HCF Review - The Wanderers

ADRIFT IN TOKYO (2007)

A tale of desperate loners, debt collectors, and even potential murder, isn’t exactly the sort of fare that is typically considered easy watching. But Satoshi Miki’s meandering hangout movie Adrift in Tokyo is anything but typical. Rather than being something like the gruelling Yakuza pictures one of its stars has appeared in this is more a strange and melancholy drama. It’s slow paced instead of gripping; punctuated by occasional moments of slapstick rather than violence. Can such a laid-back movie with a resounding lack of thrill power be engaging or even thought provoking?

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HCF Review - The Getaway

ONCE A THIEF (1991)

Discussions of John Woo’s classic run in the late 1980s to early 1990s often omit this caper, but unlike Bullet in the Head it’s not a case of it being too bleak. Plus the stars are all here; Leslie Cheung and Chow Yun-Fat return from the Better Tomorrow films, as do several other familiar faces. So are the locations the director enjoys; this time Paris. Perhaps it’s because the whole thing has a tendency to get rather silly. Some of the lead characters are named after desserts and Violet Lam’s score is very whimsical after all. The explosive set pieces are present and correct, however, there’s something off about the construction of the story itself that goes beyond some of the strange tonal shifts. Is it more than the sum of these parts?

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Review Roundup - Gods and Monsters

THE ODYSSEY (2026)

Like The Dark Knight there's a sense that some of the material in Homer's epic, and its predecessor The Iliad, could have a tendency to become rather silly. There are a lot of choices to unpack in Christopher Nolan's modernist (or perhaps minimalist) adaptation but the way he's decided to depict certain ideas and images is one of the biggest. He must have considered this one of the central problems; that a giant wooden horse, much like the caped crusader, is hard to take seriously. Going full swords and sandals fantasy camp was never on the cards so the results aren't entirely surprising. However, there's still plenty to enjoy in the resulting epic. 

HCF Review - Gold Rush

BULLET IN THE HEAD (1990)

Of all John Woo’s Hong Kong projects this is probably the most overlooked, perhaps because it doesn’t star Chow Yun-fat, or perhaps because of its sometimes gruelling nature. The behind the scenes story is well known but after a disagreement with producer Tsui Hark about a third A Better Tomorrow the pair went their separate ways. The official third movie is best described as tepid; mistaking slow-motion for style. Bullet in the Head on the other hand is a bleak and blistering assault on the senses that uses its Vietnam scenery tell a nihilistic tale of brotherhood gone awry. Perhaps it’s just a metaphor for the end of a film-making partnership.

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Horror Bites - Man Yells at Cloud

NOPE (2022)

Nope is a weird movie. In a complementary sense; a long forgotten review of Get Out on this blog suggested that it should have been more unnerving and also funnier. Which is an oddly specific complaint that has been addressed here. The characters are more eccentric, the tone is more peculiar, and the horror moments are much stranger. Which is saying something when the overall vibe of the movie is a sci-fi adventure borrowing from UFO films as well as Jaws and other influences. But with all this going on does the film as a whole manage to be compelling beyond the sum of its parts?