Tag: movies

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Is 1989 Was the Most Important Year in Movie History?

If you want to understand modern movies, you have to understand 1989. It wasn’t just a good year for cinema; it was a seismic shift that broke the mold and recast everything  in ways we are still living with today.

To give you some context: I recently sat on a panel titled “1989: The Year Nobody Left the Theater.” That title is only half a joke. The average American in 1989 bought two and a half times as many theater tickets as people do today. The volume of films released was staggering, and the appetite for them was voracious.

But beyond the raw numbers, 1989 fundamentally altered what movies get made. Case in point: Tim Burton’s Batman. It wasn’t just a hit; it was, for better or worse, and inescapable cultural monolith that ushered in the age of the superhero industrial complex. It pulled in over $400 million worldwide—that is over a billion in today’s dollars—and proved that a darker, style-heavy vision could sell tickets and merchandise in equal measure.

While Burton was redefining the mainstream, the margins were moving toward the center. Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape single-handedly transformed Sundance from a quiet, regional arts festival into the high-stakes marketplace for indie cinema that we know today.

Simultaneously, The Little Mermaid snapped a decades-long losing streak for the House of Mouse. It didn’t just save a struggling animation department; it kickstarted the “Disney Renaissance,” a period of unprecedented critical and commercial dominance.

The shift was happening in non-fiction, too. 1989 moved the documentary away from objective observation toward urgent, personality-driven activism. Michael Moore’s Roger & Me proved that a documentary could be abrasive, funny, and—crucially—commercially viable.

In Asia, the landscape was equally volatile. John Woo’s The Killer became the cornerstone of the “Heroic Bloodshed” genre, influencing the visual language of action cinema globally. Meanwhile, Chow Yun-Fat’s other hit, God of Gamblers, became the year’s highest-grossing film in Hong Kong. While it didn’t cross over to the West the way Woo’s gun-fu did, it launched a massive wave of gambling-themed cinema across Asia.


Finally, we have A City of Sadness, a monumental achievement that tackled the history of Taiwan’s White Terror, a story that would have been taboo before the censorship of martial law was lifted. Looking back, this film feels prophetic, anticipating how two major events of 1989 would shape the future.

First, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet system meant that European cinema would spend the next quarter-century unpacking that trauma in an almost endless stream of noteworthy films . Second, on the other side of the world, the repression following the Tiananmen Square massacre inadvertently birthed the “Sixth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers—artists who turned to cheap digital video to document a gritty urban reality without state approval.

There are so many significant films from 1989 I haven’t even touched on—Do the Right Thing, Heathers, Star Trek V… actually, scratch that last one. But the films I’ve mentioned are the ones that shifted the tectonic plates, establishing the geography of contemporary cinema.

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Lost in Translation: Beautiful, Messy, Enduring

Lost in Translation captures a ghost of a moment. It exists in suspended animation, showing  the shifting landscape of globalization in the immediate shadow of 9/11, dwelling on a specific, analog loneliness that existed just before the era of digital saturation.

The story is sparse. Two Americans find themselves isolated and adrift in Tokyo, attempting to escape personal crises through withdrawal and observational detachment. Bob and Charlotte meet as strangers in the Park Hyatt; over the course of a few days, they forge a meaningful intimacy—one that is defined by its own impermanence.

This film explores our experiences of displacement and our search for authentic connection. It is an essential film because Coppola explores these themes with impeccably controlled formal choices.

Coppola and cinematographer Lance Acord use visual language to evoke the characters’ internal states. Early in the film, the framing uses negative space and wide shots to emphasize isolation. We see them dwarfed by the city or trapped behind glass. Later, as Bob and Charlotte move through Tokyo together, the camera logic shifts. We begin to see shared point-of-view shots,.

Johansson and Murray deliver performances that rely on texture as much as speech—communicating through glances, body language, and physical proximity..

At the time of release, critics fixated on Murray’s pivot to vulnerability. But twenty years on, what stands out to me are the grace notes that call back to his broadly comic roots. There is a specific physicality to his weariness. While he is often credited here for pivoting to sophisticated sadness, a contemporary re-watch reveals just how many “SNL moments” remain: the slapstick flailing on the exercise bike, or his first, over the top attempt at Kareoke..

