Blog Archives

A high school kid with a temper grows up fast when he’s forced to deal with his handicapped uncle and father and runaway foreign mother. With help from a tough-love spouting teacher he channels his rage into kickboxing and finally into a more assured sense of self. Continue reading →

(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)

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)

Have you noticed how the last few years have seen South Korean cinema fall under the influence of the great Hong Kong crime thrillers of the 1980s and early-’90s? Whether it’s in a stylistic and/or thematic shout-out or a straight-up remake of a classic — like Son Hae-sung’s A Better Tomorrow or the upcoming 3D remake of The Killer (nooooooo!) starring Jung Woo-sung — the Korean industry owes a lot to the trail blazed by John Woo, Ringo Lam and … (read more)

Director Kim Jee-woon and Lee Byung-hun are turning into Korea’s own Scorsese and De Niro. After flopping around the industry for a while and getting notice on and off for his interesting, if uneven, films (The Quiet Family, The Foul King), international audiences sat up and took note of Kim’s segment in the horror anthology Three. A year later A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) really made a splash. Imperfect though it was, Sisters had a … (read more)

Oh, you’ve seen this movie before, my friend. It’s Taken. It’s Man on Fire. It’s every movie ever made wherein a super-tough but fundamentally sensitive man with a mysterious, deadly and usually governmental past has to go on a bloody rampage to rescue a child — his own or one somehow close to him. The Man from Nowhere is that hoariest of tales, the one about the redemptive power of genuine affection as only children are able to … (read more)

Director Ryoo Seung-wan has quickly made a name for himself as an action man; a director of a singular, urban, macho brand of thriller. Beginning with Die Bad (basically all about male aggression) and through Crying Fist (basically about male self-determination via the world’s most brutal sport) and The City of Violence (basically about male grief and the loss of fraternal trust), Ryoo could easily be referred to as the polar opposite of Pedro Almodovar: he’s a man’s director! I … (read more)

Slice is one of those films that very nearly defies review. A serial killer thriller cut from the same cloth as Se7en (can we move past this please?), with a dash of Ms 45 and Baise-moi thrown in for good measure, the central murderer weaves a tangled web of personal vendettas, righteous indignation and red herrings while offing some really ‘deserving’ types. If you’ve seen the aforementioned movies, you’ll clue in pretty quickly that there’s a sex crime angle to … (read more)