply gets frightened and wants to stop the ghost in order to save her own skin. There’s a sense of wrongness throughout Perez’s film. It feels like a race against time as Angel tries to expose the crime before becoming the next victim. While real life violence provides the aura of dread that pervades the movie, the restraint shown by Perez is just as responsible for the effectiveness of the tale. Instead of inundating us with over-the-top hijinks, he bides his time before introducing the ghostly happenings - a weird noise here, a horrifying vision there - which provides a satisfyingly ominous atmosphere. Perez shot Pasahero in a manner that puts the viewer constantly on edge, with lots of odd angles, perspectives and sound design. Extremely stylish in execution, it’s convincing in a way that few ghost stories are — not in the least because the crime at the bottom of the haunting is particularly nasty. The images we create in our heads to explain bumps in the night as well as everything else horrifying are far more frightening than anything a director can put on screen. Even stripped of the ethereal elements, Pasahero would have made for a compelling murder-mystery, but the supernatural sheen only adds to its power and unexpected poignancy. 

Sound Designer: Lamberto Casas Jr., Alex Tomboc

Musical Director: Dek Margaja

Editor: Aaron Alegre

Production Design: JC Catiggay

Director of Photography: Neil Bion

Screenplay: Juvy Galamiton

Directed By: Roman Perez, Jr.

     In Joel C. Lamangan's Walker (New Sunrise Films, 2022), the spectator is lured into the lives of women who, for various reasons, have been forced into prostitution. Strangely, the single-take sequences and the richness of detail in the mise-en-scène are all in place, but the only movement in Walker is cyclical and back-and-forth, like the lives of its characters, perpetually leaving and returning to their profession. Discursive sequences in which the characters discuss the social causes and effects of prostitution suddenly give way to the conduct of the business itself where prostitutes are literally dragged by their patrons. Through his own obscure passageways, Lamangan charts the various fates of his protagonists as they struggle under the social and economic burdens of their occupation. Most abhor their work and more than one schemes, usually unsuccessfully, to leave it. Lamangan and screenwriter Troy Espiritu creates a diverse range of characters who have varying back-stories but are selling their bodies in one way or another, because of men. Lamangan is anchored by its cast of characters, making Walker a true ensemble effort. Unlike more conventional dramas of the time, which had one or two protagonists and then a larger supporting cast, Lamangan employs a group of performers and gives them equal weight. These women vary in age, possessing different outlooks in life. Lamangan works extremely well with his cast, making  sure to never portray them as anything other than unflinchingly human. These women being in a profession that requires them to sell their bodies doesn’t negate their humanity, the film becomes less about their line of work and more about their inner qualities, which drives both the injustice and the necessity of prostitution, but never stops short of portraying it as tragedy allowing glimmers of possibility and even agency for the characters. 

     Lamangan gives his heroines love and sympathy, pointing his finger at the repressive patriarchal society for allowing the exploitation of women and for reflecting society’s hypocritical attitude towards them. It’s a polished, poignant and unsentimental account of the women who resiliently live in the streets awaiting a better future. There is no doubt whose side Lamangan is on. One by one, in interwoven detail, he shows us how each of the women live. His attention to the trials of womanhood is sustained over his career and yet its meaning is less obvious—and perhaps less laudable —than many would like to believe. The psycho-biographical interpretation of Lamangan—rhymes nicely with the Western conception of a feminist filmmaker. But his attitude toward women is more of an aestheticizer of female suffering, extolling and reveling in the strength and resilience of women, than one who fights against the causes of their hardship. But in watching Walker, there is little doubt where Lamangan's sympathies lie. The film is at once politically engaged and emotionally subtle. Although it puts forth a particularly complex understanding of gender politics, it never seems to relate to any immediate context. The film closes on a note of hope and heartbreak. The brief final scene in which a man takes his first step into a life that has ruined him, evoking a heartbreaking vision of hell is a mark of Lamangan’s genius. Walker is inscribed with a rare urgency that is nonetheless balanced by humanist understanding, an understanding that is remarkable even for him.

Screenplay: Troy Espiritu

Director of Photography: T.M. Malones

Editing: Gilbert Obispo

Production Designer: Jay Custodio

Music: Von de Guzman

Sound: Christopher Mendoza

Direction: Joel C. Lamangan

     Unlike the most memorable entries into the horror genre, Nokturno (Evolve Studios, Viva Films, 2024) offers only the most superficial of thrills. Director Mikhail Red's Deleter (2022) utilizes the genre’s framework to not only examine its characters in a unique way, but also to interrogate our relationship to the media we consume. Through the intense voyeurism and cinema in general, Red makes us unwitting culprits in the increasingly disturbing actions of its characters, adding an uncomfortable angle to what could’ve otherwise been a fairly conventional psychological horror story. Nokturno offers little in the way of fresh twists on the stale formula and even the well-established tropes are handled poorly. It all feels painfully familiar: vague folk religion, loud shrieks, slamming doors, flickering lights — it’s basically a non-stop barrage of tired genre clichés. It even has that shot of a character violently banging his head against the wall that has inexplicably become so popular with horror films of this kind. While the relationship between Lilet (Eula Valdez) and her daughter, Jamie (Nadine Lustre) does provide rooting interest and emotional resonance, Red struggles to bridge the protagonist’s past to her present. Admittedly, Nokturno handles some of its family drama better than a lot of films of its ilk, but even that eventually devolves into cheap sentimentalism. The film’s horror elements are primarily derivative and reliant on shock, rather than nuanced or subtle sense of dread that would have ultimately made it scarier. 

     Other characters, such as Manu (Wilbert Ross), Jamie's sister Jo's (Bea Binene) boyfriend and Tito Jun (Ku Aquino), are undeveloped. As such, the viewer is given few reasons to emotionally invest in any of them, before they are caught up in a series of supernatural events beyond their control. Some sections can be tedious as Red keeps secrets about the curse for a long time instead of revealing them early on as an inciting incident. The use of Filipino religion and folklore lends a sense of authenticity. Nokturno explores something old and folkloric by exploiting the technology of cinema, making it immediate and visceral. Lustre is a compelling presence capable of displaying vulnerability without ever seeming naive, a derivative screenplay that can’t stick the landing doesn’t so much fail her gifts, she outshines it. The way this story unfolds and how it unpeels its protagonist is too predictable to be scary, despite a striking tableaux involving Jamie in moments of terror. It would be wrong to say that Red squandered any potentially intriguing ideas because there is nothing here that would indicate this rote and painfully unoriginal exercise could’ve ever been more than it is. Nokturno might offer some surprises for non-horror fans looking for a quick and simple scare, but everyone else is likely to be profoundly underwhelmed.

