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…
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…
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…
Xu Haofeng makes movies for people who enjoy and understand the finer points of martial arts choreography. His best-known film work (he’s also a novelist)…
We truly are in a golden age of action cinema. From every corner of the globe, with budgets high, low, and in-between, remarkably fit men…
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…
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…
Norris Wong’s first feature film, My Prince Edward, was one of the better Hong Kong indie movies of recent years. It starred singer/actress Stephy Tang…