The editing favors long takes that allow scenes to breathe. The rhythm mirrors the characters’ internal clocks, dragging slowly through their jet-lagged dislocation and accelerating only slightly as their connection deepens.


However, the film is not without baggage. It has been validly criticized for utilizing Orientalist stereotypes and treating Tokyo merely as a neon backdrop for American self-discovery. There are undeniable low points, particularly scenes that derive humor from Japanese characters struggling with English pronunciation.

Yet, we must remember the context: this is a story about American tourists who are depressed, self-centered, and trapped in a bubble of their own making. If the protagonists are dismissive of the culture they encounter, the film can often be said to be observing that insularity rather than endorsing it.

Furthermore, the film frequently invites us to laugh at the white characters. Perhaps the most excruciatingly cringeworthy moment in the film isn’t a cultural misunderstanding, but Anna Faris’s character, Peggy, butchering the song “Nobody Does It Better.” It is a fierce performance that highlights the oblivious absurdity of the American interlopers.
Two decades later, Lost in Translation remains a mirror where audiences can still recognize their own uncertainty and hunger for contact. The film’s longevity suggests that Coppola succeeded in capturing not just what it felt like to live in 2003, but something fundamental to the human experience of being alone, together.

If this review was useful to you, like and subscribe—it helps the channel, and it means you won’t miss the next one.

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When John Woo Invented the Language of Modern Action Cinema

What if I told you that the movie that created the cinematic grammar of violence used by action films like John Wick had the narrative structure of a romance novel?

That film is John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow.

It  follows Sung Tse-Ho, a triad counterfeiter caught in a world of shifting loyalties. His younger brother Kit is a police officer who knows nothing of Ho’s criminal life. When a deal collapses into betrayal, Ho surrenders to authorities—a sacrifice meant to protect his family. But the syndicate, worried that he might talk, tries to take his father as a hostage, and kills him in the attempt.

Enter Mark Lee, Ho’s sworn brother. When he reads of Ho’s capture in a newspaper, something compels him forward. Not duty.  Brotherhood. In a restaurant shootout that would echo through cinema for decades, Mark decimates the gang. But he doesn’t escape clean. A bullet takes his leg.

Three years later, Ho emerges from prison seeking only the anonymous life of a taxi driver. His world, though, has collapsed. Kit now sees him as the cause of their father’s death, a scarlet stain on his police career. Mark, reduced to limping through the streets picking garbage, has been enslaved by Shing—the very man who betrayed them both, now running the syndicate like a corporate empire.

The film builds toward something inevitable: betrayal demanding answer, love demanding sacrifice, and the question of whether survival means anything if you’re surviving alone.


On its surface, A Better Tomorrow is a story about gangsters. But the narrative engine of A Better Tomorrow is not driven by the plot to defeat the villain, Shing, but rather by the emotional reconciliation of the brothers.

In a traditional romance novel, the question is never ”Will there be a Happy Ever After?” That’s simply guaranteed; the tension comes from how the characters grow enough to deserve it. This same tension animates A Better Tomorrow.

At the beginning of the film we are shown the deep, affectionate love between brothers, familial and sworn.

In a romance, a misunderstanding or betrayal separates the lovers. Here, Ho’s criminal life leads to a father’s death. This creates the central emotional conflict: Kit’s hatred of Ho. The “question” of the film is not “Will Shing be defeated?” but “How will Kit come to forgive Ho?”

Romance protagonists must often endure humiliation or perform acts of service to prove their change of heart. Ho spends three years in prison and then works as a taxi driver, refusing to fight back when beaten, specifically to prove to Kit that he has changed. He is “wooing” his brother back through penance.

A romance often ends with a grand gesture, like a dash to the airport. In A Better Tomorrow, the grand gesture is the final shootout. Ho realizes that his actions and apologies are insufficient. He re-enters the criminal world not for profit, but to protect Kit.

The film grossed HK$34.7 million. It shattered the previous record. Overnight, it  made Chow Yun-Fat an international star—and rewired Hong Kong’s entire industry. Gangster films flooded in. One movie changed what an audience wanted to see.

But its enduring impact was in how Woo showed us violence.

Guns are blunt instruments of death. For decades, Hollywood kept them symbolic. A character gets shot, clutches their chest, lets out a gasp, falls over. Clean. Sanitary. Morally digestible.