Directed By: Mikhail Red

Sound Designers: Emilio Bien Sparks, Michaela Docena, Michael Keanu Cruz

Scorer: Paul Sigua, Myka Magsaysay-Sigua

Editor: Nikolas Red

Co-Editor: Timothy Axibal

Production Designer: Ana Lou Sanchez

Director of Photography: Ian Alexander Guevara, LPS

Screenplay: Rae Red, Nikolas Red

     Much has already been written about the bravery of Ang Duyan ng Magiting (Cinemalaya, Sine Metu, 2023). I wish the movie had been even brave enough to risk a clear, unequivocal, uncompromised statement of its beliefs, instead of losing itself in a cluttered mishmash of stylistic excesses. Ang Duyan ng Magiting might have really been powerful, if it could have gotten out of its own way. The best scenes, the ones that make this movie worth seeing despite its shortcomings are the ones in which Jill Sebastian's (Dolly de Leon) tired government functionary hacks her way through a bureaucratic jungle in an attempt to get someone to make a simple statement of fact, those scenes are masterful. If Ang Duyan ng Magiting had started with Jose Santos's (Miggy Jimenez) disappearance, and followed his mother, Helen (Agot Isidro) and Professor Victor Angeles (Jojit Lorenzo) in a straightforward narrative, this film might have generated overwhelming tension and anger. But the movie never develops the power it should have had, because writer/director Dustin Celestino lacked confidence in the strength of his story. He has achieved the unhappy feat of upstaging his own film losing it in a thicket of visual and editing stunts. We get to know Jose a little while in prison with his friend Simon Manuel (Dylan Ray Talon). In something of a mild panic, the two loses it only to calm down when Jill enters the picture. Ang Duyan ng Magiting truly excels in the scenes where Jill and Police Chief Gabriel Ventura (Paolo O'Hara) try to work out what really happened. All of his views that she despises such as a condemnatory questioning of the system and disbelief of the officer standing in front of her, so brazen. Ignorance is bliss and Jill's world has been covered in a shroud of darkness. 

     Edgy and belligerent, De Leon is constrained but fully believable. She can slay you with a look and complements her co-star in truthful ways. O'Hara's character perhaps goes on the longest journey in the movie. Testy and judgmental, Officer Ventura has to deal with the sharpest and most toxic human emotion, the one that eventually kills you; hope. Jose, played with modest simplicity by Jimenez is a dedicated, somewhat guilt-ridden young man whose optimism is unshakable. Isidro perfectly captures Helen's internal strife as her world comes tumbling down. She holds truth to be at the heart of faith. Lorenzo is superior as a man facing up to issues he never wanted to confront personally. Ang Duyan ng Magiting has no room for revenge plots or of any other kind of simple gratification. Helen and Victor learn that their own instincts were right and they overcome imposing obstacles to learn what they need to learn, but it's hard to imagine any scenario where such validation could taste more sour. Uneven and a little pre-packaged, Ang Duyan ng Magiting is still a haunting film and it ignites a sharp desire for civic engagement, for public accountability, for knowledge that matters instead of knowledge that distracts. It earns your admiration, even as you wish it were a little better and that the world were much, much better. By following two individuals who learn to ask tough questions, to confront their fears, to insist on the highest standards, it's as good a movie as I can think of at demonstrating what you can do during a time of crisis. As a superbly acted political drama, Ang Duyan ng Magiting is also well worth your time.

Sound Engineers: Andrea Teresa T. Idioma, Nicole Rosacay

Musical Composer: Pao Protacio

Editor: Janel Gutierrez

Production Designer: Josiah Hiponia

Director of Photohraphy: Kara Moreno

Writer & Director: Dustin Celestino

     There are so many good things in Halikan Mo at Magpaalam sa Kahapon (Luis Enriquez Films, 1977), but they’re side by side instead of one after the other. They exist in the same film, but the result don't add up. Actually, it has no result–just an ending, leaving us with all of those fine pieces, still waiting to come together. If this were a screenplay and not the final product, you could see how with one more rewrite, it might all fall into place. There are subplots in the movie, but the emotional themes are more intriguing. Maybe the fundamental problem is the point of view. The interesting characters here are the women, but the star is Eddie Rodriguez and so the film is told from his point of view. Watching Halikan Mo at Magpaalam sa Kahapon, it’s easy to linger on issues since the movie itself sputters and sprawls, breathtakingly unaware of how ponderous it is. It’s about the enigma of adultery, which is that people — normal, decent people do it for no reason at all, except that they crave something. Romance. Renewal. A second chance at love. Rodriguez succeeds, but I’m not sure that this is an acting triumph viewers will respond to. In his gloomy, introspective mode, Rodriguez steamrolls every scene with the heaviness of his emotions. He becomes a thick-witted, broodingly stylized hero. The thing is, we’re supposed to be watching Rafael fall in love. Sometimes the movie takes its time and feels real and at other times it makes huge leaps, leaving behind emotional realism and logic. 

     Pilar Pilapil has no trouble showing the emotional range needed in a challenging role. She is a wonderful actress, her elegant femininity contrasts perfectly with Rodriguez. Natalie and Rafael make an intriguing romantic couple. It should be no surprise that Pilapil teams well with Rodriguez. Hilda Koronel plays a stronger character who considers her options and maintains control of the situation. Marina painfully begins to uncover her husband’s affair, she concludes that she must find out everything about his secret life. Marina is not about to let it go and pursues the matter with quiet determination. As tension begins to increase, perhaps more in anticipation than by the inevitable romance. At first, Natalie decides to tell Rafael the truth about her daughter Nanette (Virnadeth). Then the two of them are drawn together in ways not even the movie can explain. Here is a good story sadly marred by undisciplined dramatic direction, heavy footed staging and lack of attention to detail. Although betrayal is filled with dramatic potential, the filmmakers haven't mined the subject of its many riches. But Halikan Mo at Magpaalam sa Kahapon is the kind of movie that won't fit into a nutshell. Director Luis C. Enriquez's films have always refused to work that way. They have managed to be linear while also drifting thoughtfully through the nuances of their characters' behavior with stylistic polish. To be sure, the liability of a certain sogginess accompanies Enriquez's brand of thinking-man's romanticism. Halikan Mo at Magpaalam sa Kahapon incorporates a full reserve of hard-won wisdom about the perils that can befall a marriage.

Supervising Film Editor: Albert Joseph Sr.

