Maggie Lee

Koreeda’s sensitive yet lucid helming keeps the performances precise yet natural.

It’s the narrative non sequiturs and comic vignettes sprinkled throughout that give the freewheeling pic its playful charm.

It’s the nerve-racking situation that faces our hard-luck protag, with its heady black humor, social satire and a touch of surrealism, that keeps audiences on the edge of their seats.

The film is sprinkled with witty grace notes and is crowd-pleasing without being too ingratiating or idiotic.

While the film clearly taps into the national zeitgeist, buoyed by a sweeping show of people’s power that ousted the president, international audiences should also appreciate the actors’ feisty turns.

The unflaggingly perky caper has no down time, so one can’t help wishing for more the laid-back gamesmanship and boyish banter of the older renditions.

By highlighting the value of artists and intellectuals, and the importance of protecting them, [Hui] imbues the authentic historical episode with timely universal relevance.

Ireland conveys subtle differences between paranoia and white-knuckled fear with an appealing fragility, while Oliver-Touchstone invites sympathy and disquiet with just a few twitches of her wrinkles. However, the glaring absence of any background to the main characters’ lives and relationships gives the cast less to work with than they deserve.

As in most of the director’s repertoire, he portrays working class family relations with unpretentious warmth. Boasting a simple, coherent plot shot with real-time, handheld verismo, it’s a work of understated confidence.

The pic plays like a bonus track to the Thai auteur’s Palme d’Or winner, “Uncle Boomee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” its esoteric symbiosis of Thai folk culture, spiritualism and current sociopolitical conditions simplified, but no less mystifying.

The film’s strength really lies in its thrilling pace and robust action, elaborately choreographed and executed to involve a large ensemble of characters in a gripping way.

Although the pacing is more laidback than in “Au revoir Taipei,” the humor more rooted in believable (if bizarre) real-life situations than in slapstick shenanigans, the comic timing remains spot-on and the jokes fetchingly offbeat in an utterly Taiwanese way.

The director retains his controlled style even as he moves toward a more traditional narrative mode.

On the one hand, the film is a gripping whodunnit, exemplified by a scene of classic Hitchcockian suspense, when Jong-gu makes a frightening discovery while snooping around the Japanese man. At the same time it treads into supernatural territory through nightmarish dream sequences that feel unnervingly real.

Notwithstanding its bubblegum visuals and relentlessly perky hijinks, the yarn proceeds naturally toward a touching conclusion without high-handed lurches into tragedy or mawkishness.

Though the film lacks the spooky, macabre spirit expected of this subterranean subgenre, Mongolian-Chinese helmer Wuershan (“Painted Skin II: The Resurrection”) applies his outlandish visual panache to evoke an underground world of ethnic antiquity refreshingly distinct from traditional Han-Chinese culture.

Trading the earlier film’s goofy fish-out-of-water gags for robust action acrobatics and fail-safe family drama, the laffer induces the warm-and-fuzzies as an ode to Hong Kong cinema and its role in mainland Gen-Xers’ sentimental coming of age.

Fans of Kurosawa’s earlier psycho-thrillers may desire more eeriness and visual panache, but those who’ve accepted the helmer’s conscious change of tune and pace should be gently touched.

The Berlin File boasts knockout action setpieces that provide an impressive big-budget showcase for Ryoo Seung-wan's technical smarts.

Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid defies the time-worn nature of its material, concocting pure enchantment with the director’s own blend of nutty humor, intolerable cruelty and unabashed sweetness.

The story’s supernatural elements enable Miike to take huge liberties with chanbara, the oldest genre in Japanese cinema, and break free from rigid traditions of choreographing swordplay sequences.

Lost in Thailand is a boisterous, joyously hokey comedy.

Lam’s darkest work to date, one where violence is not just graphic but ugly, and Hong Kong symbolically comes to resemble a charnel house.

This well-crafted work deserves to be seen for its thorough account of intricate workings of secret service and political skullduggery.

Chinese director Zhang Yang (“Shower,” “Sunflower”) eschews the thrill of propulsive duels for a discursive allegorical approach, serving up picturesque visuals, highland-dry humor, and karmic plot twists.

Notwithstanding some sentimental beats, Peng achieves a delicate balance between bleak realities and a life-affirming attitude, capped by a predictable but necessary catharsis.

Although the journey feels rather drawn out in the film’s 142-minute running time, and is strewn with one ear-splitting brawl too many, the mystery of each protagonist’s true intentions, and the unpredictability of their course of action, keep tensions on a continuous simmer.

Hamaguchi extols his source for a compelling representation of love as a mystic experience. However, what gets transferred to the screen becomes more like banal indecision.