A look at the final moments of a Las Vegas dive bar called ‘The Roaring 20s’. (fictional non-fiction)
Depicting the final day of a hangdog hangout called the Roaring 20’s, located well off of the plastic fantastic glitz of the Las Vegas strip, the film makes you wonder if gentrification is even the right term for whatever is going on here. Diving into this doco is a bit like hanging around in Star Wars’ Mos Eisley cantina long after Luke, Han and the gang have gone, leaving a slain bounty hunter and a severed arm behind them. (timeout)
“Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” might have been inspired by 2016, but it embodies 2020. (indiewire)
timespace coordinates: the near future: the sun has become so toxic people can no longer leave their houses in daytime, and normal life is conducted mostly inside the virtual realm. a dying man seeks to ensure the future well-being of his family, while coping with what it means to be human in this new reality. Director: Guy Moshe
timespace coordinates: The film is partially presented in a found footage format by featuring fictional interviews, news footage, and video from surveillance cameras. The story, which explores themes of humanity, xenophobia and social segregation, begins in an alternate1982, when an alien spaceship appears over Johannesburg, South Africa. When a population of sick and malnourished insectoid aliens are discovered on the ship, the South African government confines them to an internment camp called District 9. Twenty years later, during the government’s relocation of the aliens to another camp, one of the confined aliens named Christopher Johnson, who is about to try to escape from Earth with his son and return home, crosses paths with a bureaucrat leading the relocation named Wikus van der Merwe. The title and premise of District 9 were inspired by events in Cape Town‘s District Six, during the apartheid era.
timespace coordinates: In 1990, Johannesburg is home to a number of extraterrestrial refugees, whose large spaceships (estimated to be nearly one kilometre in length) can be seen hovering above the city. When the visitors first arrived, the human population was enamored with, among other aspects, the aliens’ advanced “bio-suits”, and welcomed them with open arms. However, the aliens later began moving into other areas of the city, committing crimes in order to survive and frequently clashing with police. Playing as a documentary, the film continues with interviews and footage taken from handheld cameras, which highlight the growing tension between Earth’s civilian population and the extraterrestrial visitors.
According to individuals “interviewed” in the film, the aliens were captive labour (slaves or indentured servants), forced to live in “conditions that were not good” and had escaped to Earth. Because the film takes place in 1990, while apartheid was still in effect in South Africa, the aliens were forced to live amongst the already-oppressed black population, causing conflict with them as well as the non-white and white populations.
All of the interview statements which do not explicitly mention extraterrestrials were taken from authentic interviews with many South Africans who had been asked their opinions of Zimbabwean refugees. (wiki)
District 13: Ultimatum, also known as D13-U (French: Banlieue 13 – Ultimatum or B13-U), is a 2009 French action film and a sequel to the 2004 film District 13. Directed by Patrick Alessandrin and written and produced by Luc Besson, the film sees parkour artists David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli reprising their original roles of Leïto and Damien. (wiki)
The Irish Times wrote: “the film offers a fascinating and timely blueprint for political dissent, a methodology that connects with pamphleteering, graffiti, and memes.” (wiki)
Originally conceived by Wong as the third story for 1994’s Chungking Express, it was cut after he decided that it was complete without it. He instead decided to develop the story further into its own feature film and borrowed elements of Chungking Express, such as themes, locations and methods of filming. Wanting to also try to differentiate it from Chungking and to try something new, Wong decided along with cinematographer Christopher Doyle to shoot mainly at night and using extreme wide-angle lenses, keeping the camera as close to the talents as possible to give a detached effect from the world around them.
In an interview, Wong had this to say:
…To me, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long. I always think these two films should be seen together as a double bill. In fact, people asked me during an interview for Chungking Express: “You’ve made these two stories which have no relationship at all to each other, how can you connect them?” And I said,‘The main characters of Chungking Express are not Faye Wong or Takeshi Kaneshiro, but the city itself, the night and day of Hong Kong. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong.” I see the films as inter-reversible, the character of Faye Wong could be the character of Takeshi in Fallen Angels; Brigitte Lin in Chungking could be Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. All of their characters are inter-reversible. Also, in Chungking we were shooting from a very long distance with long lenses, but the characters seem close to us.
In the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote:
The acme of neo-new-wavism, the ultimate in MTV alienation, the most visually voluptuous flick of the fin de siècle, a pyrotechnical wonder about mystery, solitude, and the irrational love of movies that pushes Wong’s style to the brink of self-parody.
District 9 is a 2009 science fiction action film directed by 
TimeSpace Warps 