Ash Is The Purest White
Zhao Tao plays one of the finest performances of her career so far, the return to form we’ve been waiting for from Jia Zhangke… Right from the opening shot of Ash Is The Purest White, director Jia...
View ArticleAsako I & II
Love is questioned when Asako starts dating her disappeared boyfriend’s doppelganger… I’m just not sure what to do anymore, because nothing I can write would make an effective opening to a review of...
View ArticleWong Ka Yan
Writer-Director Benny Lau presents a nostalgic glimpse back at Hong Kong in the 90s and one man’s search for love… Throwing back to the crazy heyday of Hong Kong in the 90’s, Wong Ka Yan is set on the...
View ArticleStill Human
A Filipino carer and a disabled old man bond to find their purpose in life… Hong Kong Asian Film Festival 2018 offers us Oliver Chan Siu Kuen’s film debut Still Human, a moving drama with a familiar...
View ArticleBefore We Vanish
Aliens stroll among us, preparing to invade by stealing our thoughts. What makes us so unique?…Before We Vanish is a film about aliens. They come to earth as completely different versions of humans,...
View ArticleAve Maryam
Evocative of the forbidden love in the films of Wong Kar-wai, Ave Maryam is an enjoyable slow exotic audience pleaser…Exotic tales of lust and guilt are as old as time, and the tale of the forbidden...
View ArticleIntimate Strangers
Tension and laughs in equal measure at the dinner party nightmares are made of…People in glass houses shouldn’t show phones in Lee Jae Kyoo’s tense and funny dinner party drama. A remake of the Italian...
View ArticleThe Chrysanthemum And The Guillotine
Zeze movingly reveals that the ground for true revolution should be love…While Takahisa Zeze is known as one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Pink, his days of filming pink eiga are long gone. In recent...
View ArticleLove At Least
A raw and distressing look at how a relationship survives and even thrives under the tumult of mental illness…Kosai Sekine’s directorial debut, Love at Least portrays the young unemployed Yosuke...
View ArticleAnd Your Bird Can Sing
Miyake successfully highlights the difficulties of realizing a subjective position of desire within a relational context…After Kazuyoshi Kumakiri (Sketches of Kaitan City, 2010), Mipo O (The Light...
View ArticleFor Love’s Saké
A truly entertaining and engaging introduction to the art of Saké…It would be a slight understatement if we stated that eating/drinking is an important part of Japanese culture. It is, in truth, a...
View ArticleMaggie
An X-ray of a couple having sex in a hospital causes mass confusion and weirdness in Yi Ok-seop’s feature debut…Maggie marks the feature debut of writer-director Yi Ok-seop, who previously won acclaim...
View ArticleSend Me To The Clouds
A sharp satire of contemporary China’s money-obsessed society and a frank discussion of female sexual desire…In one scene from Send Me To The Clouds, a female journalist meets an old woman standing by...
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Love and Sword
Roc Tien Peng proves one of the most charismatic heroes in all of Wuxia cinema, encased in a dream-like odyssey of a film sadly overlooked…One of my closest friends is from Croatia, and he is the only...
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Iwane: Sword of Serenity
A confounding and uneven samurai saga still manages to pack an emotional punch while looking good…Iwane (Tori Matsuzaka), Shinnosuke (Yosuke Sugino) and Kinpei (Tasuku Emoto) are all sparring partners...
View ArticleShanghai Fortress
The next big Chinese sci-fi blockbuster after The Wandering Earth misses the target in pretty much every aspect…After Frant Gwo’s mega-blockbuster The Wandering Earth pulled in more than USD$700...
View ArticleLittle Miss Period
Shinada proves that one can make a compelling and touching narrative about menstruation…While Japan has many absurd manga-narratives, Ken Koyama’s manga Seiri-chan, a narrative exploring the impact...
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Love’s Twisting Path
40 years after his last big Jidaigeki, veteran director Sadao Nakajima is back at it. Is 2nd time the charm?Despite his long and prolific career, Sadao Nakajima remains known as a cult director among...
View ArticleThe Flowers of Evil
A dramatic narrative that strikingly reveals sexuality as a rupture…While most people will know Noboru Iguchi from crazy comical narratives like Robo Geisha (2009), Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead...
View ArticleMeatball Machine
One of the first wave of Japanese splatter remains one of the genre’s finest blitzkriegs of bizarre mutations and whacky dismemberment…Originally released back in 2005, Meatball Machine was one of the...
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