As a concept, writer/director Park Dae-min’s Special Delivery plays like a riff on stories like Drive or The Transporter. A solitary, hot-shot driver, against their personal rules, gets personally and emotionally involved in a job, which upends their life. Though a familiar set up, full of high-speed chase scenes, an escalating mean streak, and a fantastic performance from Parasite star Park So-damn, the film offers up a throttle-cranking action blast.
Ma Dong-seok, also known as Don Lee, just wrecking dudes, is a true thing of beauty. That single fact is more than enough reason to watch a movie; I’ve watched movies for far, far less. If that wasn’t enough to get The Roundup to pop on my radar (it certainly was), the fact that director Lee Sang-yong’s film is a follow up to 2017’s The Outlaws, which prominently features Ma running amok through the Seoul underworld. And while this new chapter may not quite live up to its predecessor, it’s still a more than worthy successor.
The past few years, Canada’s Fantasia International Film Festival has become one of my favorite cinematic showcases on the calendar. Probably because it caters to all manner of genre weirdness from around the globe. We’re talking horror, action, sci-fi, and more. It also features a combination of things that will get released and an assortment of those you’ll probably never hear from again. It’s movie nerd smorgasbord.
Take four people with intricately overlapping personal histories, drop them in a remote location, and stir. It’s a classic horror cocktail, simple, straightforward, and effective when done right. The Summoned, the directorial debut from Mark Meir, hews close to this recipe, but mixes in enough other ingredients, along with solid character work, to come up with a drink that tastes familiar but still hits the spot.
Do you have one of those friends who tells a joke, and when you don’t laugh, they proceed to poke you in the ribs, like, “Huh, right, get it? Get it?” If you know this person, or have seen countless iterations of them on TV and in movies, that’s the general sensation of watching Thor: Love and Thunder, the latest in Marvel’s candy-colored, Norse-mythology-inspired arm of their cinematic universe. The entire film, and by extension director Taika Waititi, feels like it’s just going to stare at you awkwardly until you force a weak chuckle then it will bask in the glory of its own wit.
It’s entirely understandable if you don’t automatically assume a movie about a teenage member of a royal family titled The Princess, released by a Disney property, features a lot of head-stabbing. However, in the case of the latest from director Kiet Le-Van (Furie), a movie coincidentally named The Princess newly available on Mouse-House-subsidiary Hulu, if you make this assumption, you’d be quite mistaken. There is, in fact, a fair amount of head-stabbing, eye-gouging, and general death and violence. What we get on screen can best be described as Rapunzel by way of The Raid. Or to be more accurate, a kind of reverse Raid. (The protagonist must battle her way out of a tall building.) And it’s damn fun.
Park Hoon-jung’s The Witch: Part 1—Subversion is a deliberately paced, gradual build toward a brutal, bloody action/horror/sci-fi hybrid. It takes its time to lay the groundwork and establish the emotional stakes to that violence, toying with audience expectations along the way. The second chapter in this proposed trilogy, The Witch 2: The Other One, is a jumbled, tedious misfire that fails to accomplish much of any note.
