It shows how much Johnnie To still experiments with form, especially as he continues to transition to digital cinema.
An immensely gifted physical performer, Donnie Yen isn’t strong enough an actor to suggest an authentic inner life to his character beyond a vague sense of stone-faced dissatisfaction.
Painted Skin does have the distinct advantage of starring three vibrant, distinctive female leads.
A lighthearted interclass romantic tale, Love interweaves stories of eight Beijing urbanites as they go about looking for happiness in rather clumsy ways.
Though both parts of Woo’s original film mostly serve to amplify his central pre-occupations, Red Cliff 2 goes a little farther in complicating them.
The film’s shortcomings have less to do with John Woo’s direction and more to do with the Frankenstein hatchet job enacted against it.
The social and political upheavals of the Cultural Revolution are glanced over to make way for ineffectually meta-movie counterpoints.
For fans of David Beckham and The Matrix and everyone in between.
What is the film’s Buddhist idol but a lazy MacGuffin used to excuse a last-act contrivance of soulless CGI brouhaha?
Shaolin Soccer’s multimedia madness is so excusable because most of its antics are actually more crude than seamless.