Bonnie and Clyde broke that. Its final sequence showed protagonists being torn apart by bullets from multiple angles, using slow-motion and squibs to force audiences to witness the violence, not abstract it away. A decade later, Sam Peckinpah made this uglier still. His gunplay emphasized trauma, devastation, the actual cost of modern weapons.

But Woo did something different entirely. He looked at Peckinpah’s brutality and Leone’s standoffs, sped them up, and asked: what if violence could be graceful? 

Woo’s gun-fu redefined the visual language of action cinema through a radical reimagining:

Highly coordinated choreography that treats firearms like extensions of the body—not tools, but instruments of expression. Slow-motion not as brutality but as reverence, making each death monumental, each bullet its own tragedy. Infinite ammunition that keeps the percussive rhythm alive, letting the violence breathe as aesthetic spectacle. Impossible angles and unrealistic logistics that prioritize visual beauty over tactical sense. Melodrama elevated through careful cinematography and stylized bloodshed—violence as operatic experience.

This wasn’t just technique. It was a complete decoupling of gunplay from reality. Walk through modern action cinema and you see Woo’s fingerprints everywhere.

Tarantino absorbed this language. The Wachowskis built The Matrix with it.
And when Stahelski made John Wick, he didn’t invent the “gun-fu”,  he inherited it from Woo, refined it through obsessive stunt choreography, and let it speak to a new generation.


Woo also refined his ideas. But A Better Tomorrow is the moment of creation. It is the movie where Woo invented vocabulary that filmmakers are still learning to speak.

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Jeanne Dielman: the Best Christmas Movie Ever Made

(The following is the script for a humorous holiday vlog post, with a link to the video. This site does not *actually* recommend Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as holiday classic.)

What’s up, Film Fans! Welcome back to Mark Loves Films.

I just watched a 1975 masterpiece that critics have been SLEEPING on. A film so heartwarming, so cozy, so Holiday-coded that—it is basically the blueprint for every Hallmark Christmas movie.

Meet Jeanne Dielman. Single mother. Brussels. 1974. 


This holiday season… one woman… will find the magic… in the mundane.

The director understands that the kitchen is the heart of the home. She gives us these incredible, uninterrupted takes of Jeanne just… peeling potatoes. For minutes. It’s so meditative. It’s not about quick cuts; it’s about honoring the starch.

And the family values? Chef’s kiss. The dinner scenes are breathtaking. Look at this.

No iPhones. No iPads. No “skibidi toilet.” Just a mother and son, sitting in silence, fully present, mindfully chewing every bite of…   soup. It’s a powerful reminder to disconnect to reconnect.

But here’s where it gets really heartwarming. Jeanne isn’t just a mom—she’s a Girl Boss. She runs a boutique service-based business right out of her bedroom!

Every afternoon, she hosts these exclusive 1-on-1 networking sessions with gentlemen clients. It’s so empowering to see a woman in the 70s thriving in the Gig Economy.

And THEN—and this is the part that really broke me—after each client leaves, she takes me time. She sits. She stares at the wall. Sometimes for like… ten minutes. No phone. No distractions. It’s a vital reminder for the holidays: You can’t pour from an empty cup!

But things change when her sister writes, she’s all: 

“GIRL get out of Brussels! You need a vacay! Miss u xoxo.”

Will Jeanne the “Small Town Girl” from a tiny French village called Brussels resist the call of the “Big City” Montreal? I won’t spoil the ending, but I think it will surprise you!


Let’s talk technique.

The cinematography is bold. The camera never moves. It’s not lazy; it’s grounded. It’s like the film is a weighted Christmas blanket for your eyeballs.

Costuming? Her wardrobe? Timeless red coat for that Mrs. Claus slay.

And sound design! Forget a big, sappy score. The real music is the sound of  home. The clink of the spoon in the coffee cup. The thwack of her tenderizing the veal. The scrape of the chair on the floor. It’s this incredible, minimalist ASMR symphony of domestic life. Cozy Hygge Holiday!

Now, the ending is… I won’t spoil it. But let’s just say… Jeanne makes a choice.

I think it’s a powerful metaphor for ‘cutting out’ negativity and stress before the holidays.

