Tony Jaa, action cinema’s favorite Muay Thai fighter, has faded from the limelight a bit after a quiet decade so far. He entered into…
Xu Haofeng makes movies for people who enjoy and understand the finer points of martial arts choreography. His best-known film work (he’s also a…
After almost 20 years of shuffling through a laundry list of some of the most famous Hong Kong directors and actors, a filmed version…
Director Alexander J. Farrell’s The Beast Within opens with a quote about there “being two wolves inside each of us,” followed by a brief…
The sixth Herman Yau film released in the last two years is probably the strangest. Long a denizen of Hong Kong’s underground, making his…
Director Jang Jae-hyun’s new supernatural thriller Exhuma covers a lot of ground during its two-plus hour runtime; what begins as a detailed procedural gradually…
Co-opting traditions as metaphors for the struggles of everyday life has always been cinema’s staple, either because these traditions romanticize the world or because…
Unfortunately, the current cinema landscape doesn’t allow for many straightforward genre films to slip through the cracks. Most that do are bogged down by…
Action cinema is never far from questions of the psychotic, be it content, form, or both. Be it questions of production (why would these…
It seems that — at least in the past few years — a considerable number of films have proven their ability to manifest new…
With his latest film Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda has outdone himself. Rather than make one bad film, as he usually does, the Japanese director has…
Jared Moshé’s Aporia is a rare thing indeed: a high-concept, hard sci-fi head-scratcher that still feels human-scaled thanks to sensitive performances and focus on…
Hollywood action films have long abdicated the realm of gritty believability in favor of awe-inspiring excitement beyond the border of suspended belief. This has…
Some action movies are best watched in the afternoon, the way they used to be shown on American television in the days before infomercials…
An unexpectedly maverick prequel/sequel hybrid to one of the biggest mainland Chinese blockbusters of this century, The Wandering Earth II ditches the more rigid…
Project Wolf Hunting is a symphony of wanton destruction, a splatter-heavy genre mash-up that’s so cartoonishly garish as to become absurdly funny. A symphony of…
Hansan features plenty rousing naval action, but also drags in its first half and too baldly leans on a propagandist view of history to establish…
The Other One is an overcomplicated affair, but also a hyper-stylized and thrillingly violent one, and further proof that American blockbuster cinema is lagging. Released…