Caught between rural roots and urban opportunities, familial duty, friendship and forbidden carnal desire, young San Kyi (Nandar Myat Aung) struggles to find her place in Fruit Gathering, a sensitive Myanmar-Czechia-France co-production that just won Karlovy Vary’s top prize.

That’s an impressive achievement for Burmese writer-director Aung Phyoe, making his feature debut after several shorts. His flair for blending realist drama with more poetic, painterly imagery makes for a dreamy, hypnotic viewing experience, eased along by a confident, open-hearted performance from Nandar Myat Aung in the lead role. Fruit Gathering will be ripe for picking at further festivals, especially ones specializing in Asian and/or LGBTQ+ fare, possibly followed by niche distribution.

Self-transplanted with her mother (Tin Tin Ei) and grandmother from the countryside to industry-rich Yangon, San Kyi has so far managed to resist the pressure from her mom to get married or pursue a career in something upmarket like tech. Instead, eager for a job that doesn’t demand too much thinking, San Kyi works in a massive clothing factory, sewing seams all day in a ferociously noisy, scrap-strewn environment where the supervisor gets snotty if she takes a bathroom break without seeking permission first.

Incidentally, while the factory hardly looks inviting, the conditions don’t seem to be too bad compared to those seen in older documentaries about East and South Asian sweatshops. They’re comparable to what’s on display in, say, Chinese director Wang Bing’s doc Youth but without the company-owned residential housing. At least the workers are allowed to submit petitions circulated by labor organizers requesting better pay and more safety measures, although tellingly San Kyi refuses to sign lest she might get fired for it. A union leader (Wutt Yee Kyaw) pours scorn on her for not showing more solidarity with her colleagues.

Later, after she’s injured herself by a sewing accident, San Kyi will rethink her position on workers’ rights, but industrial relations in the textile industry are not the film’s main focus. It’s all background color, as much a part of the vivid landscape as the interludes where we see San Kyi back home visiting the mango farms and spirit-dance ceremonies of her agrarian childhood.  

At least it’s at this factory that San Kyi meets Theint Theint Oo (Nandar Myint Lwin), a young co-worker around the same age as San Kyi with a radiant smile and street sense to burn. The two young women start out just hanging together during their lunch breaks but soon grow inseparable. The script suggests early on that Theint Theint may be the kind of pal who always forgets to bring enough cash for dinner. A darker interpretation might posit that she sees San Kyi as little more than a mark, but the truth probably falls somewhere in a grayer area.

Either way, by the time San Kyi is buying nearly identical blouses for the two of them to wear on strolls around town, it’s pretty clear that she’s smitten with Theint Theint. The latter is ambiguously flirtatious and keen to have languid girls’ night sleepovers in the same bed, but also open about the fact that she’s got a man in the background, who is conveniently always away working in another country. Afraid of losing her new limerent object of desire, San Kyi entertains the thought of going abroad with Theint Theint to work as housekeepers or factory workers in somewhere affluent like Singapore or Malaysia.

Clearly, things are heading for a smash up when San Kyi lends Theint Theint a substantial amount of money. Somehow the tension is heightened by the fact that Theint Theint gets closer to San Kyi’s family, even accepting a job offer that comes through the local guy whom San Kyi’s mom was trying to set San Kyi up with as a potential husband. It all serves to underscore how narrowly female relationships are usually defined in highly traditional, painfully patriarchal Myanmar society. The intense feeling between these two young women could never be openly romantic, although no one bats an eye when they walk hand and hand through the streets, much the way Queen Victoria is said to have refused to sign legislation banning lesbianism because she wouldn’t acknowledge such a thing even existed.

Aung Phyoe suggests the messy, uncontrollable nature of desire via some slightly heavy-handed imagery of flooded apartments and generally juicy, watery, somewhat soluble imagery. But the story surprisingly shifts tack halfway through and becomes less interested in the two women’s relationship and more in San Kyi’s personal development, especially after some hard knocks change how she sees the world.

Every so often, the camera will linger on a tiny detail like a vase that has some emotional significance, or the light coming in a window. There’s a tiny hint that these cinematic still life pictures are being seen through San Kyi’s eyes, like scenes in a book told through limited third-person point of view. Indeed, there’s a faintly literary quality to the filmmaking, as if inspired by romance and high-brow fiction, but Aung Phyoe’s touch is feathery soft, as gentle as the soft thud of a mango falling from a tree.

