The Monkey King Sun Wukong is big business, and nowhere has he been bigger in recent years than in Chean Pou-soi’s trilogy of lush, Hollywood-style Monkey King films. This third episode was released back in 2018, and followed the hugely successful Monkey … Continue reading REVIEW: The Monkey King 3 (2018)
Keigo Higashino has carved a considerable reputation as one of Japan’s premier authors of crime novels and thrillers, via popular books like The Devotion of Suspect X and The Salvation of a Saint. His 2012 novel Miracles of the Namiya General Store is markedly … Continue reading REVIEW: Namiya (2017)
Popular cinema is littered with underrated films. The creators of the 2011 fantasy Immortals probably cannot complain. Their Greek myth-inspired epic was a commercial success at least, although it only grossed a little more than half that of Clash of the … Continue reading REVIEW: Immortals (2011)
Teenager Koichi Hirose (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is the new kid in town, starting at a new high school and eager to make friends. He finds Josuke Higashikata (Kento Yamazaki), a surly teen rebel with the world’s biggest pompadour haircut and the … Continue reading REVIEW: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable (2018)
The late Roald Dahl continues to leave a long shadow over children’s fiction, decades after his death. His personal legacy is an uncomfortable mixture of immense creativity laced with accusations of misogyny and antisemitism, but his literary works – Charlie and … Continue reading REVIEW: Roald Dahl’s The Witches (2020)
Nothing burns through ideas faster than a film industry: in a constant battle to find pre-existing intellectual property to adapt for cinema, Disney once hit upon the idea of turning their Disneyland rides into blockbuster movies. It was, all in … Continue reading REVIEW: Jungle Cruise (2021)
August sees the return of the Fantasia International Film Festival, arguably the world’s premier screening event for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other unusual genre cinema. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, this year’s festival is offering its Canadian audiences unprecedented online … Continue reading Eight films to watch at Fantasia Film Festival 2021
In John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968), Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune play rival fighter pilots that crash-land on an isolated island and must overcome their animosity to survive and escape to safety. In Wolfgang Petersen’s Enemy Mine (1985), Dennis Quaid … Continue reading REVIEW: Monster Hunter (2020)
Properly-made family entertainment is just about the hardest thing to get right in filmmaking, and yet for all of the effort placed into the best examples it is exceedingly rare for such a film to be a hit. Children are … Continue reading REVIEW: The Kid Who Would Be King (2019)
Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio is one of the world’s most famous and best-selling works of children’s literature, and as such has long been a source for film and television adaptation. Walt Disney’s 1940 animated adaptation dominates, of course, … Continue reading REVIEW: The Adventures of Pinocchio (1972)
