Review

By Yun-hua Chen. Action itself is not enough to compose a good action film – we see yet another hard-earned lesson in Master Z: Ip Man Legacy. Directed by Woo-Ping Yuen, the famous Hong Kong action choreographer, and produced by the same producers of Ip Man 1, 2, 3, 4, […]

By Gary M. Kramer. Stockholm, written and directed by Robert Budreau, recounts the “absurd but true” 1973 Norrmalmstorg (Kreditbanken) robbery and hostage crisis that introduced the “Stockholm Syndrome” – the condition where a hostage bonds with their captor. This peculiar crime drama starts out rocky, but then manages to exert a […]

By Rod Lott. If the first two minutes of Riccardo Freda’s The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971) had failed to grab me, the next two of this 1971 giallo certainly would. Indoors at night, a beautiful woman suddenly becomes the opposite as acid is thrown in her face […]

By Jake Rutkowski. It’s hard to view the discourse around baseball’s most recent and protracted steroid use scandal as anything other than a proxy culture war, an outlet for the basest pearl-clutching and ideological chest-pounding. The pieces are all there: an institution steeped in perpetual nostalgia, aided by a media […]

A Book Review by Mads Larsen. The timing could hardly be better. Every month seems to throw more gasoline onto the political fire that this edited volume hopes to be a part of. But while editors Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi have written an introduction with ambitions that – if […]

By Jeremy Carr. There is so much potential tragedy in the first twenty minutes of Diane that the film appears instantly in danger of over-stressing the point of its dramatic tension. This subdued, 2018 release, the debut narrative feature from Kent Jones – director of the documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), director of the […]

By Yun-hua Chen. Jia Zhangke’s latest, Ash is the Purest White, three years after his previous film Mountains May Depart (2015) which ambitiously spans from 1999 till futuristic 2025 and journeys from Fengyang in Shanxi Province to Perth in Australia, continues with his incessant probing of how China changes but […]

A Book Review by John Fawell. I’ve always been somewhat surprised by the amount of critical attention paid to Charlie Chaplin’s sound films, considering they represent, for the most part, his comedic talents in decline and his frustrated efforts to contend with a medium essentially hostile to his genius for […]

By Elias Savada. Larry Fessenden has plenty of fans. A versatile producer, director, writer, editor, cinematographer, and actor in dozens of low-budget flicks, he’s left his mark for more than two decades on the horror genre. Since he’s heavily influenced by the classic Universal monsters, it is not surprising that his […]