I see a woman who finally gets what every mom wants for Christmas: a Silent Night. No more guests. No more expectations. Just Jeanne, her thoughts, and the profound peace of a to-do list fully crossed off,

So if you want a film that captures the spirit of giving, the joy of cooking, and the importance of a really sharp pair of scissors… Jeanne Dielman is a five-star holiday classic.

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and tell me in the comments: What’s your favorite potato peeling technique? See ya next time–happy holidays!

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The Dark History Buried in Exhuma

While Exhuma is marketed as a straightforward horror film, its true genius lies in its structure as a piece of supernatural “competency porn.” This is a film about experts doing their job with breathtaking skill, only the job happens to be calming the dead and confronting ancient curses.

The narrative begins with a wealthy Korean-American family in Los Angeles, plagued by a series of inexplicable and terrifying paranormal events. They enlist the help of a pairf young, stylish, and prodigiously talented shamans. The pair quickly diagnose the problem as a “grave call”—a cry of anguish from a tormented ancestor whose burial site has been desecrated.

To resolve it, they must return to South Korea and assemble a team: a veteran geomancer, who reads the very energy of the earth, and a duty-bound mortician. Their task is to locate the grave, exhume the coffin, and pacify the spirit through ritual cremation. But when they arrive at the remote, eerily isolated burial mound, the geomancer immediately senses a malevolent energy far darker than any ordinary restless spirit. They are standing on unhallowed ground, and what they are about to unearth is a secret tied to a painful chapter of the past

The film is anchored by a magnetic  performance from Kim Go-eun as the shaman Hwa-rim. She portrays a character who is both deeply reverent to tradition and thoroughly modern. In her ritual scenes, particularly the astonishing daesal gut exorcism, her physicality is hypnotic. The rhythmic chanting, the precise gestures, the sheer force of her conviction—it’s a performance of terrifying authenticity that makes the supernatural feel chillingly real.

Yet, outside of these ancient rites, she is a pragmatic professional. Kim Go-eun shows us a confident expert who approaches a paranormal crisis not with fear, but with a clear, systematic methodology. She and her team are consultants for the supernatural, and their meticulous process is utterly compelling to watch.

This sense of historical weight is not accidental. The director deliberately named his main characters after famous Korean independence activists who fought against Japanese colonial rule. This choice reframes their ghost-hunting as a continuation of that historical struggle. They are not merely exorcising a ghost; they are finishing the work of their ancestors, liberating the land itself from a curse born of occupation and oppression.

Exhuma is a great film blending folk horror with historical allegory. You can find it on several streaming services, and it is a must-see for anyone who appreciates a horror film that is as intelligent as it is terrifying.

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Where Horror, Comedy, and Kung Fu Collide: Mr. Vampire

Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s was a creative cauldron, bubbling with relentless commercially driven energy and an “anything goes” mentality.. Unlike Hollywood’s often more rigid genre structures, the most electrifying Hong Kong films of this era thrived on audacious collisions—action crashing into comedy, romance bleeding into horror, creating crowd-pleasing mashups that shouldn’t work but absolutely did.​

But sometimes, when you improvise wildly enough, you don’t just bend genres—you invent entirely new ones. Case in point: Ricky Lau’s 1985 masterpiece, Mr. Vampire.


The film tells the story of Master Kau, a stern Taoist priest whose unibrowed gravitas anchors a world gone deliriously mad. With two bumbling, girl-crazy apprentices in tow, he’s hired by the wealthy Mr. Yam to exhume and relocate his father’s remains—a practice hoped to improve the family fortunes. Upon opening the coffin, however, Master Kau discovers that twenty years have failed to claim the body. It remains pristine, unmarked by decay—a sure sign that it’s transforming into a jiangshi, a malevolent hopping vampire.​

He relocates the corpse to his mortuary for observation, but his apprentices’ spectacular incompetence allows the creature to escape, unleashing terror that only spiritual kung fu can stop.​

Mr. Vampire didn’t just create a film—it codified an entire jiangshi subgenre for the next decade. The film established the tropes of hopping vampire movies: the Stern Master, , the Bumbling Apprentices (whose incompetence drives half the plot), and most crucially, a specific set of esoteric combat principles for battling the undead.​

