Incompetent police officer Reiji Kikukawa (Toma Ikuta) has spent several years working undercover in one of Japan’s most powerful yakuza clans. Now the time has finally come to close the trap on its leader – but is Reiji in too … Continue reading MIFF REVIEW: The Mole Song Final (2021)
Widely derided by critics and fans of the original film, Blues Brothers 2000 has spent almost a quarter-century being a poster child for ill-advised and unwanted sequels. It is well overdue that someone questions why. Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) is released from … Continue reading REVIEW: Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby, originally released in 2020, may be the most uncomfortable film that I have ever utterly enjoyed. It is nominally a comedy, but while it does contains plenty that is funny – sometimes gloriously so – it also … Continue reading REVIEW: Shiva Baby (2020)
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that – if one was to ponder what follow-up project might emerge from Game of Thrones writer and executive producer D.B. Weiss – a heavy metal-themed teen comedy would not … Continue reading REVIEW: Metal Lords (2022)
Clea DuVall’s Happiest Season is the best comedy I have watched in some time. It seems to effortlessly do what the best films of its genre do: keep the laughs flowing while backing them up with well-developed characters, an engaging storyline, and … Continue reading REVIEW: Happiest Season (2020)
The Jackass movies – there have been four in all of the main series – are probably the most review-proof films one can imagine. The bottom line: you are either going to find them funny, or you won’t. Each film represents a … Continue reading REVIEW: Jackass Forever (2022)
Itinerant runner Chota (Utaemon Ichikawa) takes up a job delivering letters for an Edo period courier company. He immediately falls in love with the owner’s daughter – the lovely Oshun. Romance must wait, however, as a plague strikes the village … Continue reading REVIEW: Tengu Hikyaku (1949)
The Lost City hits cinemas like a charming throwback to the star-driven Hollywood comedies of the late 1990s and early 2000s: driven by star power, a high concept premise, and a fairly visible debt to older, more accomplished movies. Romance author … Continue reading REVIEW: The Lost City (2022)
A story about an obsessive action figure collector goes in some very unexpected directions in Blister, a 2000 Japanese comedy directed by Taikan Suga (Robo Rock). Yuji (Hideaki Ito) works in a bar with a photographer girlfriend (Masumi Sanada), but everything … Continue reading REVIEW: Blister (2000)
A comedy about an aging hit man returning to his profession turns out to be a timely reminder and elegiac meditation on what it means to grow old in Hong Kong. Time is the feature debut for filmmaker Ricky Ko, and … Continue reading REVIEW: Time (2021)
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