Director of Photography: Hermo U. Santos

Story By: Beybs Pizarro-Gulfin

Screenplay: Toto Belano & Ric M. Torres

Musical Director: Rudy Arevalo

Directed By: Luis C. Emriquez

     Nominally, Filipino cinema’s most psychologically fascinating love triangle, Ishmael Bernal's landmark is a hard film to resurrect in a contemporary era that favors logic and emotional literalness over the director’s dreamy sense of the inevitability of disappointment and the invisibility of personal morality. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon (LEA Productions, 1977) stands alongside Ikaw ay Akin (1978) as one of the definitive films of the 1970s, its impact on countless scores of subsequent films is impossible to gauge. If its guilelessness seems a bit dated, a viewing today reads like a well-observed lesson that countless filmmakers incorporated into their work over the following two decades, leaving it not just cogent but an essential piece of cinema history. With an almost insurmountable liberty in his use of the cinematic form, Bernal embraces contradiction to create meaning—Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is sad yet humorous, breathless yet contemplative, universal yet hermetic. It knows of life’s folly so intimately that it is impossibly naïve and its selfless love of the cinema borders on narcissistic. What confirms Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon to the status of a flawed gem is Bernal’s inability to reconcile his core of almost surreal melancholy with a more psychologically acute perception of character, something perfected throughout his later efforts like Relasyon (1982) that bears more than a few similarities to this film. The timeline of his plot is impenetrable and his sense of incident is suitably hazy (it only fails him at the hastily staged denouement), but he too easily lets Roy (Romeo Vasquez) and Mel (Mat Ranillo III) as characters, coast by on vague descriptions and archetypes rather than example. Mel is too easily reduced to his lack of action and is occasionally forgotten, while there is repeated discussion of his proclivities as a ladies’ man without discernment as to what drives his appetites or makes him so appealing to the opposite sex. Roy and Mel instinctively intellectualize themselves to the point where it is possible they exist only within the reality of their own minds and thus neither actor is able to give a performance that captures the imagination. 

     Terry (Vilma Santos) whose own frivolity may be her way of dealing with an underlying and serious sense of dissatisfaction. She is easy to fall in love with — the character is beautiful, charming and intelligent. The very things that mark her as a mesmerizing woman – her daring and self-determination, her refusal to play by patriarchal rules – also, in some ways, stoke her discontent. It’s inevitable, then, that her attention will eventually turn to Roy. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is really Terry’s film. This is Vilma Santos’s first great performance, all the greater because of the art with which she presents Terry’s resentment. A lesser actress might have made Terry mad or hysterical, but although madness and hysteria are uncoiling beneath the surface, Terry depends mostly on unpredictability — on a fundamental unwillingness to behave as expected. She shocks her parents as a way of testing them. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon is about love in its many faces and disguises. It isn't just about the love of Roy and Mel for Terry or about the variations of her feelings for the two of them, separately and together. In spite of his understanding and images of tenderness, joy, fun, cosiness, idyllic feelings of all kinds in Dalawamg Pugad... Isang Ibon, Bernal keeps himself, to just the right degree, out of it. He never makes the mistake of confounding himself, as creator, so that you never get his own attitude towards Terry, or any comment on her spirit and behavior. Bernal is inarguably the star of the film and his presence alone justifies Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon’s almost immediate introduction into the canon of greatness as well as its enduring appeal. His generosity in creating fleeting throwaway moments that teem with detail and emotional resonance is unparalleled and the autonomy of his camerawork is galvanizing. Dalawang Pugad... Isang Ibon, as a whole, is as singular as its director. The berth of his sensitivity is so wide that the film seems less a creation of artifice than a pipeline straight into his emotional being. If the finale feels a bit sudden, perhaps that’s because we’re only viewing it within the context of a romantic triangle. Widened out, it’s the story of love – in all sorts of forms.

Art Director: Bobby Bautista

Director of Cinematography: Nonong Rasca

Sound Supervisor: Luis S. Reyes

Film Editor: Nonoy Santillan

Music: The Vanishing Tribe

Screenplay: Ishmael Bernal

Direction: Ishmael Bernal

      While movies such as Paluwagan (Vivamax, Pelikula Indiopendent, 2024) don't exactly depend upon a wealth of logic, such an obvious gap is all too common in a film that survives solely upon the strength of its talented cast. Director Roman Perez Jr. has chosen his actors well. A trio of performers each at the top of their game playing shrewdly on their respective strengths to create three compelling characters. Victor Relosa, in a role he can sink his teeth into really nails the vulnerability caused by Hector’s predicament. There are moments when I was watching his eyes and body language thinking to myself that this is as impactful as Relosa’s devastating performance in Jerry Lopez Sineneng's Rita (2024). Micaella Raz has become quite adept in roles that suggest a certain physical frailty and vulnerability, especially when it can be stoked into wounded fury and ferocity. She evokes the viewer’s total sympathies as Julia. Perez uses Shiena Yu to excellent effect. Even at her most centered, Yu grants Marites a perpetual internal desperation. It is entirely possible that you will find yourself surprised by exactly what unfolds in Paluwagan, while Perez does his best to keep us guessing, he hits a home run by casting Relosa, Raz and Yu, actors able to portray parts with the same steady presence. The result is that even as you've decided exactly what's going on, the three principals convincingly plant continued doubts. 

     Julia's narrative voice has Perez keeping the plot brisk, taut and focused. It’s a work of wonderful manipulation because the story remains firmly about Hector. Perez effectively ratchets up the tension with cinematic devices such as closeups and noisy startles from, say, a helicopter crash overhead. It's a tried-and-true device, but one that's justifiable here as a reflection of the characters’ state of mind. To say more would spoil the surprises. Perez steers the story toward its inevitable revelations with an old-fashioned sense of tension. The viewer, meanwhile, is a little more patient. Thanks to the director's steady pacing and unsettling atmosphere. Every gesture makes sense and is consistent with the truth as revealed. Relosa, in particular, takes honors for his smart, unshowy work. Perez does a good job at giving his actors a playground that adheres strongly to genre conventions, but with a bit more mature leeway. Amnesia has driven plots throughout a broad spread of genres. The biggest difference is, however, that Hector isn't pursuing his own past so much as he’s having it thrust upon him. Perez has a nicely tuned eye, and the careful look of the film (shot by Albert Banzon of Adan and Salakab) may be its best attribute. Paluwagan is small-scale, but it succeeds in telling a story. 

Musical Scorer: Dek Margaja

Sound Designer: Alex Tomboc, Lamberto Casas Jr.

Editor: Aaron Alegre

Production Designer: JC Catiggay

Director of Photography: Albert Banzon

Screenplay: Ronald Perez

A Film By: Roman Perez Jr.

