Sinkhole Nearly a decade after his previous feature, the 2012 big-budget disaster movie tentpole The Tower — South Korea’s very belated answer to The Towering Inferno — director Kim Ji-hoon returns to the apartment-building-in-extreme-peril genre with Sinkhole, a goofy and super-dumb yet undeniably entertaining…
Ninja Girl In a bleak, post-Trump reality wherein nationalist hogwash has pervaded casual discourse, Yû Irie’s Ninja Girl reflects the kind of right-minded rhetoric that the world could do with more of. It also, unfortunately, realizes the kind of facile, lightweight logic all such…
Joint The debut feature of New York-based filmmaker Oudai Kojima, Joint takes the structure of a rise-and-fall gangster picture and tries to imbue it with procedural details and a documentary-style immediacy. It’s mostly successful, although the diffuse narrative and sizable number of characters constantly…
by InRO Staff Festival Coverage Film
NYAFF 2021 — Dispatch 2: Limbo, Hold Me Back, Under the Open Sky
Limbo Photography is the first sign that Soi Cheang’s Limbo is different from the director’s past work. Though his return to Hong Kong was bound to retreat from the CGI spectacle of his Mainland-produced Monkey King movies, the stark, extremely high-contrast black-and-white images immediately…
by InRO Staff Festival Coverage Film
NYAFF 2021 — Dispatch 1: Raging Fire, Hand Rolled Cigarette, Escape from Mogadishu
Raging Fire When credits roll on Raging Fire they are accompanied by behind-the-scenes footage of Benny Chan at work directing the film. It’s a warm tribute to the late director, who died of cancer shortly after filming this, his last movie. That he was…
Soul Emir Ezwan’s debut feature, Soul, is part of an emerging Malaysian cinema heavily composed of genre fare. Made for roughly $80,000 USD, the horror film is clearly a labor of love and, on the strength of its slick jungle compositions and dark, dynamic…
by InRO Staff Festival Coverage Film
NYAFF 2020 — Dispatch 3: Legally Declared Dead, Forgiven Children, Gone with the Light
Legally Declared Dead Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and played every kind of character in his nearly forty-year career. At first blush, the new film Legally Declared Dead looks…
Unleashed & Geran Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home for Asian action films of all stripes and budgets, but rarely are two films so perfectly contrasted against each…
by InRO Staff Festival Coverage Film
NYAFF 2020 — Dispatch 1: Beasts Clawing at Straws, Victim(s), My Prince Edward
Beasts Clawing at Straws The new Korean crime thriller Beasts Clawing at Straws is a derivative, charmless bit of Tarantino-aping nonsense, a convoluted mess so in love with its own serpentine narrative machinations that it forgets to create actual characters or do anything interesting…
The 18th annual New York Asian Film Festival ended on Sunday, and we’ve prepared one dispatch from the festival this year, with some notable titles: the fest’s opening selection, Candyman director Bernard Rose’s Samurai Marathon; the latest from Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, Jinpa; a comeback of sorts…
