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85 – 88. Mariquina, Sundalong Kanin, K’na the Dreamweaver and #Y, reviewed during Cinemalaya week.

89. Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer. Wonderfully weird and unsettling; Scarlett Johansson cements her iconhood as an alien sent to earth to seduce men. Who’s meat now?

90. The Search for Weng-Weng by Andrew Leavold. The best documentary on the Philippine film industry we’ve ever seen, by an Australian video store owner who’s gone on to become the expert on Pinoy pop cinema. This will be reviewed in full.

91. The Normal Heart by Ryan Murphy. Mark Ruffalo is ferocious as an early AIDS activist. When the pandemic was first detected in the early 80s, no one wanted to address it, not even the people at risk, because they thought it would curtail the rights they had fought so hard to obtain. Should be required viewing now that HIV infection is on the rise. Maybe people need to be scared all over again.

92. Veronica Mars by Rob Thomas. Yes, the movie funded via Kickstarter. Closure for the audience left hanging when the TV series was cancelled. A long time ago, we used to be a fan but we haven’t thought of it lately at all. Starring Kristen Bell as Veronica and that guy remembered mostly as Logan, with Krysten Ritter who was Jesse’s girlfriend who OD’d on Breaking Bad. Lots of people with small roles on the TV show went on to big careers—Amanda Seyfried, Chris Pratt, Jessica Chastain among others.

93. The History Boys. We saw this seven, eight years ago at a last full show in Glorietta, and when the lights came on, 60 percent of the audience was made of people from our high school.

94. Coriolanus

95. The Gifted by Chris Martinez. Hilarious! That’s what to do the next time you are welcomed to a Japanese restaurant by waiters shouting Irrashiamase! in your face. Starring Anne Curtis in a fatsuit and Christine Reyes with prosthetics, The Gifted dishes out all the tropes and cliches of romantic movies, only to suddenly turn them on their head. It’s subversive. Yes, why are women made to fight each other when they should be working together? Why are women judged by their looks as if life were a perpetual beauty contest with an oogly board of judges? Anne Curtis is very funny as the overprivileged bitch, and it was a stroke of genius to give Sam Milby Manny Pacquiao’s accent.

96. Le Plaisir by Max Ophuls.

The film is based on three stories by Guy de Maupassant. In the first, an old man tries to recapture his vanished youth by going to a ball in a mask and dancing as if he were 20. In the second, the madam of the town brothel goes to the country to attend her niece’s first communion, taking her employees with her. In the third, a painter’s model shows herself to be a master of manipulation. Gorgeous.