Eye For An Eye was among the recent crown jewels of Chinese DTV action: blind swordsman thrills pruned to narrative simplicity and cool fights. It was a quintessential and visceral 74 minutes, with Tse Miu lending impressive physicality to the archetype. A sequel could’ve just been more of the same, but Eye For An Eye 2 exceeded all my expectations as a proper wuxia Zatoichi ode. Yang Bingjia executes that timeless formula with ambitious style, spaghetti western flavor, and drama-driven…
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Colossus: The Forbin Project 1970
A forgotten 1970 sci-fi gem whose now-well-trodden premise of a supercomputer gone rogue is executed with Cold War-era dread and paranoia, rendered just as timely today by the ongoing developments in machine learning and autonomous UAVs. Effectively Fail Safe if it were hijacked by HAL, Colossus unfolds as a smartly-scripted leanly-plotted chess game between creator and his creation as it accelerates beyond human control.
Even though the majority of the film unfolds in control rooms and via stagey conversations, the…
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A Quiet Place Part II 2020
The classic sequel formula of ‘the same but more’ but done with an enthusiastic embrace of a wider canvas to maximize new possibilities for creature suspense and drama.
A Quiet Place Part II isn’t the first film’s exactingly-crafted finesse of post-apocalyptic slice of life spiraling into nerve-shredding survive-the-night terror. It isn’t as tight, as taut, as intimate. But it is equally intense, amplifying the tone and thrills of the original’s second half into a propulsive feature-length crescendo of set-pieces big…
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A Quiet Place 2018
If it wasn’t for my unbridled love for Crawl, this would undeniably be my contender for the most tautly crafted, most edge-of-your-seat, most breathlessly entertaining creature feature of the last decade. 90 minutes of superbly confident visual storytelling, monster suspense, and character dynamics, from the opening’s in-media-res gut-punch intrigue to that perfect cut-to-black ending.
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Gunpowder Milkshake 2021
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
There’s a section mid-film where Karen Gillan has a gun and knife taped to her paralyzed arms, swinging them around to fight a trio of hobbled goons, all of them awkwardly trying to kill eachother. During those brief minutes of inspired physical comedy, Gunpowder Milkshake threatens to become something inventive, fun, and different.
No amount of Gillan swagger, Lena Headey murdering guys with gun-knives, or Angela Bassett doing her best Hammer Girl impression could save this movie though. Remember when…
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Godzilla Minus One 2023
Takashi Yamazaki delivers a genre triumph that once again returns to the franchise’s roots of leviathan terror and monster metaphor. While Shin Godzilla reimagined those roots as an pseudo-NGE Fukushima disaster satire, this is the Spielberg-ification of big G in ultimate crowdpleaser fashion. The King of the Monsters reigns as the king of kaiju cinema with Godzilla Minus One.
I spent the last month binging giant monster films, but not even the 1954 original captivated me like Minus One. A…
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