Tag: reviews

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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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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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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 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.

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Singapore to Cuba: A Global Journey Through Sundance Shorts Program 3

Have you ever watched a film festival unfold from your couch?  Sundance 2025 made that a reality, offering its entire short film program online.



First up, Full Month by Goh Hua. Imagine returning to Singapore after a decade away, stepping back into the intricate dance of family expectations. This film beautifully captures the bittersweet reunion of a woman with her family, ostensibly to celebrate her niece’s birth. But the traditional Chinese postpartum practice – a month of confinement and rest – becomes a powerful symbol. It’s about the way families can simultaneously nurture and suffocate. Goh Hua crafts a story where the silences speak volumes, and the unspoken tensions are as palpable as the humid Singapore air.Trokas Duras, the winner of the Short Film Jury Award for US Fiction, isn’t just about trucks. It’s about the souls of  working-class migrants.  The film uses battered resliatn vehicles as breathtaking visual metaphors, showing us the beauty in what’s often overlooked, the quiet dignity of labor.

Claire Titelman’s Remember Me is a cringy, awkward comedy. We meet a woman in her forties, back home caring for her ailing mother, and clinging to a first date like a life raft.  It’s a raw, unflinching look at desperation, at the messy, sometimes pathetic ways we try to find connection. Titelman doesn’t shy away from the discomfort; she leans into it, creating a character study that’s both humorous and heartbreaking.”

Miss You, Perdularia transports us to Cuba, but not the postcard version. This is a glimpse into the lives of teenage girls adrift in a world of faded grandeur and limited options.  It’s a slice-of-life film that captures the aimlessness, the quiet rebellion, the search for meaning in a seemingly abandoned community.

In Almost Certainly False, Cansu Baydar introduces us to Hana, a young Syrian refugee in Istanbul.  She’s caught between two worlds – the fragile beginnings of her own new life and the weighty responsibility of caring for her younger brother.  The film is a delicate balancing act, portraying the resilience and quiet strength required to navigate a life uprooted by conflict. It’s a story of hope, shadowed by the ever-present weight of displacement.”

“Finally, Ragamuffine offers a fascinating counterpoint. We’re immersed in the world of a deaf 12-year-old motocross racer.  Beyond the adrenaline on the track, the film explores the tedium  race weekend with her distracted single dad. there’s a subtle sense of isolation, a feeling of being slightly adrift and disconnected.

Sundance had a solid selection of shorts, maybe you’ll have a chance to catch a few at your local festival.

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Decoding Godzilla: The Hidden Meanings Behind the Monster

What if the scars of history could manifest as a creature of unimaginable destruction? Godzilla, the original kaiju, is far more than just a monster; it’s a cultural artifact, a constantly evolving reflection of deep fears and anxieties. Over seven decades and across 38 films—33 from Japan and 5 from America—this iconic kaiju has been reborn, reimagined, and rebooted, each time offering a new lens through which to examine its era.


The original 1954 Gojira is a masterpiece, a somber, black-and-white elegy that birthed not only the kaiju genre but also Tokusatsu, the Japanese filmmaking tradition celebrated for its mesmerizing practical effects. The film opens with an eerie silence, shattered by the chilling disappearance of a freighter at sea. This wasn’t mere fiction; it was a haunting echo of the real-life tragedy of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, a Japanese fishing boat caught in the fallout of an American hydrogen bomb test just months prior to film’s production. Godzilla, an unstoppable, city-leveling force of nature, emerges from the depths, powered by, and a symbol of, the very atomic energy that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade earlier.

But I’d argue the metaphor runs deeper. Godzilla isn’t just a symbol of atomic power; it embodies the specter of America itself—the sleeping giant that Japan, through its own actions, brought upon its shores. This complex relationship perhaps explains the creature’s evolution in subsequent films, transitioning from a terrifying antagonist to a reluctant, if  formidable, protector.

Following the original, the Godzilla franchise became a chameleon, adapting to the shifting tides of popular culture. Spy movie tropes, far-out science fiction elements, a bewilderingly cute offspring designed to broaden the films appeal to female audiences—nothing was off-limits if it promised box office success. These sequels, driven by commercial interests rather than thematic depth, eventually led to franchise fatigue.

Then came 1984’s The Return of Godzilla, a bold reboot that severed ties with 15 increasingly outlandish sequels, returning Godzilla to its terrifying roots. This film, launching the darker Heisei era, traded the WWII trauma for cold war anxieties and the looming threat of global annihilation. A rampaging monster attacking one city was no longer the primary concern; the real terror lay in the potential for this creature’s existence to ignite a nuclear conflict between the superpowers, ending everything, everywhere, all at once.

This cycle of reinvention continued, but let’s focus on a few iterations that offer particularly compelling thematic insights.

Godzilla Minus One, a recent and critically acclaimed retelling, transports us to the immediate aftermath of World War II. While the creature’s design is undeniably terrifying, the film’s heart lies in the human drama. We witness traumatized veterans grappling with the psychological scars of war. Kamikaze pilot Shikishima, for instance, wrestles with survivors guilt, having fabricated technical issues to avoid his suicide mission.

Narratively, this is compelling.

However, the film’s core theme—veterans uniting to defend a helpless Japan against political inaction—is deeply problematic. Japanese militarists were responsible for plotting coups, terrorizing moderates, killing politicians and dragging their nation into a devastating war, where the Imperial Japanese Army committed horrific atrocities.

In 1947, the very year Godzilla Minus One depicts a defenseless Japan, 30,000 Chinese civilians perished due to plagues weaponized by Japanese scientists and unleashed by the war criminals of Unit 731 after Japan’s surrender. Beyond the incredibly tone-deaf portrayal of Japanese veterans as saviors against a backdrop of political apathy, the reality is that Japan was occupied by half a million Allied troops at this time. Any response to a kaiju threat would have undoubtedly fallen to these forces, not a makeshift militia of recently disarmed and demobilized individuals following an unconditional surrender.

In stark contrast, 2001’s Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack reimagines Godzilla not merely as a mutated dinosaur but as a supernatural entity—a vengeful manifestation of the souls lost to the Imperial Japanese Army’s brutality in the Pacific War.

Perhaps the most intriguing reimagining is 2016’s Shin Godzilla. Set in the modern era, the ever-evolving monster becomes a metaphor for the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The film’s true focus, however, is a razor-sharp, often hilarious satire of Japan’s aging, bureaucratic government and its paralyzing inability to confront a crisis. You might come for the giant lizard, but you’ll stay for the scenes of politicians endlessly adjourning meetings, only to reconvene in identical configurations, simply to avoid making any actual decisions.The 70th anniversary of the original Godzilla has just passed. The original film, along with the 84′ reboot Return of Godzilla, are readily available on the Criterion Channel, alongside a wealth of other films from their respective eras. Shin Godzilla can be found on Blu-ray and occasionally surfaces on streaming platforms. As for Godzilla Minus One, it’s currently streaming on Netflix, and Toho has announced that a sequel is in the works.