Maggie Lee

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.

Beguilingly simple, relaxed in its mastery and enhanced by Isabelle Huppert’s impeccable poise.

Feng employs traditional craftsmanship to draw a sweeping historical canvas with profound human upheavals that mirror virtues and flaws of the Chinese people, without ever losing sight of the personal experiences that he dramatizes with such acute sensuality.

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.

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.

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

Dutch helmer Maurice Dekkers devotes most of his film to the celebrity chef’s extensive foraging, while his abstemious staff harps on about the onerous pursuit of perfection; one crucial missing ingredient, however, is the joy of eating or cooking.

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

Adapting Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel of the same name helps impose more of a narrative framework than is typically found in Kawase’s oeuvre, although the film’s mix of genres — from marital drama to teen romance to social commentary — don’t gel.

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.

Guan’s direction may be less radical or propulsive than Nolan’s, but it too plunges audiences into both the intimacy and magnitude of brutal war spectacle while immersing them in a stunningly mounted period canvas.

Channeling “La femme Nikita,” “Kill Bill,” Nikkatsu’s ’70s female exploitation films and a gazillion Hong Kong martial arts heroines, The Villainess nonetheless succeeds in being one-of-a-kind for its delirious action choreography and overall narrative dementia.

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.

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.

Bringing two of Singapore and Japan’s most popular dishes (bak kut teh and ramen) together in a film about cultural and culinary fusion, Singaporean auteur Eric Khoo’s “Ramen Teh” is cinematically more comfort food than haute cuisine.

This directing debut by helmer-scribe Shim Sung-bo echoes Bong’s trademark cynical vision of human nature, but the characters lack dimensionality and psychological depth.

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.

On the level of pure popcorn entertainment, there’s not a thing one can fault the 3D megabuster for.

Despite its magnificent natural vistas and some pulse-pounding action in stunning 3D, Wolf Totem boils down to a familiar environmentalist allegory that doesn’t move or provoke too deeply.

Kawase embraces nature worship and pompous philosophizing in her indulgently mannerist style, which, over the course of two hours, overwhelms a small yet potentially moving story of two teenagers dealing with separation within their families.

Less offensively nationalistic than the second installment but falling short of the glowing humanity, genial Cantonese humor and visual flair of the first, the pic is somewhat tarnished by its pedestrian plot and limp characterization.

Lead actors Sometani and Huang are both charming enough even if their emotional struggles are superficially depicted.

Slow to heat up yet quick to burn out, police procedural-thriller Cold War 2 dramatizes internal strife and conspiracy among Hong Kong’s police force and ruling elite, adding some new twists in a narrative framework that ultimately can’t support the film.

Artfully subverting the spirit of such soulful, diaphanous romances as “Love Letter” and “Hana and Alice” from earlier in his own career, Iwai exposes the desperation and deceit involved in the search for love.

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.

Lost in Thailand is a boisterous, joyously hokey comedy.

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

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