     For filmmaker Lawrence Fajardo, social interaction with the audience is far more important than sexual interaction on the screen. Some of the men solicit attention, others determined to avoid it. But all are in search of human connection however short or sordid. Cinema Parausan, one of Erotica Manila’s (Vivamax, 2023) four episodes functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them. Lorna (Azi Acosta) and Gab (Alex Medina) are acting out an elaborate choreography of desire and denial. There is no need for secondhand moralizing in the presence of such rich and varied human material. Girl 11 is predicated on the power of loneliness and longing, an inarticulate desire to connect to life and this desire delivers the dramatic thrust. Each emotional misfire provides a new layer of meaning. Girl 11 is governed by a narrator, in this case Manila Daily journalist Steven (Joseph Elizalde) whose world folds into and out of itself. Fajardo demonstrates with the execution of the last line of dialogue, one of devastating, succinct finality and all that leads up to it, a mastery of dialogue as sound and sound as delivered through the cinema-specific device of voiceover narration. The MILF and the OJT, mixes an existential study in anomie with comedy in the person of haughty actress Beatrice (Mercedes Cabral). Her attitude gives a predatory (even proto-cougar) quality. Less interested in the fluidic facts that dominate teen sex comedies, The MILF and the OJT examines varieties of discomfort. Fajardo specializes in extruding just enough of the vulnerability underlying Beatrice’s facade, never better than in the scene where she lays out her expectations. 

     Ivan Andrew Payawal's Table for Three (Vivamax, The IdeaFirst Company, 2024) follows successful couple Marlon (Topper Fabregas) and Paul (Arkin del Rosario) as they explore being a throuple with Jeremy (Jesse Guinto). There's little doubt that Table for Three bears few similarities to Payawal's Two and One (2022), as the film unfolds in a deliberate and surprisingly conventional manner that effectively prevents it from becoming anything more than a well-acted (and well-made) domestic drama. Payawal even seems to be going out of his way to prevent viewers from wholeheartedly embracing the spare narrative, as the director offers up a trio of underdeveloped protagonists that remain completely uninteresting virtually from start to finish. Not helping matters is Payawal's sporadic emphasis on oddball elements, as the film's tenuously authentic atmosphere is undoubtedly diminished significantly each and every time the filmmaker indulges his notorious sensibilities. Table for Three  feigns interest in its characters as three-dimensional beings layering them with dilemmas and hang-ups, but rarely gets deep enough under their skin to make them seem like more than devices in a socio-political thesis. That’s especially true of Jeremy, who receives the least attention and thus comes across as the most paper-thin of the film’s three protagonists and his featurelessness ultimately sabotages the increasingly tense threesome dynamic at play, since none of these people’s attractions to each other are ever fleshed-out or potently felt. 

     Simplistic as its core may be, though, Payawal manages the not-inconsiderable feat of habitually distracting attention away from his material’s underlying didacticism through aesthetic dexterity providing the material with far more urgency than does its let’s-all-get-together plotting. Give credit to Payawal for trying to dissect a relationship and then build it up again. But despite its fascinating moments, one can't help but be frustrated when at times it switches away to pretentiousness. All the aesthetic tangents the director throws at us play as just that, tangents. To what is actually a slightly enervated drama of not-so-complicated romantic geometry, the the film is frequently ravishing in its visual construction making the drama go down easy. For all its complicating intrusions, Table of Three can’t help but register as somewhat less than the sum of its disparate parts. As Payawal frames them threading the waves in symmetrical compositions, he captures all the mystery and romance of a new relationship that isn’t necessarily communicated in the film’s less stylized sequences. For a while, Payawal gets by on his talent for conjuring up interesting exchanges. But no matter how hard he tries to make his characters distinctive, no matter how much he attempts to flesh them out through elucidating their interests, the drama they enact ultimately feels flat, the hermetic actions of hermetic conceptions of character. In a few tender moments, Payawal conjures up the feeling of necessity, but for most of the rest, it’s just eye-filling, soul-starving emptiness that no amount of intermittent assaults on the sensorium can paper over.

Directed By: Ivan Andrew Payawal

Written By: Ash M. Malanum

Cinematographer: Juan Miguel Marasigan

Production Designer: Jaylo Conanan

Editor: Kristian Marc Palma

Music: Emerzon Texon

Sound Designer: Nicole Rosacay

     This beguiling romance offers a fresh take on a familiar premise. At its heart is a story about love, tolerance and honesty. For all its anodyne rom-com silliness, however, 4 Days (Phoenix Features, 2016) is also funny, sad and beautiful in equal measure. Mark's (Mikoy Morales) facial expression is most affecting. With a few well-placed glance, a furtive look at his college roommate Derek (Sebastian Castro), a pained expression, a brow sorrowfully furrowed, Morales adeptly manages to capture the anxiety of being gay with dexterity. He is this film’s emotional rock. Morales navigates excitement, happiness, sadness, guilt and anger equally well and Castro lends strong complementary performance. This movie’s storyline does come carefully encased in an unassumingly conservative plot superstructure, but what a smart, fun, engaging film. Director Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr. (working from a sharp and funny screenplay he co-wrote with his lead actors) does a nimble job of placing us in Mark and Derek's shoes. The story’s lightness is, in a sense, the source of its charm. The issues that gay youths face are, in many respects, more interesting and the breakthroughs on that front continue apace. Alix brought an idyllic authenticity to 4 Days just like picking the right person in your love triangle or finding love before the big dance.Yes, the film does everything it can do to parboil the flavor, color, consistency and fabulousness out of its queer romance, until all that's left is the familiar beige, featureless pap of overcooked heterosexual rom-coms. But that's kind of the point. Why shouldn't queer kids get the chance to see generic, mass-produced versions of themselves onscreen, overcoming minor obstacles on their path to true love? They absolutely should and with 4 Days (and the films that follow) they will, but it's the quieter, deeper storyline that forms its true emotional center.

     The cast and filmmakers stir elements of secrets and lies for all they’re worth, prizing telling details and piercing observation over broad comedy. Relationships that in the film’s first moments seemed simple prove prickly and complex. 4 Days isn’t frank or revelatory in the vein of the best queer cinema. It avoids much talk of arousal and it delays its first same-sex kiss and then scores it to onlookers just in case viewers aren’t sure how to feel about it. This is crowd-pleasing filmmaking, so, of course, it’s in some ways behind the times. There may be little in this movie that you haven’t seen before, but the perspective through which you’re seeing it makes all the difference. The events aren't really surprising. Rather, the film focuses on the one thing it does differently, making the romantic quest at the center of the story gay rather than straight and it can't be denied that it does make the tired formula feel ever so slightly fresh for having done so. When the movie shifts into its inevitable third act, it takes a fresh turn which we obviously don't get from standard romance. The formula works regardless of the sexual orientation of the characters involved. 4 Days is a dubious step on the road to equality, proof that conventional romantic dramas are no longer limited to straight people. The polished soundtrack still allows for a procession of acutely observed details, from the hypersensitivity around how others discuss sexuality to the unspoken jealousy aimed at those able to conduct themselves with more surface-level comfort. 4 Days seems a bit too tame to be entirely plausible from start to finish, but it’s hard for find fault with any film that addresses a changing world with such compassion and decency. An unexpected delight in more ways than one.

