Eileen (2023)

Eileen (2023) is a character study. It’s also about stretching out the tension. The question keeps occurring: where is all this going? It’s the mid-1960s, it’s wintery and grey Massachusetts. Eileen works as a secretary in a prison. She looks after an alcoholic ex-cop father. She has daydreams about sex, or about killing her father. As […]

City On Fire (1987)

Saxophone is the weapon of choice for Teddy Robin’s score to City On Fire (1987). I couldn’t help but think of the David Sanborn sax sound to the Lethal Weapon soundtrack. What I love about Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s (and into the 1990s) is that circuit loop, of taking on influences from western […]

Full Contact (1992)

A night full of rain lit by the flames from multiple explosions. Motorcycle silhouette and hair metal power ballad wailing on the soundtrack. The Whitesnake MTV music video aesthetic crossed with the HK action cinema Heroic Bloodshed. This is Full Contact (1992), directed by Ringo Lam and reuniting him with star Chow Yun-Fat after films […]

Rodrigo D: No Future (1990)

Imaginalia is a free film club held at Fremantle Buffalo Club – projecting a movie in a bar, basically – that finished up their first program, which had included screenings of Cruising (1980) and Effi Briest (1974). The organiser and programmer, Juan Mora, is from Colombia and selected for the last night of Program 1, […]

Exiled (2006)

Exiled (2006) is Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s tribute to the spaghetti western embedded within a contemporary gangster film. The opening sequence sets the tone. An apartment where a woman, Jin (Josie Ho) feeds a baby, waiting for her partner, Wo (Nick Cheung). She is visited by two sets of men. One duo – Blaze […]