Close-Up (1990)

What a magic trick this movie is. An odd courtroom case is filmed by the camera, the person charged is studied in the frame, everyday people are asked to become actors and recreate what they experienced, and the result offers a complexity of meanings and readings, but also depending on your viewing experience, it also […]

Blackjack (1998)

“Directed by John Woo” was what the DVD cover advertised. I remember seeing Blackjack (1998) in video stores as a kid and thinking that was a gag – wasn’t Woo’s last movie Face/Off a big hit? Why was his name brandishing a direct-to-video Dolph Lundgren action movie? Turns out Blackjack was a TV pilot that […]

Knock Off (1998)

Director Tsui Hark’s gift to cinema: a POV shot of a foot going into a shoe. A knock off shoe that we receive extreme close ups of the wear and tear suffered as Jean Claude Van Damme pulls Rob Schneider on a cart in a competitive race through the streets of Hong Kong. And this […]

Last Man Standing (1996)

Last Man Standing (1996), Walter Hill’s remake of Yojimbo (already remade as A Fistful Of Dollars), is almost mythical yet reductively basic. Set in a ghost town named Jericho that nobody else lives in except for two gangs fighting over the same turf, a state of purgatory only destabilised by the arrival of a gun-for-hire […]

Hard Target (1993)

Retroactive Academy Award to Jan Alexander, credited Hair Stylist for Jean-Claude Van Damme on Hard Target (1993) and crafting one of the finest mullets to ever grace an action movie. Even though the theatrical release version of Hard Target, which I have watched countless times, is not John Woo’s director’s cut (apparently he was overruled […]