Directed By: Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.

Sound: Jason Conanan

Music: Mikoy Morales

Production Design: Arthur Maningas

Cinematography: Albert Banzon

Screenplay: Adolfo Alix Jr., Mikoy Morales, Sebastian Castro

 

     Maligno (Rosas Productions, 1977) builds tension with masterful patience and detail, not because it relies entirely on the payoff of its devilish finale, but because Celso Ad. Castillo wants to submerge the viewer in paranoia. Through his meticulous study of characters, their naturalistic mannerisms and peculiarities, and the weight he applies to even immaterial trivialities, Castillo constructs a very real sense of horror. Through it, he raises an atmosphere of instability that counteracts his picture’s supernatural menace with a practical skepticism, almost in the same moment that he confirms our worst, most unimaginable fears. Not until the final act does the film reveal itself as a tale of supernatural terror. Though perhaps Maligno remains more alarming for its depiction of a housewife trying to regain agency over her pregnancy and herself. But before any talk of occult conspiracies, Castillo spends about an hour outlining his characters, their relationships, eccentricities, insecurities and desires. The film’s details consume us, such as how three-dimensional these characters feel. Paolo (Dante Rivero) tries to behave like an understanding husband sensitive to his wife’s needs, but his apologetic control of Angela (Susan Roces) is apparent, no matter how much he seems to be grappling with some inner guilt about his impulses. Elsewhere, Blanca (Celia Rodriguez) fusses over Paolo and Lucas Santander's (Eddie Garcia) friendship during lunch with Angela. The credit for some of these details belongs to the actors who bring their characters to life. Watch Blanca in her keen surveillance of Angela or the way she bounces with excitement. But Castillo also layers seemingly inconsequential conversations with curious facets that prove significant later. 

     Realistic mise-en-scène shrouds the elements of horror in a Celso Ad. Castillo film, so that which remains suspect also feels too real and inconsequential to possibly delve into horror territory. His scares arise not from supernatural origins, but from psychological possibility, the horrible things people will do if so compelled. Castillo specializes in obsession and madness, particularly those supplied within a limited space. The film’s dizzying, hallucinatory dream sequences continue to puzzle as Castillo constructed them so much like actual dreams, not typical soft-filtered movie dreams, but an overexposed nightmare of mish-mashed imagery. Voices seem to penetrate Angela’s consciousness, as if Castillo were showing us two truths at once. Images flow in and out of frame. Nothing makes logical sense, and yet it all congeals in an effortless sort of way. Hints to Angela's Catholic upbringing and religious images in her dreams warn of ingrained religious-based fears, countered by the delusional thought that something sinister plots against her. Castillo implants the notion that Angela has fallen prey to hysterics, so the viewer begins to doubt its misgivings about the suspicious behavior of those around her. Roces is phenomenal, tapping into maternal fears and sense of distrust with full vulnerability. She carries this film on her shoulders, even as everyone tries to push her further down, Angela remains headstrong and resilient. Rodriguez’s scene stealing performance is at once comical and foreboding. Rivero’s acting opportunities open up almost immediately. Paolo is a likeable person, you can’t help but emphatize with. Garcia is impeccably cast as Lucas. His performance is one of the great marriages of character and actor in the genre. Castillo has taken a most difficult situation and made it believable, right up to the end. Angela is forced into the most bizarre suspicions about her husband and we share them and believe them. Because Castillo exercises his craft so well, we follow him right up to the end and stand there.

Production Designer: Peter Perlas

Sound Supervision: Rudy Baldovino

Film Editor: Augusto Salvador

Director of Photography: Loreto U. Isleta F.S.C.

Screenplay: Celso Ad. Castillo, Dominador B. Mirasol

Music By: Ernani Cuenco

Directed By: Celso Ad. Castillo

     The Hearing (Cinemalaya, Pelikulaw, Center Stage Productions, 2024) evokes the experience of a molested child in all its furtive anxiety and shame. Sensitively directed by Lawrence Fajardo and cogently co-written with Honeylyn Joy Alipio, The Hearing goes after deeper, harsher truths. For Lucas (Enzo Osorio), reliving the experience at the trial proves fatal. Madonna (Mylene Dizon) realizes how powerless she is in helping her son and we are forced to look at Fr. Mejor (Rom Factolerin) in a different light. Earlier, we viewed him through Lucas' eyes, now we have the shock of seeing him as he sees himself. The horror is filmed with admirable restraint, with Fajardo opting for a less-is-more approach that only reinforces the tragedy of the events depicted. Lucas’ youthfulness makes him an object of our compassion, particularly as he struggles to free himself and stand up to the predatory Fr. Mejor. Audience identification with Lucas is much stronger in this part of the film. Fr. Mejor is certainly the center of the film’s controversy and also the insightful and problematic depiction of a child molester. Throughout The Hearing, we are kept thoroughly off balance, not only by Fajardo’s style which tends to throw us into scenes with few establishing shots, but also by the impossibility of identifying with any of the characters. The establishing shot helps the audience to define and locate themselves within the logic of the film’s diegetic space. The lack of establishing shots keeps the viewer on edge and adds to the subtle discomfort provoked by the film. The Hearing has the dramatic pull of a muckraking thriller revealing something both sinister and ineffable. Although Fr. Mejor is brought to trial, he is neither healed nor forgiven. Lucas manages to testify, but we are left with no sense of either triumph or revenge. 

     The Hearing does not offer us any comfortable assurances about the future and by avoiding closure, it even implies that this kind of crime does not go away. In a film which consistently violates convention, this may be the most difficult truth of all to face. The Hearing is a provocative film inhabited by characters grappling with moral dilemmas in very recognizable and realistic ways. With its highly impassioned tale, The Hearing transcends the earnest weight of its subject through the sympathy it displays for the predicament of its characters. Utilizing his cast of actors, Fajardo resists going too far into their personal lives and never diverts away from the central story. The actors’ unique idiosyncrasies add small yet significant quirks that create the illusion of character depth. Not much about their lives appears onscreen, but the excellent performances make it seem like we’re seeing more than we are. Elsewhere, in dueling lawyer roles, Atty. Francisco Salvador plays Fr. Mejor’s defender while Joel Torre is Prosecutor Alejandro Mariano, who devotes his life to doing the right thing, a particularly difficult quality to come by in this setting. Maya (Ina Feleo), the sign language interpreter is torn by conflicting expectations and contradictory feelings. Fortunately, what remains important is telling the truth in the here and now. Fajardo's sobering drama affects on multiple levels, from personal to spiritual. The Hearing suggests that the cloistered atmosphere of celibacy, guilt and discipline has helped foster a pattern of depravity is not likely to go over well in many quarters. All the more reason why this film should be seen. In The Hearing, artistry and conscience are emanations of the same cleansing, darkly truthful spirit. 

