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HKAFF Line-Up Pits Asia's Big Guns Against North Korean Unknowns

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HKAFF Line-Up Pits Asia's Big Guns Against North Korean Unknowns

HKAFF Line-Up Pits Asia's Big Guns Against North Korean Unknowns

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 02:00 AM PDT

The Hong Kong Asian Film Festival is always one of the highlight's of the city's crowded festival calendar, crammed each year with a host of edgy, artsy and often otherwise unavailable fare from around the continent. This year proves to be no exception. The festival is set to run from 2-18 November and will open with the domestic premiere of Longman Lok and Sunny Luk's much-touted cop thriller Cold War, together with Taiwanese rom-com When A Wolf Falls In Love With A Sheep, from Hou Chi Jan. This year's closing film is the highly anticipated Pieta from Kim Ki-duk, which recently bagged four awards at the Venice International Film Festival, including the Golden Lion for Best Film (much to the chagrin of P.T. Anderson fans).There...

The Bronze Lion Fights In New MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS Teaser

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 09:35 PM PDT

Heads up, martial arts fans!The first in what appears to be a series of character teasers for RZA's The Man With The Iron Fists has arrived online, this one focused on Cung Le and his great big wig as Bronze Lion. While it's not incredibly long or in depth you do get a good bit of the ol' punchy punchy, a gadget or two and a reminder that Le has got himself a whole lot of screen presence. Check it below....

Blood And Fire In First Teaser For CARRIE

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 09:20 PM PDT

Chloe Moretz and Julianne Moore have some big shoes to fill with the Kimberly Peirce directed remake of Carrie. The original is a bona fide classic, after all, and one which is still very much held dear by horror fans. The stars have the chops to pull it off, however, the question is whether everything else will line up.A reimagining of the classic horror tale about Carrie White, a shy girl outcast by her peers and sheltered by her deeply religious mother, who unleashes telekinetic terror on her small town after being pushed too far at her senior prom.The first teaser for the film arrived online today so now you can judge for yourself. What say you? Looking good? Destined for the bargain bin? Take...

On Why Season Seven Of DEXTER Is - Thus Far - A Failure

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 08:57 PM PDT

I make no great secret of the fact that Dexter has been a staple of my TV viewing over the past six years. Though the quality has varied from episode to episode and season to season the high points have been very high indeed and many of the lows are flagrantly goofy enough to remain firmly in guilty pleasure territory. But three episodes in to Season Seven, Dexter is losing me. Dexter is failing in a manner that is no longer pleasurable and it all comes down to the writing, specifically in the dogged resistance to change.Dexter (the show) has been running for six full seasons now without any actual development in Dexter (the character). He is exactly the same now as he was when...

Jim Carrey To Star & Steal In Jared Hess' Heist Comedy LOOMIS FARGO

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 08:37 PM PDT

Say what you will of Jim Carrey, but the man knows how to surprise when picking projects. Fresh off filming for Kick-Ass 2, Carrey is now lining up to star in Loomis Fargo, a heist comedy that has Napolean Dynamite's Jared Hess at the helm, and has seen the fingerprints of Danny McBride, Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way) and Emily Spivey (Up All Night) on the script. Based on an actual 1997 armored car heist in North Carolina, Carrey is currently in negotiations to play an ex-military leader who heads up the massive heist. Currently in development at Relativity Media, rising producing star Megan Elliosn and her Anapurna Pictures could come aboard as a financial backer. Despite some critical and box office busts after...

Asian Premiere of THE AMERICAN SCREAM Hits Hong Kong This Halloween!

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 08:00 PM PDT

The American Scream, the award-winning documentary from Michael Stephenson, will enjoy its Asian premiere in Hong Kong later this month, as part of a special Halloween-themed double bill with Tom Holland's original Fright Night, on 23 October.This special, one-off screening is being organised by independent collective "Hong Kong Alt Screenings" - of which I proudly count myself a member - who earlier this year hosted the first official screening anywhere in Asia of Stephenson's hilarious Best Worst Movie, together with cult classic Troll 2. We followed up that success with the Asian premiere of hit Danish comedy, Klown.After years of seeing the films we love sail past Hong Kong, without stopping even for a token festival appearance, Ivy Lam, Spencer Douglass and myself decided that...

