2000s

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Like that famous saying, Tan Chui Mui speaks softly, but she carries a big stick. Her films are quiet little affairs, but boy, do they pack an emotional wallop. She has a knack for easing you into a situation, and getting you deeply involved with her characters. I liken it to Nabokov, who can say a thousand things in one sentence. Tan can create such emotional push-and-pull between her characters without them saying much. It’s all in the doing, not the uttering. Show, not tell. And she does it beautifully.Read More »

Yun Fei, a young poet, seeks the advice of an old university friend who lives in the Beijing suburbs, discovering that his friend has gone into business breeding black chickens. Discouraged about his future as a poet, Yun Fei starts a relationship with a colorblind young girl who encourages him to persevere. But even this new relationship is not enough to inspire him to write. It’s at this point that he buys a pirated record whose magical powers bring him the success he’s longed for. However, sudden fame does not seem to solve everything. The first film of Beijing theatre director Meng Jing Hui, Chicken Poets is an insightful and poetic look at materialism and the younger generation in China.Read More »

For his latest film, Yoshida turned once more to melodrama as a means of sensitively engaging a difficult political issue, here the devastating legacy of the Hiroshima bombing. Mariko Okada stars, in her 154th film, as the eldest of three women trying to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together. A shared memory of the Hiroshima disaster draws the three generations together in a search back to the very site of the atomic trauma that unites them, with Hiroshima standing in as a figure for the limit point of the national imagination. Among Yoshida’s more classical films, Women in the Mirror is an assuredly stylish late work that carefully balances the three women’s stories as interlocking pieces of a complex psychological and historiographic puzzle.Read More »

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A theatre director tries to put on a play with real underprivileged Roma people about their lives but, feeling taken advantage of, the actors leave the troupe to gain a new consciousness.Read More »

Set in Shanghai during the 1930s, the story is inspired by John Woo’s classic work Bullet in the Head, released in 1990.Read More »

Slashing Through Review:

Movie: Afterman 2
By: Orlok666
Date: June 8, 2012
Born to be cult

Absurd. That is the word that springs to mind when watching the Belgian no-budget film “Afterman 2”. In the opening scene a man tries to make a call but is ratted out by a woman. So when the car arrives of the authorities a couple of muslims get out and arrest the man. Then their commander gets out -a male dressed as a SS officer- executing the woman and having the hand of the man cut off. And all that happening in the year 2012, Belgium. If that had your head spinning, read on because it gets a lot more absurd.Read More »

A trio of tales delineating Sex and the Japanese city, “Tokyo Noir” provides more emotional colors than just black and white. Picture marks a collaboration between writer-helmers Naoto Kumazawa and Masato Ishioka that’s less diverse than in “Female,” another recent erotic Nipponese collection, but is still emotionally rewarding, thanks to solid performances and considered pacing. Sexual slant could open up fest slots beyond Asia.Read More »

Sammy Smalls is a 21-year-old tomboy who works as a store detective, catching shoplifters for her boss who beats them up so they never re-offend. She is head over heels for scruffy musician Eugene Zaslavsky. He’s perfect for her, but doesn’t want to be in a relationship.

After a disastrous one-night stand, Eugene suggests they play the field to get more experience. Following his advice, Sammy hatches a plan catapulting her on a quest that takes her through her neighbours’ bedroom, the public swimming pool, and finally to blackmailing shoplifters into giving her sex lessons in the woods behind the supermarket.Read More »

At night a city bus driver finds an abandoned baby near a stop. A divorced man comes to pick up his excited son for the weekend. A pretty doctor befriends a quadriplegic. Out of this unfolds a delicate story of human relationships, in which tough feelings of sympathy and guilt the protagonists are confronted with different ways of looking at events.Read More »