”I'm just an actor playing a king. You really are Yuji.”
Farewell My Concubine is a 171 minute epic that spans 53 years and is as much a behind the scenes look into the Peking Opera and their schools, a love triangle involving a woman and a man after the affection of a second man and a portrayal of Chinese history including the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Cultural Revolution. And to top it all the story mirrors that of…
"It's not for health reasons.
After putting on 10.000 steps,
I feel like I had a good, busy day.
It's an all-too-healthy way of escapism."
So writer/director Lee Hae-Jun knows what made me buy that rowing machine last year - splendid..
Starring Jeong JaeYeong as the male Kim and Jung Ryeo-Won as the female Kim, Castaway on the Moon opens with male Kim trying to commit suicide via jumping from the infamous Mapo Bridge in Seoul to his death in…
Not exactly the hidden gem I was hoping for, but a fun setting, scenery-chewing Rutger Hauer and his pairing with Alastair Duncan makes for a good time nevertheless.
Indeed a Sion Sono Greatest Hits medley and while questionable in parts (he does the thing where he yells at sexism and misogyny while certainly embracing the exploitation film aesthetics and nonsense anchored in these very things himself), but comes together in a rather wonderfully demented way and won me over.
Not peak Sono, but this definitely belongs to the better half of his filmography.
A piano sonata of revenge that, with each note, breaks a bone, peels back your skin, slits a tendon and punches and kicks your heart and gut and stops exactly a split second before it would knock you unconscious, only to build up again and leave you more devastated the next time around.
I Saw The Devil is a gorgeously crafted piece of cinema directed by Kim Jee-woon. The tale of a special ops agent played by Lee Byung-hun on…
If you look up action movie in a dictionary there's a picture of "The Raid".
"The Raid" is the very definition of an action movie. It's action movie perfection brought to life by the amazing team of writer/director/editor Gareth Evans, indonesian silat master Iko Uwais, cinematographers Matt Flannery and Dimas Imam Subhono and choreographer/antagonist/silat master Yayan Ruhian aided by a great crew.
When an elite police squad gets trapped in a run-down apartment block controlled by a drug lord shit…