Screenplay: Lawrence Fajardo, Honeylyn Joy Alipio

Director of Photography: Roberto "Boy" Yñiguez

Editors: Lawrence Fajardo, Ysabelle Denoga

Production Designers: Ian Traifalgar, Endi "Hai" Balbuena

Musical Scorer: Peter Legaste, Joaquin Santos

Sound Design: Jannina Mikaela Minglanilla, Michaela Docena

Directed By: Lawrence Fajardo

 

     Decrying film clichés is easy. Replacing them with something worthwhile is much harder. Tropes become tropes because they’re often the straight-line, natural-feeling answer to common story problems. How to make a character relatable, an arc satisfying or a story tidy. While storytellers who try to dodge well-worn, familiar narratives deserve recognition for trying harder, the road to hell isn’t the only one paved with good intentions. Films like When I Met You in Tokyo (JG Productions Inc., 2023) show that avoiding safe, lazy choices isn’t enough to make a strong film. It’s necessary to make decisive and meaningful choices as well. Filmmakers Conrado Peru, Rommel Penesa and writer Suzette Doctolero have their hearts in the right place. They’ve created a film about senior citizens that acknowledges them as people, not pathos machines or wisdom dispensers. They focus on female friendships without making them catty or fickle. They avoid cheap melodrama, big life lessons and predictability. But while they’re steering clear of so many pitfalls, they don’t give the impression that they’re steering in any specific direction. The film is a parade of barely connected events, presided over by a barely connected protagonist. Even among a great ensemble of actors, Christopher de Leon stands out. Joey's no-fuss amusement and gentlemanly version of macho come closest to making the film feel distinctive, instead of droning. He sells the romance well. It’s easy to see why Azon (Vilma Santos) allows him into her life, given how he rolls up with a compliment and an insouciant smirk. The film is at its best when exploring Azon and Joey’s comfortable rapprochement, which comes with more affable curiosity than longing or passion. It’s a film that never exits its holding pattern, no matter what else happens. 

     In When I Met You in Tokyo's case, friendships between older people tend to focus more on a congenial present than digging into each other’s pasts or how inter-gender friendships become easier with age. Santos's performance can be savored for its subtlety, but even that robs the budding romance of its spark. Other than that, the film lacks any visual snap or panache to offset the tonal and narrative blandness. At best, it’s a reasonably sweet, unchallenging character piece that won’t insult older viewers by reflecting them poorly or shallowly. That feels like an accomplishment in itself. But in its relentless lack of significant affect or movement, When I Met You in Tokyo attempts to find a balance between the stimulatingly new and the comfortably familiar. Highly polished yet never quite slick, the film devolves into cartoonish cutesiness with its broadly drawn minor characters, as in a heavy-handed sequence in which Azon and her girlfriends behave like superannuated teenagers. But the main actors' emotional authenticity keeps the story from drowning in unfunny shtick or facile wish-fulfillment. It hangs on a screenplay as random as a dream. It drifts to and fro, leaning too hard on the sparkle provided by its veteran cast, never quite settling on what it wants to say or do. There is a central moment where When I Met You in Tokyo hits a tremendous peak of displayed beauty. That is when Joey steps up to the mic and belts out a rendition of the APO Hiking Society's When I Met You that will leave you speechless. Through song, you feel every ounce of the passionate balance between Joey's independence and loneliness. You see what he was and what he could still be. De Leon's solo is a dynamite moment that the rest of the film cannot match. The few good comedic elements doesn't fit the rest of the film and its weighty take on mortality and love at an advanced age detracts from the heft of what could have been a bigger, bolder dramatic statement or a fuller and more involving romance. When I Met You in Tokyo is one of those screenplays that might have been more interesting a couple of drafts ago, before the detours were closed off. And yet, when Santos’s Azon shares scenes with De Leon’s determined suitor, there’s considerable charm in the results. As When I Met You in Tokyo reminds us, Santos and De Leon are masters in the art of turning ordinary material into little bits of truth and life.

Sound: Armand de Guzman, Fatima Nerikka Salim, Immanuel Verona

Music: Jessie Lasaten

Editors: Froilan Francia, Karla Diaz

Production Designers: Buboy Tagayon, Rey Peru

Screenplay: Suzette Doctolero

Director of Photography: Shayne Sarte, LPS

Directors: Conrado Peru, Rommel Penesa

     Bernal's greatness as a director rested principally in that improvisatory brilliance, in his uncanny knack with actors. In a cast so large and uniformly superb, it seems unfair to pick any of them out even though Gina Pareño is the one who is handed a big, virtuoso, movie-stealing dialogue. It also lies in Bernal’s ability to free up an entire company to do their best work, his unique obsession with the whole process of making movies, the fact that he wouldn’t quit, no matter what. Appropriately, he won back the spotlight in the most impudent way possible, by laying bare the excesses and hypocrisies of Makati itself. Working Girls is one of those marriages of seeming opposites that works. What Bernal does by placing these people in another of his rich, boisterously populated collage films, is to show how every city (especially Makati) is, in a way, a community of the isolated. Bernal may even give us more of a sense of truth than the stories alone, because they recognize more of the absurd and terrible interconnections of life, the consequences that most of us choose to ignore. Part of the films' greatness, which is one of the triumphs of contemporary moviemaking, lies in the inclusiveness of its portrait, the way it gives such an omniscient sense of character, of milieu. And part also lies in Working Girls’ recognition that nothing in life is ever resolved, that there are no happy endings, but virtually no endings at all. Bernal likes the messiness and coincidence of real life, where you can do your best and some days it's just not good enough. Working Girls understands and knows because it is filmed from an all-seeing point of view. Its characters sometimes cross paths, but for the most part they don't know how their lives are changed by people they meet only glancingly. Some of these characters, would find the answers to their needs, yet these people have a certain nobility to them. They keep on trying and hope for better times. 

Sound Supervision: Vic Macamay

Musical Director: Willie Cruz

Production Designer: Benjie de Guzman

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Director of Photography: Manolo R. Abaya, FSC

Screenplay: Amado L. Lacuesta, Jr.

