Uninvited (Dan Villegas, 2024)

Gatecrasher

Dan Villegas' Uninvited (2024) with a script by Dodo Dayao is unashamed to flaunt its pulp-fiction credentials, everything from Tarantino's Kill Bill to Ferrara's Ms. 45 to Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood (from which Tarantino stole much of Kill Bill) to Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black-- the Woman Seeking Revenge flick is a suitably disreputable genre that merits revisiting time and time again, if only to allow a director to get his rocks off exercising his filmmaking chops. 

Isang Himala (A Miracle, Pepe Diokno, 2024)

It's a miracle

Let's get the million-peso question out of the way: from my limited perspective Isang Himala does not measure up to Ishmael Bernal's 1982 classic film, not quite, but does easily stand out as the best of the four films I saw at the 2024 Metro Manila Film Festival. 

"But how can this be?!" you ask. Well let me tell you.