Frankie Chen's Fall in Love at First Kiss feels like a Wattpad adaptation from the getgo, and that makes sense since this is actually an adaptation of the Shoujo Manga Itazura na Kiss. And as such, the film is filled with tropes that will be familiar to fans of the genre: extremely segregated, class based private high schools (I'm looking at you, Ouran High School Host Club), bland, every(wo)man female protagonists (easy for audience self insert purposes) and cool, smug perfect pretty boy types with hearts of gold for multitudes of girls to swoon over.
Without the proper context, it's easy to misjudge some of the characters and their motivations; an outsider can interpret the film as a lovable idiot falling in love with a smug asshole who clearly doesn't want the attention. Or does he? In the film, the male lead's motivations are mostly a mystery until the very end, where his smugness hides cowardice and fear of the future. Whether that is enough or not to keep the ilm from being too problematic is up in the air.
That said, the film commits to its zaniness that there's a certain charm to it. It might not be the best movie out there, but Fall in Love at First Kiss is sufficiently entertaining fluff.
Alexandre O. Philippe's films have mostly been commentaries on film, whether it be a prescient analysis of (toxic) fandom and the appropriation of pop culture in The People vs. George Lucas, or an in depth analysis of a film through one scene like in 78/52. Memory: The Origins of Alien, is much more like the latter than the former, though it adds its own spin to the whole thing.
Memory delves into the life of the creative minds behind Alien: Dan O'Bannon, who wrote the script, Ridley Scott, who directed the film, and H.R. Giger, the man who designed the look of the titular Alien. The ilm makes the case that Alien's particular aesthetic and themes draw from a sort of cultural and mythohistorical memory, and that is why it has resonated with so many people then and now.
The film also uses Alien's most iconic scene - the chestburster scene - to explore the film as a whole, discussing how body horror on male characters can be an unconscious manifestation of patriarchal guilt, or how even in 1979 the film captured our hopes and fears for decades to come.
A teenager's coming of age is juxtaposed with a country's coming of age in Dominga Sotomayor's Too Late to Die Young.
Set in a rural community in Chile, at the very end of Pinochet's rule over the country, the film follows Sofia, a young girl who fiercely wants independence from her instrument maker father, Lucas who also starts dealing with his own burgeoning feelings, and Clara, who spends most of the film looking for her lost dog Frida.
Independence and change is seen as tempting, yet also frightening, a sea of uncertainty. Clinging to the past is also seen as folly, when replacing that which is already gone with something similar, but not quite the same, brings only misery and discontent.
The movie ends with a sort of ritual cleansing - either through fire or water - to mark the passage of one era into the next. And its final frames, mirroring one of its first sequences - that of a dog unleashed, running towards the future - encapsulates the promise and peril of times to come.
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