Looking at Keeper of Darkness on paper, you’d be thrown off by how much fun this film really is. You read the premise, you see the style and you watch the opening few minutes and you’re settled in for a really dark gothic fantasy…and then suddenly the film just becomes a lot of fun. You laugh a lot more […] Read more
The closing night film for this year’s NYAFF is Adam Tsuei’s dark comedy The Tenants Downstairs. This new Taiwanese feature follows a Landlord (Simon Yam) who runs an apartment building full of a colorful cast of people. We have a young guy obsessed with gaming and teleportation, a gay couple hiding their relationship, a sexy […] Read more
This seems to be a great year for animal oriented animated films. While I haven’t seen Zootopia, I hear it was phenomenal, Finding Dory was terrific, and the trailer for The Secret Life of Pets was downright hilarious thanks to that poodle bit. Suffice to say I was pretty excited to check out Yarrow Cheney […] Read more
Crime and comedy are at the forefront here in this South Korean caper which brings inspired elements from Hollywood flicks such as Shawshank Redemption and Ocean’s Eleven. Byun Jae-Wook (Hwang Jung-min) is a prosecutor who consistently oversteps his boundaries in search of the truth. He prides himself on being excessive in his methods, which usually […] Read more
With a vague opening, an array of super long one-shots, and a plot that somehow both impresses and frustrates, Alone delivers a miss-matched thriller that will divide audiences. After the ominous POV start we’re introduced to Su-min (Lee Ju-won) – a timid photographer who witnesses a murder on the rooftops of a poorly developed Seoul […] Read more
One of the films I was most excited to see at this year’s NYAFF was Woo Min-ho’s crime thriller, Inside Men. Starring Lee Byung-hun (GI Joe), Jo Seung-woo, Beak Yoon-sik, and Lee Kyoung-young, this slick South Korean revenge tale became the highest grossing R-rated film in the country’s history, and for good reason too. Inside […] Read more
Time is of great importance in this Chinese crime drama, as actor Ruofu Wu gets an up close look at an experience that could have proven fatal over a decade ago. Eyes usually roll when you see a film state the line “Based on true events”, but for Saving Mr. Wu, screening at this year’s […] Read more
When The Purge was released back in 2013, I bet writer/director James DeMonaco had no idea he’d be setting up a pretty nifty little horror franchise, similar to the way James Wan’s Saw first broke into the mainstream. While I liked the first film, I wasn’t a big fan of the second, but I loved […] Read more
When I saw Finding Dory last week, I was dismayed by the dull-looking trailers for all of the upcoming family films. So many of them had the same sort of gag-a-minute humor, the same CG animation, and the same talking animals as the stars (seriously, how many CG animated talking animal movies come out per […] Read more
Stephen Chow is one of a handful of directors from Hong Kong whose films I will watch without fail. The guy has a great handle on genuine slapstick humor and is one of the few who is able to keep it funny without making it consistently raunchy. His latest directorial endeavor is the critically acclaimed […] Read more
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