Blog Archives

Arrietty, the most recent release from Studio Ghibli, is released in cinemas nation-wide on the 12th of Jan, 2012.

Recently, Studio Ghibli seems to have turned to more non-Japanese inspiration for their particular and delightful brand of animated features – Howl’s Moving Castle was based on books by British author Diana Wynne Jones and Tales from Earthsea was of course drawn from the series by American author Ursula Le Guin. In both cases, Ghibli saw in these stories something that … (read more)

(Ed: we don’t normally prepend a disclaimer to a review, but we just thought we’d warn you: Liz is pretty frank in this piece, and you should expect explicit discussion of, well, very explicit themes and the occasional spoiler. You are reading about a film titled ‘3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy’, after all!)… (read more)

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)

13 Assassins begins with a man committing seppuku. He preformed this act to bring attention to Lord Naritsugu a somewhat vile and sadistic man. This will not be the only bloody death before this tale ends. Continue reading →

This year’s KOFFIA festival opened with a bang, with director Ryoo Seung-wan presenting his huge hit from last year, The Unjust — an action thriller in which policemen, prosecutors and property developers are caught in an endless cycle of corruption. A couple of days into the festival, as part of their Bloody Friday match-up, the KOFFIA team programmed another Ryoo film: 2002′s No Blood No Tears.

As with the opening film, director Ryoo himself got up on stage and … (read more)