Feature Essays
10 archive highlights among the Disney+ launch
With the Walt Disney company launching its own international film and television streaming service Disney+ within two months, one of the big questions was with ...
Review: Rambo: Last Blood (2019)
Vietnam veteran John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) lives on his family ranch with Mexican housekeeper Maria (Adriana Bazzara) and her granddaughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). When Gabrielle - a high school graduate on her way to college - receives details on her long-departed father, she crosses the border to Mexico to track him down. When she does ...
REVIEW: Fires on the Plain (2014)
In the final days of World War II, a bullied soldier suffering from tuberculosis makes his way through the Filipino jungle in the hope of reaching his evacuation point in time. On his journey he encounters local guerillas, hides from the American military, and discovers the frightening extent to which desperate, starving men will go ...
REVIEW: A Boy and his Samurai (2010)
Hiroko (Rie Tomosaka) is a single mother with a stressful middle-management job. While rushing to take her young son Tomoya (Fuku Suzuki) to school, she stumbles into a samurai (Ryo Nishikido) in front of her local supermarket - a belligerent warrior who has been magically transported from 18th century Edo to the present day. There ...
REVIEW: Collective Invention (2015)
A medical experiment goes disastrously awry, transforming one of its human subjects (Lee Kwang-soo) into a mutated half-man half-fish. When he goes to his ex-girlfriend (Park Bo-young) for help, she instead leaks his appearance onto the Internet and sells him out to the pharmaceutical corporation that caused his mutation. While Korea goes fish-man mad, an ...
REVIEW: Bullet Ballet (1998)
Writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto made an enormous impact internationally with his low-budget 1989 tech-horror Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Shot in grainy black and white with a piercing industrial soundtrack, it rapidly became a cult hit around the world and attracted a fiercely loyal cult following. Tsukamoto's subsequent films never quite captured the widespread attention that his feature ...
REVIEW: Love and… (2015)
A young woman goes to see her grandfather in hospital. He is suffering deeply from depression, and clearly some additional mental illnesses because he is soon chasing a cleaning lady around the ward with a knife. Before long that sequence is broken as a gaffer interrupts the shoot - we are actually watching a film ...
REVIEW: Granny Poetry Club (2019)
In 1937 an occupying Japanese regime, in an effort to solidify its control over Korea, banned the teaching of Korean language in all schools. For children going through school at that time, it meant a lifetime of illiteracy. In the new documentary Granny Poetry Club, a group of women in the late eighties boldly return to ...