Sticky rice draws out vampire venom, paper talismans inscribed with blood-ink spells can immobilize the creatures, and holding one’s breath renders you invisible to these sightless predators. This last was actually improvised by the actors during the filming, but became so central that the movie was released in Taiwan with the title “Hold Your Breath for a Moment”.​

While Mr. Vampire essentially invented the cinematic jiangshi, the film’s visual inspiration springs from a genuinely haunting historical practice: corpse herding. During the Qing dynasty, the practice of “autumn executions” concentrated the killing of convicts into one brief annual period, creating a logistical nightmare: corpses often had to be transported vast distances for burial in their ancestral homes. Traditional funeral processions with four pallbearers were prohibitively expensive. .​

The solution was as ingenious as it was eerie. Taoist priests would bind corpses to flexible bamboo poles, and when two men carried these poles on their shoulders, the natural flex and bounce of the bamboo made the bodies appear to “hop” in unison as the procession moved through the countryside. This practical transportation method spawned folktales of hopping vampires. 

Mr. Vampire was Ricky Lau’s directorial debut, and its success instantly made him the go-to specialist for the genre.. His key technique was the masterful balancing of the film’s wild tonal shifts, ensuring that the slapstick comedy, intricate fight scenes, and moments of horror felt like a cohesive, exhilarating whole.

Mr. Vampire was a massive box office sensation in Hong Kong and across Asia, striking a chord with audiences who delighted in its unique fusion of screams and laughs..   

Today, the film’s reputation has only grown. It is beloved by cinephiles as a great example of the mashups that defined the golden age of Hong Kong’s cinema.

Right now, in October 2025, you can find Mr. Vampire and it’s sequels on the Criterion Channel.

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Akira Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful (1944): A Study in Propaganda

Akiria Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful  opens not with an image of beauty, but with a brutal command: “Attack and Destroy the Enemy!” This command is followed by the totalitarian declaration that this is “An Information Bureau Movie for the People,” before the familiar Toho Studios logo even appears on screen. This is the disorienting introduction to Kurosawa’s 1944 wartime docudrama.

While nominally a Toho project, The Most Beautiful was created under the unyielding grip of Japan’s militarist government. By 1944, as resources dwindled and creative control tightened, it was one of only 46 films released in the country. Kurosawa had initially planned an action film centered on Zero fighter pilots, but with no military aircraft available for filming, he was compelled to pivot. His new subject: a “patriotic morale booster” about young women working in the home front.

Kurosawa ingeniously blurs the line between documentary and fiction. In what one might described as startlingly early anticipation of method acting, the actresses lived in the factory where they filmed, ate in its mess hall, and referred to each by their character names, immersing themselves entirely in their roles.

The story centers on a group of women at an optics plant, producing lenses for weapons of war.  When the government mandates a production increase—a staggering 100% for male workers, but only 50% for their female counterparts—the women, driven by a fervent sense of duty, passionately petition to have their own quota raised. The film chronicles their subsequent struggle, a grueling battle against exhaustion, illness, and personal sacrifice to meet these self-imposed targets.

As a historical document, The Most Beautiful offers a window into Japanese wartime society. It captures the realities of industrial mobilization: factory floor dynamics, dormitory life, management techniques, company calisthenics. showing us the lives of Japan’s equivalent of Rosie the Riveter.

Thematically, the film offers a distillation of a core Japanese cultural value: dedication, often referred to as “doing one’s best.” This cultural touchstone, likely familiar to anyone acquainted with Japanese media, finds an extreme and unsettling expression here. For 85 minutes, we watch these women do their best, pushing past physical limits, ignoring illness and family duties, all in the service of building weapons.

Here the virtues Kurosawa would later champion for humanistic ends—dedication, community, and self-sacrifice—serve imperial militarism.  These women work to “destroy Britain and America” and to ensure that the Yamato race would not have to live under the same sky as Chinese people.

Kurosawa himself would later grapple with his role in creating such propaganda, stating with stark honesty: “I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism… I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way… I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it.”

And yet, for the cinephile, there is undeniable value in The Most Beautiful beyond its function as a historical artifact. You can witness the nascent signatures that would define Kurosawa’s later work. The director demonstrates his growing mastery of rapid-fire editing to convey urgency, intimate close-ups to reveal inner turmoil, and meticulously crafted compositions that transform a factory floor into a battleground of the will.