Jai Courtney Joins Joel Edgerton's FELONY

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 07:30 PM PDT

Felony is shaping into one of the most exciting police thrillers on the horizon. Written by Joel Edgerton and to be directed by Matt Saville (who has already proven himself with his debut film, Noise, another amazing police thriller - seriously, track it down), Felony is about decorated Australian cop (Edgerton) who runs a cyclist off the road after drinking with his buddies to celebrate a major gang bust. His split-second decision to lie about the incident changes everyone's lives forever. Tom Wilkinson has already been cast as the lead investigator who arrives first on the scene. According to Deadline, Courtney will play a fresh-faced police detective who suspects Edgerton's character is lying and gradually builds a criminal case against him. Courtney has had a busy few years. He's...

AFI Fest 2012 Announces Midnight, World Cinema, Breakthrough, and Shorts Lineups

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 05:50 PM PDT

Los Angeles's big awards season festival, AFI Fest will kick off on November 1 and they've just announced the lion share of the rest of their film programming (see the announcement of Young Americans and New Auteurs from a couple weeks back). The festival is still free to attend so be sure to check out the AFI Fest website for more details on tickets. The Midnight section is small but includes the highly anticipated The ABCs of Death, Adrián García Bogliano's much loved Here Comes the Devil, the Don Coscarelli Sundance hit John Dies at the End, and Makinov's Come Out and Play. The World Cinema program is much more extensive. A few highlights include Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or winning Amour, Kim Ki-duk's Pieta,...

EXCLUSIVE Poster Premiere for Peter Chan's DRAGON

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 05:20 PM PDT

Formerly known as Wu Xia, Peter Ho-Sun Chan's Dragon is finally making its way to American screens via RADiUS/TWC on VOD October 26, 2012 and in limited theaters November 30, 2012. Guess what, we've got the exclusive debut of the film's new poster for you now! You can scroll right down to see stars Donnie Yen and Kaneshiro Takeshi looking ready to rumble. Here are a few words from Todd's review. Leaning significantly more towards drama than action, Wu Xia is a beautifully photographed piece of work from the always visually impressive Peter Chan with an all star cast that includes Kara Hui, Tang Wei and - in a lovely nod to the film's origins as a remake of The One Armed Swordsman (a...

JA Bayona's THE IMPOSSIBLE Smashes Box Office Records

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 04:29 PM PDT

Juan Antonio Bayona has outdone himself. Bayona's debut feature, The Orphanage, already stands as one of the great successes of recent Spanish film, drawing nearly four and a half million admissions at Spanish cinemas alone. And now his follow up? Disaster picture The Impossible? Well, that one has just smashed previous Spanish opening records by drawing 1.4 million admissions on just 633 screens in only four days. To put this in context, only six Spanish films have managed to match The Impossible's four day totals over their entire runs in the past five years. The hugely popular [REC] films, incidentally, are not among them. That's just huge and a very necessary boost for the local industry at a time when government supports are being drastically...

Ishibashi Yohsimasa's MILOCRORZE Gets A New - And Greatly Improved - Trailer

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 04:00 PM PDT

Brash, bold and colorful, Ishibashi Yoshimasa's Milocrorze was one of the most invigorating debut pictures of 2011 - so much so that it landed on my year end best-of list. But despite a successful festival run and much love from critics and audiences alike Milocrorze has been stuck in a lengthy holding pattern awaiting its Japanese theatrical release, a wait that finally ends in November when the film hits local screens a full year and half after it began on the festival circuit.A candy colored affair, Milocrorze stars Yamada Takayuki as the lead character in three wildly different tales presented side by side by side. He is a young boy in love, the dancing giver of bad relationship advice, and a common man turned wandering...

Watch Apichatpong Weerasethakul's CACTUS RIVER

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 03:30 PM PDT

Uncle Boonmee director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is clearly a man who likes to keep busy. The acclaimed feature director is also active in the short film world and has worked extensively with art gallery installation projects and he seems as though he's constantly got at least a couple irons in the fire. One of those is his new short film Cactus River.Commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis - St Paul, it's a black and white work that continues Weerasethakul's fascination with the Mekong river. It's also freely available online and you can watch it below....

