Aryan Tauqeer Khawaja

20. International Film Researcher, Critic and Workshop Producer at UK-China Film Collab.

Sundance London 2023: The Doom Generation

Originally published 07/07/23 on Letterboxd GOD IS DEAD AND NO ONE CARES IF THERE IS A HELL I’LL SEE YOU THERE Remains the most violently horny film I’ve ever seen. Araki draws from the semiotics of queer literature and Old Hollywood so often and so liberally,

Crash

Originally published 02/07/23 on Letterboxd Watching this while exhausted at 3:30 am merely heightens its already potent somnambulant qualities. As with every Cronenberg this only reveals itself more with time, but what I was struck by this time around was less to do with the steeliness of

No Hard Feelings

Originally published on 27/06/23 on Letterboxd Don’t have much to say about this one besides the obligatory “JLaw please crush my windpipe with a sledgehammer” but I liked this quite a bit. Surprisingly sweet (but not saccharine) throwback to the now-extinct sex comedy that handles the technical

Bastards

Originally published 21/06/23 on Letterboxd “Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same

Apocalypse Now

Originally published 18/06/23 on Letterboxd Some words I wrote in relation to Assayas’ Demonlover here, which continue to apply to this horrifyingly singular work: In 1987, Jean Baudrillard published his continuation of his discussion of the image introduced in his seminal Simulacra and Simulation. Titled The Evil Demon

The Flash

Originally published on Letterboxd on 14/05/23 Truly awe-inspiring in the degree of pure incompetence and resignation from everyone involved that it embodies. This is a Grand Guignol carousel of computer-generated abominations, each more conjured with more cynicism than the last. There are moments where it seems truly confounding

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Originally published on Letterboxd on 09/05/23 Went to see this because I was feeling mildly suicidal, needed a distraction of some sort and the place playing it was nearby, so in that regard- not bad! (though by the fifth time someone in the film uttered the word “canon”

Mildred Pierce

Originally published on Letterboxd on 08/05/23 Think my experience of seeing my first Joan Crawford picture in a theatre- something I was looking forward to immensely- was discoloured by receiving an extremely unfortunate piece of news right as it was about to begin, as well as being informed

Coming to you live from the apocalypse: The potent paranoia of Gregg Araki’s Nowhere

Originally published on 05/06/23 for Little White Lies Article available at above link.

Berlinale 2023: ‘Afire’ Review

Originally published on 26/05/23 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal In 1938, the first edition of Gustav Schwab’s Sagen des klassischen Altertums (Gods and Heroes: Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece), was published, becoming almost immediately a key text on the guiding myths

Berlinale 2023: ‘Passages’ Review

Originally published on 26/05/23 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal One of the first distinct sounds amidst a background of chatter in Ira Sachs’ Passages is that of a clapperboard. A line delivery is repeated-nay, hammered– into the ground until the imperious director overseeing

Berlinale 2023: ‘BlackBerry’ Review

Originally published on 26/05/23 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal At the centre of Matt Johnson’s long-awaited followup to Operation Avalanche is a shiny, gleaming surface- one that often acts as the sole form of light illuminating both drab corporate boardrooms and the

Beau is Afraid

Originally published on Letterboxd on 16/05/23 Aster’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Obviously owes much of its existence to Kaufman and the Coens, and it certainly doesn’t shy away from brazen pastiche of Twain and Roth, but the degree to which Aster projects his neuroses onto

Some Things Are Beyond Forgiveness

Originally published on Letterboxd on 12/05/23 “The feeling of being forgiven by another and forgiving oneself are so much alike, there's no point in trying to keep them distinct”. In the text of JG Ballard’s science fiction, there is often a seemingly universal acknowledgment that

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Originally published on Letterboxd on 04/05/23 “Comes an age in a man's life when he don't wanna spend time figuring what comes next…” Ruthlessly self-reflexive as a western- as swift and brutal as the bloodshed is here, the archetypical Peckinpah journey towards the abyss

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Originally published on Letterboxd on 05/05/23 He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and

The Counselor

Originally published on 29/04/23 on Letterboxd “Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A

The Passenger

Originally published on 27/04/23 on Letterboxd “At first he was elated... Really high. Faces... Colors... Landscapes. But then everything began to change. The world was much poorer than he imagined. No one had ever told him how much dirt there was. How much ugliness. He noticed ugliness everywhere.

The Box

Originally published on 16/04/23 on Letterboxd Obviously had high expectations for purely its conceptual commitment going in, but even seeing Southland Tales couldn’t have prepared me for the immensity of what Kelly accomplishes here- not a mere pastiche of The Twilight Zone and the 70s conspiracy thriller,

John Wick: Chapter 4

Originally published on 27/03/23 on Letterboxd Was extremely sceptical of the idea that these could only improve the more they expanded their scope (something that Parabellum, for all its panicked manic all-nighter energy, largely failed to live up to by virtue of accumulating so much directionless exposition that

Maps to the Stars

Originally published on 18/03/23 on Letterboxd Makes perfect sense that at his most perversely horrifying, Cronenberg would also be at his funniest. Perhaps not as ornate as the jagged poetry of DeLillo in Cosmopolis, but the unadulterated bluntness of Wagner’s screenplay is so much more brutal when

Tenet

Originally published on 10/03/23 on Letterboxd COWBOY SHIT Finally seeing this the way I’ve wanted to see it for 3 years has probably rewired my brain in irreversible and disastrous ways. As much as I admire Interstellar’s sweeping cosmic melodrama, there’s really nothing in that

Knock at the Cabin

“Always together.” He did it again. Easily one of the most distressing things I’ve ever seen. Shyamalan is one of my favourite working directors, and I would’ve expected nothing less than something impeccably taut that extracts as much agony from all the potential implications of the impossibilities he

Didn't You Feel Triumphant? On Tár and Guilt

For better or worse, this is one of the few post-2010/post-image-hypersaturation films (along with Gone Girl and The Card Counter) to render, in all their prickly and discomforting detail, the conditions of modernity that transform the painful process of creating an identity into a branding exercise- that, for lack

The Rules of Attraction

Originally published on 16/12/22 on Letterboxd Gregg Araki for straight people. Deeply crass, in bad-taste and mostly abandons any of the (sparse) humanising qualities of Ellis' novel in favour of dialing up the ruthlessness of its satire and just generally making everyone twice as sociopathic. Probably one