Tunnels: Sun in the Dark is a rarity in the West: a film about the Vietnam War told entirely from the perspective of the Viet…
As the Hong Kong film industry has been devoured by Mainland China, drawing its stars and directors away with the promise of big budgets and…
If you like Bone Tomahawk, Lucio Fulci’s Conquest, samurai poetry, and Yayan Ruhian being cool as hell, then there’s a new movie just screaming your…
One day, noticing an influx of dust into their apartment due to some construction outside, a person known only as an “academic ladyboy” (as they…
Sylvia Chang has been one of the more under-appreciated forces in international film for almost 50 years now. Beginning her career as an actress in…
While Taiwanese arthouse films have been regulars on the international festival circuit since the breakthroughs of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and the rest of the…
The best action movie franchise of the 2020s is about a couple of teenage slackers who, when they aren’t being incredibly lazy, work as hired…
The most reliable formula in action cinema today is having Ma Dong-seok one-punch a bunch of anonymous stuntmen into a wall. After hitting it big…
If anyone can make a great Cancel Culture movie, it would have to be Takashi Miike, right? Sham is based on a true story, a…
Attention: this one’s for all the Obayashi heads out there. Daigo Matsui’s Rewrite begins in a place we know well: a high school girl named…
A young man named Ibuki (played by multi-hyphenate star Raul), styled as a “bad boy” because of, presumably, his dyed-blonde hair and dangling earrings, is…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies…
It’s been over a decade now since I caught Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture at the Vancouver Film Festival. The director’s chronicle of his memories…
Comparisons to Everything Everywhere All at Once seem inevitable in the early buzz on Yang Li’s Escape from the 21st Century. The TIFF program guide…
Director July Jung’s first film, 2014’s A Girl at My Door, starred Bae Doona as a policewoman who gets transferred to a small fishing village…
There are two kinds of cinephile: those who hear a movie described as “Black Swan on ice” and sneer, noses upturned, their one-line, one-and-a-half star…
At first, Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia seems to be just another entry in what this writer is calling Millennium Mambo-core, after the growing yet…
In 2001, Jia Zhangke made Unknown Pleasures, in which Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao Qiao who tries to make a living as a…
It may be somewhat surprising to learn that The Last Dance has become the highest-grossing (domestic) film in Hong Kong history, if only because we’re…
I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the world of…