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Villain and Widow (South Korea, 2010)
Once again I’ve come head to head with a genre-bending Korean film and as usual I feel it necessary to comment on this fact. Villain and Widow is Son Jae-gon’s third feature, after The Man Who Saw Too...
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Crazy Stone (China, 2006)
The recent mainland China box office success of comedies that are as low-brow as they are low-budget has proved that local audiences love cheap laughs just as much as the spectacle of expensive...
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Chaos (Japan, 1999)
Japanese noir has rarely been more seductive than Chaos, a skilfully-crafted thriller by Ring (1998) director Hideo Nakata, who briefly leaves the realms of the supernatural to focus on a...
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Nameless Gangster (South Korea, 2012) [NYAFF 2012]
Written and directed by Yoon Jong-bin, Nameless Gangster tells a story of crime and incidents of corruption in Busan, South Korea that were so widespread the government declared war in the early...
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Exodus (Hong Kong, 2007)
It is apparent from the opening sequence of Pang Ho-Cheung’s Hong Kong police procedural Exodus that this will be an odd experience: starting with a close-up of a picture of Queen Elizabeth II,...
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Headshot (Thailand, 2011)
The phrase ‘world turned upside down’ is frequently used to describe how a person’s life is dramatically affected by events that are as sudden as they are unexpected. Yet it is taken more literally in...
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Hard Romanticker (Japan, 2011)
The title of Gu Su-yeon’s semi-autobiographical crime thriller Hard Romanticker invites such critical summaries as ‘hard boiled’ or ‘hardcore’, attributes that it achieves through a consistently...
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KL Noir: Red (2013)
Intended as the first of four volumes about the underbelly of Kuala Lumpur, the seedily evocative KL NOIR: RED is an enticing anthology consisting of fourteen works of fiction and one essay, all of...
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Blind Shaft (China, 2003)
Li Yang’s feature debut Blind Shaft was one of the breakthrough independent films from mainland China in the early-200s in terms of receiving art-house theatrical exposure beyond the festival circuit...
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Drug War (Hong Kong, 2013) [NYAFF FILM REVIEW]
With the title “Drug War,” readers wouldn’t be wrong to imagine that Hong Kong’s critically acclaimed director Johnnie To might be delving heavily into cinematic darkness. However, just how far the...
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