Deconstructing the machinery of cinema.
Claustrophobia, a 2008 Hong Kong drama by writer/director Ivy Ho, is a difficult film to summarise. Certainly it's impossible to write about without spoiling the story, since what story it has is extremely slight. Let's just run through its lengthy opening scene. Five co-workers pile into a car and travel one, each being dropped off ...
Fairy tales have been adapted to cinema for many decades. The most obvious is Walt Disney’s ground-breaking 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but as a genre they have been inspiring films since movies were in black and white and silent. Across the world, the fairy tale adaptation has seen a variety ...
Elderly widower Chin-mao (Hsiao Hou-tao) lives alone in his family house in Pingxi. When a painful accident sees him admitted into hospital, his middle-aged children begin argue over whether or not to send him to a nursing home in Taipei. Chin-mao, however, stubbornly wants to spend his final days alone in Pingxi. Dad's Suit is the ...
1923. Sam (Hamilton Morris) is an indigenous farm worker working for the obsessively Christian immigrant Fred Smith (Sam Neill). While Smith is away on business, an altercation with a neighbouring farmer (Ewen Leslie) sees that farmer dead and Sam on the run from the local police sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown). If you have not seen Sweet ...
Manawei (Golden Horse winner Si Pangoyod) is a young boy living with his grandmother (Feng Ying-li) on Orchid Island, south of Taiwan. His father (Ou Lu) is largely absent, having left the island to work in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. Whatever money his father is earning is not coming home in sufficient quantities; ...
Following his boxing victory over middleweight champion Danny Wheeler, Adonis "Donnie" Creed (Michael B. Jordan) continues his path through the ranks of world boxing. When he reaches the height of the sport - world heavyweight champion - an unexpected challenger emerges. Viktor Drago is the son of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), the former boxer who ...
In a cold Chinese city the lives of several people collide in an unexpected fashion. A high school student accidentally causes his bully to suffer a crippling injury; that bully's older brother - a local gangster - comes looking for revenge. The same brother has an affair with his best friend's wife, leading that friend ...
