It’s safe to say that Masashi Yamamoto’s Wonderful Paradise is a nod to the surrealist Luis Bunuel’s eccentricities, especially in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). If one is looking for weird, then this film delivers. It is even reminiscent of the attempts of the Katsuhito Ishii-led Grasshoppa clique with their fusion of CGI, tokusatsu and deadpan in Funky…

The first thing one will notice with The Blue Danube is the deadpan expression from its actors. But this isn’t the deadpan one can usually see from American indie: Akira Ikeda directed the film in this tone and in the most unapologetically theatrical sense. Due to its theatricality, the film presents a weird liveliness in that it…

Malaysian filmmaker Tan Chui Mui’s comeback after a decade, Barbarian Invasion brings about considerable departure from her 2010 feature, Year Without a Summer. As a first departure, Tan offers a genre work, a clear break from her past arthouse-inclined works. As a second departure, Barbarian Invasion does not just align with the current trend of female-fronted genre films in Southeast…

Julien Faraut follows up his 2018 tennis documentary In the Realm of Perfection with another film on unique sports personalities. This time, he focuses on the Japanese National Volleyball team who were dubbed “the Witches of the Orient”: magical players that achieved a record winning streak en route to an Olympic Gold at the Tokyo Olympiad in…

Sun Children attempts to make a whole statement on the vulnerability of children to be exploited. Writer-director Majid Majidi considers this in a very nuanced sense: to expose how this exploitation is not in anyway sourced from evil people, but rather from a whole complex of situations that force children to take things on their own…

There was a surprising turn in Scott Sanders’ blaxploitation parody Black Dynamite (2009) when the characters in the film suddenly turn to a discussion about Greek Mythology. It was a pleasant surprise, done with a hint of irony, of course. Now take that scene, stretch it to 80 minutes, reduce the irony, and what you get is…

Other than good filmmaking, what makes a film especially satisfying? A good ending. Tetsuya Mariko’s Miyamoto starts with a good ending: a couple getting married. But more than this good ending, Miyamoto actually presents a positive approach towards human life and violence, an attitude that is quite rare recently due to the prevalence of Hollywood cynicism. But what Mariko…

It is hard to believe that Roll is a debut feature by a young filmmaker. Daichi Murase has written and directed the film with such care that it actually exhibits a maturity that is lacking in recent independently produced works. This is not to say that it’s smoothly done, but however rough it is around the edges,…

Wang I-Fan’s debut feature Get the Hell Out opens explosively and stylishly, like the entrance of a pro wrestling star in the arena. It promises chaos, blood and fun. The film delivers a sharp line of social commentary mixed with technical and artistic consistency almost comparable with 2019’s Parasite. Where Parasite succeeded as a social commentary through metaphor, Get the Hell…