Deborah Young

Lam’s filmmaking team deliver thrills on schedule with solid effects, crisp shooting and fast cutting.

Splashy, noisy and downright fun.

The film has a hard time shaking a feeling of filmed theater, particularly with the tight restriction of time and place. But the drama is brightly acted by a competent cast, of whom Jadidi and Izadyar, as the married couple, are the most acidic, while Abar and Alvand are given the most range.

Though not very subtle in presenting its thesis, the story is generally suspenseful and well-told by young HK actor and director Tsang (Soul Mate).

The film succeeds at being both exciting and character-driven, but only after a confused first half that will leave international viewers frustrated over who’s who and what’s going on.

Sentimentality and pathos are banned from Hikari’s screenplay, which surprises with its fresh, often humorous realism. This is one of those films that starts slowly and predictably, but when the turning point comes, it lifts the pic into another dimension.

Lensed with great sensitivity and style and superbly acted, it has one drawback for Western audiences in its perplexing plot points based on the local culture and customs.

It is unsettling in its depiction of the dark underbelly of the country, where a culture of hate paved the way for violence and tragedy.

Jeremy Strong’s vicious portrayal of Roy Cohn will long be remembered alongside the finest of Hollywood’s eccentric baddies.

The pièce de résistance of unabashed culinary cinema, Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu serves up a French country idyll in romantic 19th century sauce for audiences whose tastes run to the fine wines and 12-course meals.

An intellectually rigorous but stylistically staid peep at the 20-something author of Capital and The Communist Manifesto, Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is at once historically impeccable and a filmic disappointment.

It’s a smart film with engaging moments. But working overtime to build an involving multi-layered drama with a flurry of hand-held camera movements and dizzying flashbacks, it ultimately turns repetitive and annoying.

Though it takes some time to sort out the large cast, the leads, all fine actors, eventually come into focus. As the good and bad samurai, Yakusho and Ichimura have the gravitas to take their roles seriously and perform a decisive one-on-one sword fight straight.

For those who like head-on, immersive emotional experiences at the movies, The Sky Is Pink may be a direct hit.

One couldn’t wish for a more painstakingly researched or beautifully rendered account of the infamous Dreyfus affair than Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse).... Yet the result is oddly lacking in heart and soul, almost as though a mask of military discipline held it in check.

The story has a tendency to scatter at times, and it banks a lot on the humanity of the three main actors who have some heart-wrenching moments riding out the joys and sorrows of modern life, complicated by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

It’s a far cry from dreary or depressing, but it also doesn’t offer any easy way to enter its emotional territory. Viewers who have gone through the experience of taking care of an ailing parent or relative may identify more fully with the slow-moving story.

While the stories the film tells are lively and never uninteresting, they fail to ignite an emotional explosion. The reach is also too broad for a film.

A film whose very surreal, disturbing first hour dissolves in disappointing B-movie nonsense at the end. Still it’s hard to remember a film about S&M as funny as this one, or one as beautifully and weirdly imagined.

Though it begs for a little lightening up, a moment of irony, a wink at the audience, this dead-serious fairy tale about a mysterious young woman (and a phantom automaton straight out of Hugo) is worth watching for Geoffrey Rush’s sensitive, never pandering performance.

The attention given to constructing each shot makes for a hypnotic visual experience, while lack of a progressive narrative telescopes film's running time into infinity.

It feels like every script-reader in the Italian-Swiss-German-Albanian-Kosovo coproduction cut out a line of dialogue in each scene, leaving behind an irritating silence and an enigmatic puzzle for the audience to second-guess.

The overwritten script has so many subplots it’s hard to keep the stories straight, especially when the ending throws a truly unexpected twist. But little matter; the exceptional tech work gives the film plenty of energy and excitement.

Only the bravura of the cast, first and foremost Park and Lee (both veterans of Unbowed), generates sufficient interest to see the film through to its surprising conclusion, recounted in a respectful coda many years later.

The film feels empty and intellectualized at the core, where it should feel powerfully emotional.

Despite a warmly interacting cast that includes Jennifer Ehle as Emily’s sister and Keith Carradine as her lion-maned, lionized father, and a valiant effort on the part of Nixon and Davies to externalize the poet’s inner demons in emotional, high-tension scenes, the film can’t escape an underlying static quality that extinguishes the flame before it can get burning.

A low-structure, high-involvement Brazilian free-for-all destined to take its place among hellish prison films, Carandiru plants a fist in the viewer's stomach.

In the end, there is a method in all this madness, suggested by Dafoe’s calm face and reassuring voice as Clint confronts his most emotionally charged memories with courage and curiosity.