Author: Andrew Saroch

While ‘Till the End of the World’ allows sentiment to become a little too exaggerated as the film nears its end it is, nevertheless, a mixture of the alienating and the intimate that works.

Whether this is the beginning of the Esports film remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure – there’s definitely plenty of room for improvement.

As a meditation on father/daughter relationships, ‘The Empty Hands’ is lazy and thinks that a slickly delivered camera shot is a good replacement for basic storytelling.

Director Fan Haolun seems to be more concerned with playing with flashbacks and flash-forwards than he is with constructing a story of any real depth.

A life-affirming work that came at a key time for a director whose self-confidence was at its lowest ebb, ‘Dersu Urzala’ is cinema at its most vital.

With a sparse soundtrack, and an ensemble of superb performers, Koji Fukada has fashioned a haunting film that is never quite a thriller despite leanings in that direction.

The result is every bit as wonderful and awful as it sounds, a quite dizzying display of opportunism and ineptitude that has to be seen to be believed. Essential.

It tackles a complex subject with real skill and, while not pretending to be the definitive film on the matter – as if any one film could claim to be – it is a work of rare brilliance.

‘Mission Milano’ is exactly what you would expect from Jing; a paper thin plot, overdone action sequences and low-brow humour.

Recalling those doomed rom-drams of yesteryear where low-level gangster falls for someone from a totally different world, ‘Concerto Of The Bully’ is something of a nostalgia trip.

‘The Village Of No Return’ is stuck between two stools – too disjointed to appeal to the mainstream, but too flat to be considered anything particularly out of the ordinary.

‘Bleeding Steel’ starts with promise and then refuses to flesh out any of the plot details, leaving us bewildered shortly after our interest had piqued.