Young street musician Shinji Taki (Akira Kobayashi) wanders into the northern Japanese city Hakodate and straight into the affairs of local mob boss Akitsu (Nobuo Kaneko). Taki gets assigned to force a nearby family to vacate their house so that … Continue reading REVIEW: The Rambling Guitarist (1959)
Loosely adapting the popular television series, The Equalizer reunites star Denzel Washington with his Training Day director Antoine Fuqua. If only the result was half as engaging as that film. In truth, The Equalizer is a lazy and overly padded bore. Washington plays … Continue reading REVIEW: The Equalizer (2014)
In a world experiencing a widespread viral outbreak, and with most cinemas closed and scheduled releases delayed, it has been a hard year for audiences seeking popular big-screen entertainment. Thankfully Netflix has been taking great advantage of the ‘new normal’, … Continue reading REVIEW: Enola Holmes (2020)
He Ping, the Chinese director best known for his international arthouse hit Red Firecracker Green Firecracker, is also the director of an intriguing trilogy of ‘Chinese westerns’. In these films He developed a combination of wuxia-style stories of heroic feudal warriors … Continue reading REVIEW: Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991)
Let’s talk about Gone in 60 Seconds, Dominic Sena’s 2000 car racing flick loosely inspired by H.B. Halicki’s 1974 cult favourite of the same name. This remake turns 20 years old this year, and is – let us be honest … Continue reading REVIEW: Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)
Robert Roy MacGregor was born in 1671 near Loch Katrine in Scotland’s Perthshire. As a young man, like many Scottish patriots, he was drawn to the 1689 Jacobite uprising – an armed rebellion to restore Stuart dynasty rule to the … Continue reading “Neither asked nor given” | Rob Roy (1995)
In December 1941 a group of Chinese railroad workers, led by the station porter Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) engage in carefully staged raids of Japanese train shipments to disrupt Japan’s military efforts to occupy China and invade other Asian nations … Continue reading REVIEW: Railroad Tigers (2016)
FBI computer analyst J.J. Shaft (Jessie T. Usher) re-unites with a lifelong friend – an army veteran and recovering addict named Karim (Avan Jogia) – only for Karim to turn up dead in Harlem from a drug overdose. Suspecting foul … Continue reading REVIEW: Shaft (2019)
A team of operatives skilled in industrial espionage are apprehended by Hong Kong’s secret service and blackmailed into undertaking a raid of MI:5. Their target is a set of British sterling printing plates that could, if released to the black … Continue reading REVIEW: Downtown Torpedoes (1997)
Yinniang (Shu Qi) was taken from her home at the age of ten and trained to become a master assassin. Now an adult, she fails to undertake her latest mission when she sees her target cradling his infant son. As … Continue reading REVIEW: The Assassin (2015)
