The Swordsman of All Swordsmen has filed his amicus brief on debt forgiveness, and he wrote it in blood. Kung Fu Legend Joseph Kuo’s early wuxia film is back and digitally restored for your viewing pleasure, and it is a… Read More ›
foreign film
“The King of Wuxia:” Fall in love with the Twilight Samurai. [Old School Kung Fu Fest]
“He was a pure artist. The kind you meet once or twice in a lifetime.” King Hu, the subject of documentary The King of Wuxia, was once named among the five greatest filmmakers on Earth. Kicking off Metrograph’s 10th Old… Read More ›
EoM Presents: A Conversation with “Sisu” writer/director Jalmari Helander.
EoM senior interviewer Thomas Manning recently had the chance to interview writer and director Jalmari Helander in a discussion about Sisu, the wickedly entertaining action drama which follows a Finnish gold prospector’s quest for vengeance against a squad of Nazis…. Read More ›
Donnie Yen’s “Śakra” delivers the martial arts wuxia action you want.
In Buddhism, the word Śakra refers to a specific individual, a ruler of the Trāyastriṃśa Heaven who analyzes issues of morality with Buddha. Considering the depiction of the character Qiao Feng (Donnie Yen) in the Yen and Kam Ka Wai-directed… Read More ›
“New Gods: Yang Jian,” the fourth film in Light Chaser Animation’s Investiture of the Gods Universe, comes home via Shout! Factory and GKids Films.
The New Gods series from Light Chaser is a refreshing approach to cultural stories. Each one of their films, even if not listed with the New Gods label (White Snake and Green Snake) allows the audience to engage with the… Read More ›
Radiance Films adds director Luigi Comencini’s murder mystery comedy “The Sunday Woman (La donna della domenica)” to their burgeoning collection of restorations.
Comedy is tragedy plus time. – Author Mark Twain Though Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is widely considered the first detective story, there’s a long standing relationship between murder and storytelling. Whether in dramatics… Read More ›
2021’s “Cube” lands on the pile of unnecessary remakes.
There was a viral tweet going around recently of a meme account getting roasted for implying that high school in 2002 was “so chill,” leading millennials of that age to share their horror stories of attending high school in a… Read More ›
Don’t worry, smile: 88 Films’s 2K restoration is “Gorgeous.”
Martial artist. Stuntman. Action director. Comedic Actor. Romantic lead? The first four absolutely describe world-renowned physical performer Jackie Chan, but the last? Certainly during his time making films with studio/distributor Golden Harvest, that’s not something the actor dared pursue as… Read More ›
“Suzume” is another breathtaking tale of grief, love, and healing from writer/director Makoto Shinkai.
Writer/director Makoto Shinkai’s been telling stories since the late-1990s, but didn’t become as widely well-known in the United States until his 2016 release Your Name. (君の名は。) which combined science fiction/fantasy elements through a natural disaster with young love, creating one… Read More ›
Behold the mighty weirdness of director Gakuryu Ishii’s “Punk Samurai” outside Japan for the first-time thanks to Third Window Films.
The concept of “punk” is a rebellion against the mainstream. As it relates to music, the term was used to describe rock bands of the late-‘60s to early ‘70s that played rock tunes fast, hard, and, often, in brief. For… Read More ›
Director Edward Berger’s Oscar-winning adaptation of “All Quiet on the Western Front” is now available in a 4K UHD limited edition home release.
It is 2023 and the theatrical window is dangerously small now. Things that aren’t being made on $100 million budgets are barely seeing the theatrical window to begin with, and then a physical release is even less likely, and if… Read More ›
“Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism” will swallow your soul. [The Overlook Film Festival]
There is something that is truly horrifying about exorcisms and it usually is the horrors behind them. Something about being possessed by an entity is just something that makes my skin personally crawl, and seeing the more modern versions and… Read More ›
“With Love and a Major Organ”: A Rare Science Fiction Gem. [SXSW]
In the surreal and quirky With Love and a Major Organ, director Kim Albright deftly examines the difficulty of finding love and connection inside a world ruled by the algorithm. Based on a play by Julia Lederer, who also wrote… Read More ›
Explore every nook of “299 Queen Street West” with Sean Menard’s new documentary. [SXSW]
If you grew up in Canada, specifically Toronto, the address 299 Queen Street West most likely held a special place in your heart as more likely than not you either fought your way through the pandemonium of crowds OR you… Read More ›
The lesser-known aftermath of World War II is brought into the light thanks to director Mizuho Nishikubo’s “Giovanni’s Island,” now available from GKids Films and Shout! Factory.
Acts of aggression always come with unintended consequences. On the smaller scale, as when my children fight, it could be that the toy they’re fighting over takes a break for a bit and neither gets to use it. On the… Read More ›
With a giggle and a wink, Tomas Gomez Bustillo’s “Chronicles of a Wandering Saint” asks audiences whether we notice that heaven is a place on earth. [SXSW]
How do you know if you’ve lived a good life? That’s a hard question to answer objectively because of the various cultural and social rules that come to define what “good” is. Do intentions really matter if someone gets hurt… Read More ›
“Code of the Assassins” Blu-ray Giveaway
Black Mask (1996) and Dragon Blade (2015) director Daniel Lee Yan-Kong released wuxia action drama Code of the Assassins (青面修罗) in 2022, with it landing on streamer Hi-YAH! at the start of March and on home video via Well GO USA toward… Read More ›
Prequel “Furies” rages harder and asks tougher questions than its predecessor.
Content Warning: Sexual assault and violence against women are heavy visual and narrative themes throughout the film. Actor Ngô Thanh Vân has been working for nearly two decades across genres and countries. She’s known more widely in the U.S. by… Read More ›
Ally Pankiw’s “I Used to Be Funny” first feature is a provocative, intense, and deeply unsettling gut-punch. [SXSW]
In 2020, during the height of this pandemic were still finding ourselves in, I was sitting on my couch with my partner wondering what to do on the first night of TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) and Twitter was recommending… Read More ›
The waiting room from immigration hell awaits “Upon Entry.” [SXSW]
Nobody enjoys a waiting room. In a world accustomed to instant gratification, the experience feels intolerable, even if you have an appointment or assurances that your stay in that space is only temporary. Co-directors Alejandro Rojas and Juan Sebastián Vásquez… Read More ›