The exorcism and possession subgenre has been at a creative stall basically since its heyday in the 1970s. The panoply of genre tropes looks more…
The death of a loved one is fundamental to the human condition, with the ensuing grief making way for an odyssey of pain and acceptance.…
The rousing action epic may seem, in the age of bloated superhero flicks and video game adaptations, a thing of cinema’s past. If, for example,…
Given a title like The Old Woman with the Knife, viewers will likely enter expecting to see an old woman killing people with a knife.…
Alternating between icky-squishy horror, fish-out-of-water comedy, and doppelgänger abstraction, director Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic certainly lives up to its title. If the whole thing ultimately feels…
A man wakes up on a crowded bus. He’s in a strange neighborhood, with no idea how he got there. He just wants to get…
Tony Jaa, action cinema’s favorite Muay Thai fighter, has faded from the limelight a bit after a quiet decade so far. He entered into it…
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)…
After almost 20 years of shuffling through a laundry list of some of the most famous Hong Kong directors and actors, a filmed version of…
Director Alexander J. Farrell’s The Beast Within opens with a quote about there “being two wolves inside each of us,” followed by a brief but…
The sixth Herman Yau film released in the last two years is probably the strangest. Long a denizen of Hong Kong’s underground, making his name…
Director Jang Jae-hyun’s new supernatural thriller Exhuma covers a lot of ground during its two-plus hour runtime; what begins as a detailed procedural gradually gives…
Co-opting traditions as metaphors for the struggles of everyday life has always been cinema’s staple, either because these traditions romanticize the world or because they…
Unfortunately, the current cinema landscape doesn’t allow for many straightforward genre films to slip through the cracks. Most that do are bogged down by political…
Action cinema is never far from questions of the psychotic, be it content, form, or both. Be it questions of production (why would these humans…
It seems that — at least in the past few years — a considerable number of films have proven their ability to manifest new sensibilities…
With his latest film Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda has outdone himself. Rather than make one bad film, as he usually does, the Japanese director has made…
Jared Moshé’s Aporia is a rare thing indeed: a high-concept, hard sci-fi head-scratcher that still feels human-scaled thanks to sensitive performances and focus on familial…
The cold open of Yugo Sakamoto’s Baby Assassins sequel — called Baby Assassins 2 in boring press materials, while its title card uses the charmingly…
Hollywood action films have long abdicated the realm of gritty believability in favor of awe-inspiring excitement beyond the border of suspended belief. This has been…