Directed By: Ishmael Bernal

     Overused and much misused, the word provocative has become a double-edged sword, especially when swung in the direction of Filipino independent cinema. At its best, the genuinely provocative film, off the top of my head, shocks in order to expand our vision of the world it encompasses. At its most dispiriting, it's an exercise in cheap thrills, designed to goose a presumptively stuffy bourgeois audience while positioning a director as some sort of iconoclast and Jun Robles Lana has no such excuse. The characters in Your Mother's Son (The IdeaFirst Company, Octobertrain Films, Quantum Films, Cineko Productions, 2023), belong in their own isolated little world that is self-absorbed and irresponsible. Lana and co-screenwriter Elmer Gatchalian come to the conclusion that some people would prefer to spend their days with those who are much younger, abandoning their social responsibilities and families. This is a film that seems divorced from any moral sensibilities. Your Mother's Son needed serious judgment: someone to have a firmer opinion on these terribly unappealing characters. It lacks plausible psychology and context for the film’s characters and their love circle. The performances from some normally reliable talents do little to strengthen our sympathy and help us understand them. As Sarah, Sue Prado has the hint of a beautiful woman aging, unused to such desperation in her loneliness. She is truly enigmatic, delivering a surprisingly strong and powerful performance for a film and a screenplay this superficial. Elora Españo (Amy) can convey nuance and quiet intelligence even when seeming to do nothing in particular. Both Kokoy de Santos (Emman) and Miggy Jimenez (Oliver) are given terribly uninteresting and inexpressive roles, spending most of the film underserviced by flat dialogue. There’s no sign of coltishness in either De Santos' or Jimenez’s performances. These characters don’t inhabit the real world: they remain lodged in this seaside idyll from beginning to end and whenever an opportunity is presented for them to leave. Your Mother's Son is poorly paced and concludes with an ending that is frustratingly detached from comprehensible human behavior and personal responsibility. There's a germ of genuine transgression to be located in this three-way affair and it has to do with the overlap between maternal and carnal love. But it's less explored here than it is sidelined. 

     Your Mother's Son is incredibly hard to watch. It's a completely illusory and nonsensical film and is one that would benefit greatly had Lana not taken the material quite so earnestly. The film needed to play on the frivolous nature of the premise in order to work or alternatively go completely the opposite way. It’s a messed up situation and if handled with more conviction and devastation it could be really affecting, yet we don’t get a sense for the severity of the scenario nor the destructive implications. It lingers nonchalantly between the two notions making this entire situation seem almost normal. The movie tacks hard into self-serious waters, piling on the consequences. We don’t get into any of the characters’ heads either, though to be honest, there isn’t particularly much going on inside any of them. Lana manages the trick of making sex joyless. Like porn, he tops that by draining his film of variety and longing. Within that framework, Lana makes some serious missteps. He always had a fondness for these kind of highly symbolic, far-fetched stories, but he still feels the need to give his characters more mundane motivations, to make us like them. It’s an understandable miscalculation and let’s applaud these two insanely talented actresses for gamely lending real vulnerability to these broken creatures, but it’s a catastrophic one, because it threatens to bring Your Mother's Son into the real world, and that’s not a realm where this story can survive. This sort of thing threatens to make the movie about sex and as far as I can tell, that’s not what it's up to. There’s a potentially interesting attempt here to explore without judgment why older women might be drawn into relationships with much younger men. Physical pleasure, reassurance and unencumbered freedoms that often vanish over the course of conventional long-term unions. But the film sticks to the surfaces right up to the climactic exposure. That makes these characters not much more than irresponsible narcissists living in self-satisfied isolation. The movie wants it both ways. It asks not to be judged by standards of realism, but then tries to inject realism and naturalism into its absurdist narrative. One imagines what other directors who deal in similarly symbolic, hermetically sealed environments could have done with this material. Lana, for all his talent and ambition, doesn’t seem up to the task; in the end, Your Mother's Son doesn’t quite go far enough.

Sound Engineer: Allen Roy Santos

Music: Teresa Barrozo

Editor: Benjie Tolentino

Production Design: Roy Roger Requejo

Director of Photography: Moises Zee

Screenplay: Jun Robles Lana, Elmer Gatchalian

Directed By: Jun Robles Lana

 

     Overly simplified and curiously uninvolving, Pula (Fire & Ice, CCM Film Productions, Centerstage Productions, 2023) is an example of how ruminative storytelling isn’t meant the way Brillante Mendoza presented it. He failed to make Pula into the emotionally echoing piece it could have been by drowning out the feelings with a garish and unfocused presentation. At once, the director is doing too much visually while not doing enough dramatically. Perhaps he could have let his characters do so as well. The biggest problem is that Mendoza pulls punches when it comes to content. Tricia (Christine Bermas) isn’t just simply murdered by Daniel (Coco Martin) she’s raped. Pula is a marathon of failed emotional connections. Caring about Tricia, beyond the basic empathy we feel for a murdered young girl, is almost impossible in her state in the film. Her presence has no meaning—she’s not lingering for any purpose communicated in her action. She just remains behind, if only to give the audience an excuse to watch her. Meanwhile, Tricia's parents Elena (Lotlot de Leon) and Canor (Alan Paule) spend their time brooding over their loss. At least Daniel is proactive about catching the killer. Although, Martin is clearly in over his head with the role and therein resides a problem. Mendoza isn’t quite sure if he wants to make a drama or if he wants to make a suspenseful thriller about catching a murderer. He doesn’t decide, so instead, Mendoza smashes the two together and neither receives full attention. Pula is all over, unfocused, unorganized and too poorly developed to convey the multitude of complex theories involved in the story. 

     This genial, celebratory interview with Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka interspersed with movie clips hits a note of excitable cinephilia throughout. Christian Blackwood examines the hows and whys behind Brocka's oeuvre in Signed: Lino Brocka (Christian Blackwood Productions, 1987) and what makes him worthy of serious attention. Blackwood decided to interview the director in person and let him discuss his filmography on screen with no other talking heads. This gives us Brocka’s unfiltered point of view. The director’s candid commentary reveals him to be a filmmaker who made movies and finds the right combination of style and substance. At least we now know why he did what he did. Nevertheless, Blackwood remains a cinema aficionado delivering a simple interview-style retrospective of Brocka’s life and career. What’s important here is movies – movies and yet more movies. Brocka’s personal life is given the occasional sidelong glance and there is an extraordinary moment when he confesses his coming out story. A staggering revelation that is mentioned briefly. There are no critics or film historians on hand to testify or tear down Brocka’s movies. None of his stars or screenwriters are interviewed to pay tribute. The entire interview was shot with Blackwood remaining off-camera, as this rather straightforward and linear account of Brocka proceeds with brief cutaways to his subject’s body of work. The documentary races a little too breezily through the earliest years of Brocka’s movie obsession. Whether he’s remarking on Eddie Garcia's over the top performance in Tubog sa Ginto (1971), his stories are fascinating, sometimes providing new insight into a film, showcasing the director’s unexpected honesty about his work. 

