A little while ago I reviewed Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team for this very site. In that review, I expressed my concern that jumping into the Gundam franchise in the wrong way was likely to drive someone into a Lovecraftian madness.
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You get what you pay for and in cinematic terms the currency, as everyone should know, is genre. If you go to see a big budget action movie, you should probably expect a big budget action movie and all that entails, and you really shouldn’t complain if you get it. In my opinion, it’s important to be clear on this concept; that way you don’t end up sitting behind me in the cinema making annoying pseudo-intellectual comments about a) the … (read more)

Looking through our archives, it seems like almost everyone who’s ever written for Heroic Cinema has sat down at a keyboard to bash out a review of a Johnnie To film at one time or another. Ching Yee compared films from Milkyway Image to comfort food in her review of My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, and she’s right — To’s films have developed a distinctive style and consistently high level of quality over the years, and I always look … (read more)

Leave it to Japanese auteur Iwai Shunji to find a way around the ongoing moony-eyed romantic vampire craze as it’s defined by Twilight. Simply titled Vampire, the vampirism of Iwai’s English-language debut exists in its own world as it were, one that’s rooted in reality more than the fantasy tropes of stakes through the heart, aversion to garlic and turning into the undead if bitten — and of course sparkling! Vampire hinges on a 28-year-old high school biology … (read more)