Sitges 2012 Dispatch: Subtitle Woes, and Jennifer Lynch's CHAINED

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 03:00 PM PDT

I would really like to tell you about Marçal Forés' fantastic story of an adolescent and his talking teddy bear, Animals, and Fernando Cortizo's gorgeous animated fantasy film O Apostolo. But I cannot. I can tell you a little bit about each, but you see, both were in either Spanish or Catalan with no subtitles. And I don't speak either of those languages. Here's what I know: The 3-D stop-motion animation in O Apostolo is gorgeous right from the first scene, which depicts two convicts running through labyrinth tunnels in hopes of escaping from prison. Both men talk quite a bit in these tunnels, and based on audience-laughter, I think that some of what they say is funny. That's about where I checked out, but,...

Edgar Wright's ANT-MAN Arrives November 2015

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 02:30 PM PDT

It's official:The Edgar Wright directed adaptation of Marvel Comics' Ant-Man is a go and now slated to arrive on the big screen November 6th, 2015. Which, yes, is a good while off but with Wright currently busy with The World's End and this being an exceptionally VFX heavy project I actually take the breathing room as very much a good thing as it means Wright won't be rushed to deliver on an overly aggressive timetable.Also announced today is the shocking to nobody news that both Thor 2 and Iron Man 3 will be released in 3D....

NYFF 2012 Review: FLIGHT, Well-Acted But Shamelessly Manipulative Awards Bait

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 02:15 PM PDT

The 50th edition of the New York Film Festival ended much as it began, with the launch of potent awards season bait, namely, the world premiere of Flight, the latest film by Robert Zemeckis. Flight is Zemeckis's first live-action feature in over a decade - his last was 2000's Cast Away - and is crowned by a riveting and nuanced performance by Denzel Washington as the troubled character at its center. Much like NYFF opener Life of Pi, Flight features an impressive disaster scene, rendered with state-of-the-art special effects, which Zemeckis has proved throughout his career to be no stranger to. Washington is surrounded by other cast members who do very good work as well, so in the acting and technical departments at least, there...

SINISTER Filmmakers Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill Talk Influences, Children, and Audience Expectations

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 02:00 PM PDT

Sinister was a highlight in a year of strong horror releases at Fantastic Fest 2012. It's also an American made film with a well known cast that includes heavy hitter Ethan Hawke. I myself was rooting for it because I'm such a big fan of director Scott Derrickson. The last few years have seen an explosion of religious horror films, due in no small part to the success of his still underrated The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005). His writings on the horror genre and spirituality are eloquent and, I think, important. In short, he's willing to dig deep and mine the genre for more than simple thrills and chills. Derrickson is partnered here with longtime Aint It Cool News writer C. Robert Cargill (known...

Full Trailer For Jackie Chan's CHINESE ZODIAC Spans Continents

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 01:45 PM PDT

After releasing a pair of teasers the first full trailer for Jackie Chan's upcoming action extravaganza Chinese Zodiac has arrived. And extravagant is definitely the word for it. This is classic, old school Chan with the action spanning continents while it neatly balances physical stunts and slapstick comedy. And after years of pushing into new areas and trying to figure out how to keep working without killing himself as his body inevitably slows down it's great to see Chan back doing what he does better than anyone else in the world.Take a look at the new trailer below....

TV Review: THE WALKING DEAD S3E01 Is The "Seed" For More Action Packed Things To Come!

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 01:27 PM PDT

Like most fans, I was pretty angry when Frank Darabont was fired from the show he had worked so hard to bring from the comics page to the tv screen. I see his Stephen King adaptions as the best of the bunch, and The Mist is a straight-up modern horror classic in my opinion. So how could this show go on without him and his brilliant guidance?Surprise surprise surprise. Go on it did, and to be truthful? The Walking Dead actually improved (greatly) when it returned to finish up it's second season, even with the budget cuts that had been imposed on the program, and Darabont being shown the door. The pace was leaner, the action more frequent, and the scares more intense.Now that the...

Sitges 2012 Review: THE SECOND DEATH Finds New Terror in Religion

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 01:01 PM PDT

Argentinean director Santiago Fernández Calvete's The Second Death is an oddity: A hard-boiled, supernatural mystery that revolves heavily around Catholic dogma. Its engagement with religion is far more complex than the slew of exorcism movies we've been subjected to as of late, and in some ways, its plot goes into far more audacious places than any of those. At the same time, the tough, no nonsense style of the film results in a final product that feels surprisingly subdued, and while it's often moody and evocative, it could have used a bit more showmanship and drama to really drive its intriguing premise home. The titular term, according to Christian beliefs, refers to the eternal suffering that the soul endures after death in the Lake of...