Furthermore, in a filmography often dominated by male bonding and power struggles, it is compelling to see Kurosawa, forced by circumstance, center an ensemble of women.

The Most Beautiful is not an easy film, but for those willing to engage with its complicated legacy, it is an intriguing if challenging piece of cinematic history.Thank you for joining me for the third installment in my series on World War II propaganda films. Next time, we’ll journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic to examine another narrative feature: the immortal classic, Casablanca.

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The Art of Cinematic Jujitsu: How Frank Capra Turned Enemy Propaganda Against Itself

When Pearl Harbor shattered America’s isolationist fantasies, General George Marshall faced a peculiar dilemma: how to transform farm boys and factory workers into global warriors who understood why they were fighting. His answer: have Hollywood’s most beloved populist, Frank Capra,  wage war with light and shadow.

This is our second examination of the propaganda films of WW2, and today we dissect Capra’s Why We Fight: The Battle for China.

Capra arrived at his Pentagon assignment with experience making beloved features like  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but he wasn’t a documentary filmmaker. His brilliant approach was conceptual jujitsu—he would let fascism indict itself. Enemy newsreels, speeches, and triumphalist spectacles would be surgically re-edited into their own damning testimony. “Let the enemy prove to our soldiers the enormity of his cause,” Capra declared, “and the justness of ours.”


The gamble paid off. Roosevelt, impressed by Prelude to War, ordered the series released to civilians—54 million Americans would eventually witness Capra’s cinematic sermons. The formula was simple: authoritative narration, swelling orchestras, and surgical editing that carved the world into moral absolutes.


The Battle for China shouldered a burden more delicate than the series’ other installments. Beyond selling democracy versus fascism, it had to perform cultural alchemy—introducing America’s Chinese allies and transforming Yellow Peril stereotypes. Capra faced the task of introducing five millennia of Chinese civilization to audiences whose geographic knowledge might not extend  beyond state lines.


His solution: frame the narrative in terms of shared values. Sun Yat-sen became China’s Washington, Chinese resistance became Lexington and Concord writ large. In addition to  demonizing Japan, Capra elevated Chinese endurance—reframing eight years of occupation and resistance not as victimization, but as civilization’s first stand against fascist barbarism.

The film does have what, today, we know as historical errors.  It references the “Tanaka Memorial”—supposedly Japan’s 1927 blueprint for global conquest—that was likely fabricated. But Capra wasn’t engaged in historical deception; he was a filmmaker using the intelligence available at the time. Similarly, the film’s stated death toll of 40,000 in the Rape of Nanking is a stark underestimate of the 200,000 to 300,000 now accepted by historians. This wasn’t an attempt to whitewash the enemy ` ‘s war crimes, but a reflection of the limited information escaping the war zone. In fact, the film’s most haunting sequences derive their power from authenticity: grainy, 16mm footage of Japanese atrocities, smuggled out of China by an American priest, which provided a silent, damning testament to the war’s true horror.

Ultimately, the most discordant note is not found within the film itself, but in the stark and jarring reversal of geopolitical narratives that followed. In the Cold War’s shadow, Japan was recast as a peaceful, aesthetic culture, while our former allies, the people of  mainland China after Communist takeover, were suddenly portrayed as a monolithic, fanatical horde.

The Battle of China  preserves a history often marginalized in Western accounts: that the Second Sino-Japanese War was the true opening act of the global conflict. China’s eight-year resistance, fought against staggering odds, is a story that has to be  remembered.

Today, as new lines are drawn and old alliances are tested, Capra’s film serves as a powerful reminder of how narrative shapes reality, and how the allies of yesterday can become the adversaries of tomorrow. But the human cost of conflict is a haunting constant.

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How Buster Keaton Broke His Neck & Reinvented Cinema: The Story of Sherlock Jr.

Imagine a man running on the edge of a rushing locomotive, staring up at a torrent of water about to crash over him-knowing he’s about to risk his life, not for glory, but for a laugh. This was Buster Keaton: the silent era’s daredevil, stone-faced genius, and master of audacious stunts.

Keaton’s journey began before he could read, working the rough-and-tumble vaudeville circuit at the age of three. Billed as “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged,” his act involved playing a child whose antics provoked his father into physically throwing him across the stage – smashing into the scenery, tumbling into the orchestra pit, sometimes even tossed into the startled audience.

