Headshot is not The Raid. There is, of course, no reason that Headshot should have been The Raid, but it still comes across as just a little bit disappointing. The five films preceding this in the career of martial artist Iko Uwais have come in two categories: starring roles for director Gareth Evans (2009’s Merantau, […]

The production backstory of The Raid 2: Berandal (the subtitle, which translates as “tough guy”, “thug”, or something like that, is present only in ad material and not onscreen, at least not in the U.S. release) is surprisingly useful in hacking through what the thing is, and why it feels a little… but we’ll get […]

V/H/S/2 begins with a scene of a seedy private eye (Lawrence Michael Levine) recording two people about to have sex in a hotel room. This event does not inform anything in the rest of the movie; it doesn’t even introduce us to the character of the P.I., who’ll be more formally set-up in the very […]

There are some movies that beautiful and true chiefly in their purity: they are, and they pretend to be, one thing only. Such it is with The Raid: Redemption, an Indonesian action movie written and directed by a Welshman, Gareth Huw Evans. An action movie, and nothing at all but an action movie: insofar as […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/16World premiere: 7 October, 2010, Indonesia Here is a place that I don’t think any of us expected the present superhero movie wave to to end up going: a transgender crime fighter in a shiny leather catsuit fighting a conservative Islamic presidential candidate who wants to turn Indonesia […]