Letterboxd — Your life in film

Yuen Woo-ping's focus on athleticism and speed— compared to say, more image-oriented peers like Corey Yuen— naturally pairs well with Jet Li in his prime (not to mention somewhat under appreciated Chin Siu-ho). There's a nice simplicity in how the wire choreography in the last fight attempts to reflect the newly established philosophy of the titular character, even if Woo-ping is also too much of a jokester to really sell the spiritual awakening.

A return to form after the last entry, an elevator pitch nigh impossible to fuck up: one of the greatest actors of all time running around Italy like a black-ops slasher villain. Antoine Fuqua is one of our most cherished hacks, the undefeated king of the three star banger, and this is basically the Steven Seagal movie he never directed.

It says a lot about the Hong Kong film industry at this time that a movie featuring Michelle Yeoh jumping out of an exploding tank and into a chainsaw fight is merely "pretty good."

Total comfort food. Sammo's 2.35 compositions really compliment his choreography here; it's less kinetic than his peers but he knows instinctively where to put a camera so the logic of whatever beat he's filming flows naturally. Besides, martial arts western? That's the best genre!

For all the foregrounding of Puritan dogmas and tradition leading to ruin, I don't get the impression Eggers himself is particularly religious, there isn't much ambiguity or torment about the family being punished for their beliefs; there is a systemic violence here, but beyond patriarchal it is right there in the text, in which New World colonizers encounter the evil they project onto and enact upon the world.

Farm-to-table DTV haute cuisine featuring some of the finest vehicular carnage imaginable. Also appears genuinely composed for 4:3— somewhat unusual for nonsense of this caliber— which does double duty in helping the choreography echo the claustrophobia of the narrative, while also scoring high on the Fist Pump Scale every time a henchman is thrown through a pane of glass and directly towards the camera.

Looks nice and remains true to the franchise's raison d’être— killing horny teens with sharp objects— so ultimately a decent entry (and as a fan I begrudgingly admit, perhaps one of the best?), although I find it GUILTY of being a direct sequel to the original while having an identical name, a decade before David Gordon Green pulled the same trick. Who allows this nonsense?

A few tender moments can't overcome the missing interiority needed to elevate the romantic stakes, and the central metaphor is a smidge too hacky to compensate for the lack of time spent developing tension. At any rate the stretch in the middle with the Skype calls is the clear highlight, particularly the cut to the extremely distorted lift footage: it's the only time Nora's idealization of her own struggle is given any consideration, when the outside world fades away and the characters are allowed to be more than just ideas. I will watch whatever Song comes up with next.

Worked more for me on a second viewing, or at least Peele's clunky managing of the central eight thousand metaphors felt less like a hindrance and more like flavour on the margins. Even the Gordy sequence seemed more— but not entirely— in service of atmosphere or texture than some abstract thematic obligation. Peele's successes typically land when he tries to scare (first alien attack), not instruct (TMZ guy), and Gordy is probably as close as he gets to productively fusing those instincts.