"Show me an alternative, and I’ll take it. What I’m doing now is horrible, difficult, frightening, but I have to do it to save my own life. [...]"
-Donald E. Westlake, The Ax 1997

I'm not going to lie, this is a film that completely flew under my radar, until I heard the Oscar Drama around it. When I found out it was going to play in a cinema near me; you could say, I had No Other Choice but…

"In this town, winning is everything."
Between the 1990s and into the early 2000s Japan experience a complete economic crisis, known today as the Lost Decades. Unemployment rates rose to 5,5% in 2002 and corporations slashed hiring, forcing most youth into low paying, part time Jobs.

2LDK reflects these Japanese attitudes to the then very serious crisis. Tensions rise between two roommates, as both await a message from their producer for news on the role they both auditioned for. Both…

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust"
-T.S. Elliot, The Waste Land

With the hot summer sun currently brooding over my head, as summer break draws near, I decide to revisit the Yabba once again. The Australian outback seems like a magical place to me: desolate landscape, wild animals and of course, the greatest hurdle of all: the human mind.

When schoolteacher John Grant starts his journey, he intends on spending his few free weeks in Sydney,…

"Sorry, sir. Not much of a war. No Stalingrad."
In 1981, a young playwright sneaked into war-torn Afghanistan. Once there, he experienced the horrors of the conflict first-hand. He witnessed a particularly harrowing scene; a soviet tank crew being executed by a group of mujahideen warriors. So moved by the events he had witnessed first-hand, he immediately got to work on his next play after he left the country. The writer's name; William Mastrosimone, the play he wrote; Nanawatai.

While…