Ho Yuhang, a key filmmaker of the 2000s Malaysian New Wave, previously specialized in beautifully made and deliberately paced art films, ones that often dealt…
Telling the “true” story of murderous, drug-addicted Triad heavy-turned-sober, prolific rehabilitater of young gangster-addicts Peter Chan Shun-chi, Lawrence Lau’s Dealer/Healer belongs to that most enervating…
Street thug Fan (Neo Yau) lives fast as a hooligan with little regard for authority or his own life, regularly dealing with crooks and lawbreakers.…
Mikhail Red’s formally placid Filipino thriller Birdshot parallels the stories of a young girl, who mistakenly shoots an endangered bird on protected land, and a…
In the latest from Japanese cult actor/director Sabu, a stranger named Kanzaki (Masatoshi Nagase, perhaps most familiar to American audiences from Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train)…
For anyone who missed The Mole Song: Undercover Agent—Takashi Miike’s first adaptation of Noboru Takahashi’s manga series, Mogura no Uta—the opening minutes of its sequel don’t…
The 16th annual New York Asian Film Festival recently ended its two-week run. We’ve already published two dispatches from the fest—for our third and final one, we have a few…
In Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Over the Fence, Joe Odagiri plays Shiraiwa, an apparently lost man attempting to rebuild his life and studying carpentry at a vocational school he bicycles…
The stateside media-consuming public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for standup comedy product (The Comedian, Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, infinite podcasts) is the target audience of The…
Ninko (Masato Tsujioka) is just a dedicated monk who desires to live out his days committing himself to the teachings of Buddha. The only problem? Women…
After directing what may have been the worst film screened at last year’s Japan Cuts, director Eiji Uchida bounces back with the much more nuanced character…
Taira (Yuya Yagira) leaves his hometown and his little brother, Shota (Nijiro Murakami), and goes off on a journey to get into fights with just…
The motivating concern of Liu Yulin’s Someone to Talk To is suggested by the film’s title, and repeated endlessly throughout; it’s the idea that lonely…
Taiwanese director Chung Mong-hong’s Godspeed starts like any number of other gangster pictures: a mysterious man is led by other mysterious men into a room…
Zhang Lu’s chatty, relatively plotless A Quiet Dream, for the most part, non-judgmentally observes the interactions between bar-owner Han Ye-ri and her three regulars, film…
While initially scanning like an ultraviolent take on Richard Linklater’s freeform Slacker (early scenes find the camera roaming Vietnamese streets in search of heinous acts),…
Deeply atmospheric and tonally akin to a variety of nefarious pseudo-procedural Asian imports of the past two decades (The Cure, Memories of Murder, The Wailing),…
Derek Tsang’s Soul Mate seems an odd choice for a Summer 2017 festival; it was already released in both China and the U.S. as recently as…
Buried within Kei Ishikawa’s artfully moody debut feature, Traces of Sin, are two intriguing narrative strands. The first involves the long-lasting effects and indelible scars of physical and…
Like a Hong Kong version of Lodge Kerrigan’s indie, sorta-classic Clean, Shaven, Wong Chun’s debut, Mad World, plunks recently rehab-ed, bipolar disorder sufferer Tung (Shawn Yue)…