The new comedy film The Invite centers on an unhappy married couple who host another couple — they live upstairs — for an uncomfortable, and revelatory, evening of dinner and charcuterie. The film’s screenwriters, Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, are actors who are also longtime writing and producing partners.

Jones and McCormack met decades ago, when McCormack’s sister (actor Mary McCormack) set them up on a date. It didn’t work out as a romantic pairing. Instead, it was the start of a long-running creative partnership.

“We’re really like brother and sister who dated briefly, which is not weird,” McCormack jokes. “I think we both knew right from the very beginning that we were connected and that we had to be in each other’s lives. And it took us a minute to sit down to write, but finally we did, and I’m so glad we did.”

Jones says she and McCormack share a voice: “The two of us have the same clip, the same rhythm, and we’re so different in so many ways, but we just kind of like fit like puzzle pieces conversationally very quickly, which is a wonderful thing to have with a writing partner.”

Inspired by the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, The Invite takes place over the course of one night in a chicly appointed apartment in San Francisco. Two couples gather for dinner, and as the evening unfolds, the stories they’ve been telling themselves about their relationships and about themselves fall apart.

McCormack describes the film as a sex comedy that’s not really about sex. “It’s about wanting to be seen and heard and valued,” he says. “You live with someone for so long and it’s really hard.”

Jones says it’s no accident that their work tends to focus on relationships and middle age: “Selfishly, it’s great that we can channel the thing we’re most interested in, which is relationships, living with other people, being parents, losing parents, being alive, getting older, being middle-aged, looking straight down the barrel of the back half of life. All these things we got to bring to this script.”

Way back in 2017 I reviewed a film called Demon Hunter (which was recently rereleased as Taryn Barker Demon Hunter), a moody character driven horror action hybrid that I enjoyed very much. After a very long wait, a sequel, Demon Hunter: Time 2 Kill, has finally been released in the world.

Read on for my thoughts on the film

Synopsis

Taryn Barker is just your average everyday monster slaying, wise-cracking, demon hunter on the hunt for two pieces of an ancient artifact, The Necrox. Standing in her way is Elysia Cronika, the CEO of Illumini Industries and a member of the Satanic sect The Stygian.

Cronika plans to obtain the Necrox to unleash Hell on Earth. The problem is Taryn is hard to kill and with every demon sent to eliminate the demon hunter getting wiped out, she gets closer to saving the day.

As a last resort, Cronika sends Taryn through time alongside a band of innocent teenagers to the year 1987 and now Taryn needs to protect the group from a notorious summer camp slasher Lucien Krull, whilst finding the Necrox and a way back home to the present

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Demon Hunter: Time 2 Kill was written and directed by Zoe Kavanagh. The film stars Niamh Hogan, Lisa Wilcox, Angel Nichole Bradford, Kevin O’Malley, Anthony Cespedes, CJ Dorsey, Valeria Arango Gomez, Jada Krueger and Desiree Xu.

After all these years, it was nice to see Taryn Barker return. She’s a little less moody and more grown up and she has a stronger sense of humor. One thing that hasn’t changed is that she’s an absolute badass. I was really impressed with the increased action, fight scenes and stunt work. Niamh Hogan does a great job as Taryn. She kills it at the fight scenes, she’s got great comedic timing and she’s just genuinely fun to watch.

I was really happy to see Kevin O’Malley return as Ethan, as I felt he was one of the strongest characters in the first film and I really enjoyed his chemistry with Taryn. He’s given a lot more to do here and that was exciting. The cast includes a lot of new additions and there was definitely some highlights.

Angel Nichole Bradford (one of my absolute favorite indie actresses) plays Deborah, a character who shares a sisterly energy with Taryn. I loved the way they looked out for each other and always had each other’s back. Enea Pagni’s Jay and Jacob Rainer’s Lawrence were 2 characters I was able to root for. I loved their friendship. Last but not least is Desiree Xu’s Azumi, a demonology expert who is also a ninja. She was definitely a badass and I loved seeing her work together with Ethan.

The story here is much different than the first film, including time travel and a strong slasher element, which I really enjoyed. It gave Demon Hunter: Time 2 Kill a unique feel and set it apart from the first film. Given the slasher elements, it’s much gorier than the original film, which is sure to please those who enjoy that sort of thing. I loved how the film ended and am curious to potentially see where the series could go from here.

Final Thoughts 

Demon Hunter: Time 2 Kill is an excellent sequel that increases the action, has some well executed fight scenes and ups the body count. Demon Hunter: Time 2 Kill is supernatural slasher/action film that is well worth a checking out. Highly recommended.