Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan had become the faces of Hong Kong cinema, delivering a brand of action cinema that was both thrilling as it was technical in its execution, we’d never seen anything quite like it here in the West. And whilst it may have been Cheng Chang-Ho’s 1972 […]
Ben Jones
Golgo 13 (1973) Ken Takakura at his Effortless Best (Review)
The Katsuhito Ishii Collection (1995-2022) (Review)
Revenge (1964) A True Masterpiece of Japanese Cinema (Review)
How does one win when the chips are stacked so very high against you? In a society where social standing and face mean everything, the slightest disagreement or misunderstanding can escalate to unfathomable levels of violence, heaping consequence upon consequence. When does it end? And just how far does it […]
The Game Trilogy (1978/9) Classic Japanese Carnage with a Huge Slice of Cool (Review)
Standing at 6 feet tall and having an effortlessly cool demeanour, Yusaku Matsuda stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries in every sense of the term. His baby face masked by the always present sunglasses and a slender physique gave manga and anime artists their template for the next two […]
Burning Paradise (1994) Classic Wire-Fu that suffers due to the legendary status of its peers (Review)
Yakuza Graveyard (1976) A Chaotically Rewarding Yakuza Classic That Demands All of Your Attention (Review)
Toei had already garnered a reputation for being the studio that made Yakuza movies. Between their ninkyo-eiga (“chivalry”) pictures of the 1960s to the harder-hitting jitsuroku-eiga (“actual record films”) popularised by the likes of Director Kinji Fukasaku and writer Kazuo Kasahara, Toei Company had a winning formula that brought in […]