     Perhaps the most interesting aspects of Signed: Lino Brocka involve his discussions about censorship and the Marcoses. If there’s a worthy criticism about Brocka, it’s that the documentary does not thoroughly investigate how he’s been perceived. It’s a fascinating career overview (backed by ample clips, of course), as he talks about his critical breakout with 1974's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, his commercial success and box office failures. Blackwood puts Brocka in front of the camera and allows him to talk frankly and in depth about his journey through the Philippine movie industry. He explains single shots that bring the viewer into the moment while revealing an ever-changing perspective. What makes Signed: Lino Brocka an exciting and instructive film in its own right is that its subject is able to analyze his films from an emotional remove. That’s not to say he isn’t proud of what he made or that he’s overly self-critical. But he’s very rational with regard to what they are and what they achieved. The interesting thing is that he has insights on how every creative decision was made. Of course, not every movie Brocka made was great, but we emerge with a profound understanding of a singularly talented, creative filmmaker who invested himself fully in everything he did and whose work merits a second look. It becomes clear that nothing in his cinema is left to chance. The film’s focus on the work of its subject and desire to learn more from it is what really makes it worth watching. Signed: Lino Brocka is an entertaining portrait of a filmmaker that changed a generation.

Produced and Directed By: Christian Blackwood

Cinematography: Christian Blackwood

Editor: Monika Abspacher

Music: Michael Riesman

Sound: John Murphy

     Dahas (MAQ Productions Inc., 1995) with Maricel Soriano, has two things that separate it from the pack of thrillers on the shelves: It's almost unbearably tense and it has the biggest visceral kick, capable of inspiring bloodlust in otherwise peaceful viewers. Seeing this movie, about a woman on the run from an abusive husband, makes us want to see Soriano lay him out. To maintain that emotional pitch, it's not enough for a movie to simply show a man smacking a woman. Everything has to work and it does. Chito Roño's cunning direction squeezes every drop of suspense from every setup. Most of all, it's the screenplay by Roy C. Iglesias that transforms an arresting premise into a thriller of significance. Iglesias' most important inspiration was in the writing of Jake, the husband, who is not a routine psycho sprouting devil horns on his honeymoon. Jake (Richard Gomez), operates with an unlimited sense of personal entitlement. He enters the life of Luisa (Soriano), like a toxic Prince Charming, sweeps her off her feet and portrays himself as a rescuer. If Jake were the husband from hell, Dahas would be a monster movie. Instead he's a fellow we recognize, a kind of man we might know, one who prides himself on getting what he wants, whose self-conception is tied up with his willingness to go to any length to succeed. Jakes are everywhere and that alone gives Dahas a modest social importance. 

     Soriano, playing a damaged soul, conveys a sense of that pain and when Jake hits her for the first time, we feel her terror. Gomez is chillingly twisted and the film is poised to make an effective dramatic statement. Tonton Gutierrez brings an edge to Eric, Luisa's knight in shining armor. Dahas does it by the numbers, albeit with style and has the requisite chase scenes, escapes and near-escapes and a suspenseful finale. Roño uses the same structure, in which a man victimizes a woman for the first half of the film and turns the tables in an extended sequence of graphic violence. The movie, in time-honored horror movie tradition doesn't allow Jake to really be dead the first time. There is a plot twist showing that Luisa can't really kill him--she's the heroine, after all--and then he lurches back into action like the slasher in many an exploitation movie. Dahas has a certain internal logic. Its wife-battering scenes characterize the movie's head-banging aesthetic. Through stealthy camera movements and an abrasively jumpy soundtrack, Dahas does a better job than most movies of sustaining a mood of palpable physical menace, then confirming your worst fears. From this point on, Dahas becomes agonizingly suspenseful and nerve-racking.

Sound Engineering: Audio Post

Production Designer: Jeffrey Jeturian

Supervising Editor: Ever V. Ramos

Film Editor: Jaime B. Davila

Director of Photography: Charlie S. Peralta

Music Composed By: Jessie Lasaten

Screenplay: Roy C. Iglesias

Directed By: Chito Roño

     What Vilma Santos achieves in Maryo J. de los Reyes' Tagos ng Dugo (VH Films, 1987) isn't a performance but an embodiment. With courage, art and charity, she empathizes with Josepina Ramos Regala, a damaged woman who simply asks that we witness a woman's final desperate attempt to be a better person than her fate intended. The performance is so focused and intense that it becomes a fact of life. Observe the way Santos controls her eyes in the film; there is not a flicker of inattention, as she urgently communicates what she is feeling and thinking. There's the uncanny sensation that Santos has forgotten the camera and the screenplay and is directly channeling her ideas about Pina. She has made herself the instrument of this character. Her transformation into a street prostitute, where she strides into the shadows before stepping forward to talk with Cesar Garcia (Miguel Rodriguez), a handsome young man who has found her in a strip mall after dark. I was simply watching one of the most real people I had ever seen on the screen. Pina's initial kill is justifiable. Having been raped as a child, she uses the knife in self-defense. Pina’s victims become progressively more innocent, with one simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. With a dying conscience, she dispatches Edwin (Michael de Mesa) and seals her fate. De Los Reyes presents the killings in a straightforward manner. Although we understand Pina's reasoning, we neither sympathize nor empathize with her. 

     It’s devastating the way director Jerry Lopez Sineneng depicted how the domino-effect destruction of Rita (Vivamax, 2024) came within milliseconds of never happening. Rita (Christine Bermas) could pick up and perish the idea of sleeping with her husband Ariel's (Victor Relosa) best friend, Royce (Josh Ivan Morales). Sineneng has never been much for subtlety, but he understands that the psychology of erotic fantasy has as much potential to obliterate as to titillate. Rita never arouses, judges or mounts a morality play: It’s a dark, delusional piece of sultry fantasia that doesn’t condemn or condone Ariel or Rita’s choices. It simply presents people surprised by the ease with which they transgress and allow little white lies to fester into tumorous deceptions. Sineneng pulls out all the stops to display his lovers' erotic trysts. Playing down his handsomeness, Relosa invests Ariel with such palpable hurt. It’s such an emotionally naked performance, couched in understatement. Other strong performances are offered by Morales whose character is both repulsive and mysterious (that is part of his allure). Royce's charm is a convincing temptation and an interesting choice for Rita's dalliance. Perhaps the most balanced character is Rita's younger brother Marlon, played sensitively by Gold Aceron. As the confused and guilt-stricken Rita, Bermas is asked to run the full spectrum of emotions, from unexpected joy to emptiness to heartbreak and every step is a performance of blistering intensity.