Asian Movie Reviews »
Marrying the Mafia (2003) Movie Review
Showing their newfound love affair with all things organized crime, South Korea has produced a flurry of mafia-related films in recent years. The movies mostly fall into two categories: straight Gang Melodrama and Action...
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Another Heaven (2000) Movie Review
Joji Iida’s “Another Heaven” is a standard “X-Files”-inspired movie about cops chasing a more-than-human killer, but it makes the mistake of spending too much time trying to be deeper than it is capable. The...
Read More »Gorgeous (1999) Movie Review
Leave it to Jackie Chan to do a romantic comedy and not have a single kissing scene in the entire thing. (Unless you count the film’s outtakes, which play over the end credits; one...
Read More »Black Mask 2: City of Masks (2001) Movie Review
Besides the title and the presence of a man wearing Kato-inspired threads, “Black Mask 2: City of Masks” has little in common with the original “Black Mask” starring Jet Li. The original was produced/co-written...
Read More »Dream of a Warrior (2001) Movie Review
Let me just say that “Dream of a Warrior”, a South Korea/Hong Kong film, is as unfathomably bad as they come. If there is one saving grace to the Sci-Fi Romance it’s the presence...
Read More »Naked Weapon (2002) Movie Review
Imagine my surprise when “Naked Weapon”, a movie written by Jing Wong, the man behind such lackluster fare as “The Duel” and “High Risk”, turned out to be one of the more entertaining films...
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Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002) Movie Review
Sun-Woo Jang’s “Resurrection of the Little Match Girl” is one of the most intriguing failures I’ve come across in a long time. It’s about a food deliveryman who, in what can only be described...
Read More »Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) Movie Review
“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” represents an all-too familiar problem with many South Korean films that I’ve encountered of late: It lacks passion. There is a large contingent of South Korean filmmakers who believes the...
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Gojoe (2000) Movie Review
I am a sucker for Japanese Samurai movies, but lately I’ve been disappointed by what I’ve seen. “Red Shadow” was lacking in any serious credibility, and as a result I loathe calling it a...
Read More »So Close to Paradise (1998) Movie Review
I must admit that the Chinese film “So Close to Paradise” surprised me. At first I found the film to be lacking and uninteresting and its acting to be spotty at times. But as...
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Tales of the Unusual (2001) Movie Review
“Tales of the Unusual” is essentially a “Twilight Zone”-inspired movie about 4 very different stories linked by a common sequence. But where other anthology movies usually have a constant theme (for example, horror or...
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Princess Mononoke (1997) Movie Review
I should first say that I have nothing against nature, forests, and all that other good ecological stuff. Hey, plants keep us alive, right? It just so happens that whenever someone attempts to make...
Read More »Enforcer (aka My Father is a Hero, 1995) Movie Review
Besides offering us a chance to see Jet Li pretend he knows how to smoke (which he really doesn’t, natch), “Enforcer” (or “My Father is a Hero”, which is the more appropriate title in...
Read More »Happy End (1999) Movie Review
In this day and age, only a fool would cheat on her/his husband/wife after seeing so many movies where the offender lived (or in some cases, doesn’t live) to regret his/her indiscretion. According to...
Read More »My Boss, My Hero (2001) Movie Review
It probably behooves me not to take everything I see in movies seriously, as cinema is at best fictional versions of the truth, and at worst pure fabrications of some fevered writer’s imagination. Still,...
Read More »My Beautiful Days (aka 24, 2002) Movie Review
Far be it for me to tell an established filmmaker what to do, but perhaps the next time director Jong-jae Im decides to make a movie he should choose a protagonist that is actually...
Read More »Sausalito (2000) Movie Review
“Sausalito” is a Hong Kong movie starring Chinese actors, but set entirely in San Francisco. The film is essentially a Romance, but not a Romantic Comedy since there’s little comedy to be had. It...
Read More »Two Cops 3 (1998) Movie Review
“Two Cops 3″, as the title indicates, is the third installment in a popular series that focuses on two cops as they fight crime side by side. Part 3 has strayed from the previous...
Read More »Mr. Iron Palm (2003) Movie Review
The South Korean movie “Mr. Iron Palm” is an undeniable Romantic Comedy, and as such its ending is inevitable from the opening frame. We know, for instance, that Korean expatriate Iron Palm (In-Pyo Cha)...
Read More »Public Enemy (2002) Movie Review
Despite a very graphic suicide (a bullet through the head) popping up early in “Public Enemy,” the rest of the film takes a dramatic shift toward comedy. Not long after the suicide, a cab...
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