While such a spectacle would horrify modern sensibilities, this hazardous upbringing cultivated in Keaton an exceptional physical resilience and an almost supernatural comprehension of comic timing. It served as perhaps the most rigorous and unconventional apprenticeship conceivable for any auteur. By the 1920s. Keaton was a writer, director, and luminous star.

His 1924 film Sherlock Jr. is a testament to both his artistry and his appetite for danger. Keaton plays a humble film projectionist with two aspirations:to learn the deductive skills of a master detective, and to win the affection of a young woman billed simply as “The Girl”. When a rival frames him for theft, Keaton’s character retreats to the theater where he works. As the film flickers before him, he succumbs to sleep, and here, the story takes a surreal and innovative turn. He dreams himself into the very film he was projecting, transforming into the sophisticated, heroic detective he yearns to be, suavely navigating a fictional world.

What unfolds within this “film within a film” is a cascade of thrilling action sequences and astonishing comic set pieces, all famously performed by Keaton himself.

The dangers were genuine. During the iconic water tank sequence the deluge drove Keaton down into the tracks below. Unaware of the severity of his injury, ignoring his blinding pain, Keaton simply continued, completing the film. His broken neck would only be diagnosed years later by X-ray, a stark testament to his unparalleled physical commitment and stoicism.
Yet, Sherlock Jr. is more than a collection of amazing stunts. The technical ingenuity required to realize the film’s central conceit: a dreaming projectionist attempting to navigate the constantly shifting cinematic landscape – demanded meticulous planning and mathematical precision. This playful yet profound exploration of the porous boundary between the audience and narrative, between perceived reality and cinematic fiction, marks the film as startlingly meta-cinematic, anticipating theoretical discussions by decades.
Too surreal for audiences in 1924 – achieving moderate success rather than the blockbuster status of Keaton’s broader comedies – Sherlock Jr. is now hailed by critics and arthouse audiences. Its audacious blend of physical prowess, narrative invention, and cinematic self-awareness led to its preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1991.

Fortunately, Sherlock Jr. is in the public domain, allowing me to share a few grainy glimpses of its magic. However, to truly appreciate the startling genius of Keaton’s vision, I recommend experiencing the beautifully restored version available on the Criterion Channel.

Keaton’s legacy is not bruises and broken bones, but the way he expanded the language of film, inviting us to dream with our eyes wide open. What’s your favorite Keaton film? Let me know in the comments below.

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The Visionary Returns: Tsui Hark’s ‘Legends of the Condor Heroes’ 

Tsui Hark stands as one of Hong Kong cinema’s most formidable auteurs, his finest works deserving placement alongside the masterpieces of John Woo or Wong Kar Wei, yet with a filmography that is far more varied.

His latest offering, “Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants,” has reached American screens after amassing an impressive $83 million over New Year in China. This sprawling fantasy unfolds from a carefully selected fragment of Jin Yong’s monumental literary universe, following the journey of Guo Jing as he ascends to martial arts mastery during the days of Genghis Khan’s.

The film demonstrates remarkable cultural authenticity by featuring actual Mongolian dialogue for Mongolian characters, who are portrayed with admirable complexity rather than as one-dimensional antagonists. Yet beneath this cultural sensitivity lies a familiar narrative structure where these characters ultimately exist to elevate the Chinese protagonist’s heroic journey. As Jeanette Ng has noted, it’s not uncommon for Wuxia to feature a Han variant of the White Savior trope.

Still, Hark navigates this with more nuance than the source material, and he delivering what has become his signature: a female character whose capabilities and complexity rival or surpass the male lead. Sabrina Zhuang inhabits this role with a compelling presence, I want to see more of her work in the future.

Hark’s directorial vision manifests through bold, distinctive choices in composition, lighting and color– visual poetry that speaks to his mastery of the medium. However, the film ultimately surrenders to the gravitational pull of CGI spectacle, with digitally rendered armies frequently overwhelming the intimate human drama.

But making Condor heroes is his passion project, after gifting cinema with revolutionary works, he has earned the right to command these virtual legions across his cinematic battlefield. For viewers seeking grand-scale action with artistic integrity, “The Gallants” delivers a satisfying, if occasionally overwhelming, experience.