Now on DVD: MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS PRESENT Will Make You Want to Strip Naked and Stare Into a Mirror

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 12:03 PM PDT

A completely absorbing, starkly powerful film, Matthew Akers' Marina Abramović The Artist is Present documents an amazing performance that is deceptively simple yet clearly the work of a master artist. It made me want to strip naked and stare into a mirror. As our own Christopher Bourne explained in his review, published in June 2012: Far from being a mere document, Marina Abramović The Artist Is Present, Matthew Akers's film about "the grandmother of performance art" Marina Abramović's massively popular (750,000 visitors) 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, is itself a moving work of art, visually and emotionally powerful. The documentary gives us a crash course on Abramović's pioneering work and details her extensive preparations for the show which, among other purposes, was intended to...

Jason Gorber's Cineruminations: ARGO and the "Truthiness" Doctrine

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 10:01 AM PDT

Argo is a delightful throwback film, echoing the kind of "political intrigue" style that was commonplace during the Nixon administration. The fact that Argo shares many characteristics with the likes of The Ides of March might be no mere coincidence. Forgetting the obvious point, that George Clooney is listed as a producer on both works, this film about events surrounding the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis fits in nicely with last year's politico-drama, joining a line of recent movies that Steven Soderbergh, Grant Heslov, Stephen Gaghan (Syriana), and a relatively small community of like-minded artists have been crafting of late, a group that Ben Affleck fits in with very well. Argo demonstrates that Affleck's move to directing is laudable as he settles in comfortably with this...

TV Review: DEXTER S7E03, BUCK THE SYSTEM (Or, Hurray! It Sucks Less This Week!)

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 09:30 AM PDT

Oh, Dexter. You had a lot to make up for after last week's phenomenal crapping of the bed, what with all the weepy eyes and twelve stepping and not killing people. After getting the season off to a strong start in episode one, last week's offering was one of the worst of the entire series and seemed to steer the show in a horrible direction. Consider this week's episode, then, something of a mumbled apology delivered with downcast eyes with toes scuffling away in the dirt. It doesn't fix all the damage of last week - not by a long shot - but it does offer some corrective measures.The good: There are two major positives. First, the whole Deb and Dexter live together with Deb...

TV Review: BOARDWALK EMPIRE S3E04, YOU'D BE SURPRISED (Or, Things Are About To Get Very Ugly)

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 09:01 AM PDT

While things have been, on the whole, rather sedate and introverted through the first three episodes of Boardwalk Empire this season director Timothy Van Patten is throwing down the gauntlet in episode four. Pick a story line - virtually any story line - and you can rest assured that it has taken a turn for the ugly here and while the consequences of all of these turns have not yet been fully felt you can rest assured that they are coming. Oh, yes, they are coming. And while there is still a good bit of road left to walk this season it seems quite clear that You'd Be Surprised is the moment where the season turns.We'll begin with Van Alden. Increasingly tense following his brush...

Blu-ray Review: FATHER'S DAY, Great Film Or The Greatest Film?

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Astron 6's masterpiece, Father's Day, was released back in August on Blu-ray, but I've only just now received my review copy. This is too important and controversial a release to ignore, so here is my belated review. The opening section of the article comes from my review of the film at Texas Frightmare Weekend, more detailed thoughts continue below that.I am an Astron-6 junkie.Ever since I saw their faux trailer for the brilliantly titled Lazer Ghosts 2: Return to Laser Cove (yes, laser is spelled two different ways in the title), I was hooked. This is a band of miscreants with whom I share a common twisted sensibility and genuine love for trash filmmaking. As a thirty-two year old man who grew up scouring the...

VIFF 2012 Review: TOGETHER Is Frothy Fun

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 07:00 AM PDT

A fresh blend of romantic comedy and fluffy drama, Rox Hsu's intrinsically constructed Together makes for some serious carefree viewing. Channeled through the eyes, and occasionally the will, of 17 year-old Xiao Yang, the film leapfrogs through a neighborhood of Taipei and the pockets of interpersonal fracases and blossoms. Xiao Yang's friends and family all seem to be caught up in the mire of mildly unpleasant relationships, including his amiable but distant parents. His father holds solitary court in his print shop, entertaining the local dog or practicing his skills on the accordion or cultivating an attraction to a recently engaged woman across the street. Likewise, his mother tends to people's needs at her juice and noodle stand while being distracted and wooed by the...
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