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)
Mimi Cave’s debut feature Fresh sits in a tricky sort of niche where part of its appeal is the unexpected direction its story takes, but where discussion of that direction will inevitably give away some of its secrets. Even by mentioning this … Continue reading REVIEW: Fresh (2022)
All-but-impenetrable to foreign audiences, and produced for the most unusual of reasons, Jeffrey Lau’s The Eagle Shooting Heroes is a fascinating side story from pre-handover Hong Kong. It also represents a chance to see some screen legends playing the broadest of … Continue reading REVIEW: The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993)
When it was released theatrically in 2002, Roger Kumble’s romantic comedy The Sweetest Thing was a commercial failure. While it did reasonable business on home video, it never particularly surfaced on anybody’s radar and received short shrift from critics. In more recent … Continue reading REVIEW: The Sweetest Thing (2002)
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