October 17, 2013
Shield of Straw My first film at Fantasia in 2013 was Takashi Miike’s Shield of Straw, one of the director’s contribution to the festival. Miike is a known workhorse, directing sometimes three films per year, in a myriad of genres and styles. Yet, there seems to be a connecting thread through his films, which feels harder to ascertain for me […]
March 29, 2010
Although true at times, Little Children never compels as the story suffers from the same shortcoming as In the Bedroom: it is merely an actors’ showcase.
April 20, 2010
As action films go, Wolverine isn’t so bad, establishing a diverse group of supporting characters for the franchise to play around with.
March 22, 2010
A reviewer compared City of God to Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) and many parallels could be made between the two. As they both fall into the genre of gangster films, they depict violence in a raw, uninhibited way, in a realist fashion. City of God, with its documentary-style aesthetic—camera shakes, voice-over narration, etc., uses that realism to emphasize its story’s […]
January 26, 2011
In The Man from Nowhere, after a neighbour's daughter is abducted by drug dealers, Tae-shik will stop at nothing to save her.