Film reviews

I’m getting ready for the function at the junction And baby you’d better come on right now Because everybody’s gonna be there We got people comin’ from everywhere – “Function At The Junction,” Shorty Long, 1966 There’s a long, long legacy of Black folks gathering around food and funk, bbq sauce and song.

THE SOUL (緝魂) stands out among recent Taiwanese film as an effective and well-executed commercial thriller.

Building off of Taiwan’s complex relationship with intersex issues stemming from the 1950s, 2021’s "Born to Be Human" brings light to contemporary misunderstandings of intersex people and the continued medical violence they face. The film proves an emotionally harrowing look at the medicalization of the gender binary through the lens of intersex rights.

What happens when "Fifty Shades of Grey" meets Taiwan-Japan relations? Well, probably something like "Hotel Iris," a Taiwan-Japan co-production that just premiered at the 2021 Osaka Asian Film Festival.

A Review of My Missing Valentine (消失的情人節)

Who you gonna be tonight

A Review of Madalena (馬達·蓮娜), a romance between two working-class immigrants to Macau from China. Ultimately, the film provides an effective, if dramatized, look at the lives of the working class as they eke out a bare existence in the shadows of the mega-casinos that Macau is best known for.

Tension between Thunberg’s genuine wishes and her being the symbol of the overall climate movement and institutions’ stubborn refusal to act is at the very core of the film. The most successful and often poignant moments of the film is for us to understand the emotional context of what Thunberg famously said in conferences, in explaining Thunberg’s frustration and anger in her speeches.

It was the most prominent of a series of cases that came to characterize a phenomenon its proponents called “Satanic Ritual Abuse” (SRA). It was widespread enough that it feels disorienting to see a pop culture homage to the period, like The Devil Made Me Do It, that doesn’t even mention it.

The following Taiwanese animated shorts for children were reviewed as part of the “Formosa Fantastica” section of the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival in Switzerland. The film festival will be held from July 2nd to July 10th in a hybrid format, with simultaneously live-streamed events in Neuchâtel and Taipei.

The Accidental President recycles the same tired messages that media pundits have been repeating since 2015.

SWINGIN’ (輕鬆搖擺) aims to be a charmful, cute, and playful story, even as it touches on contemporary social issues still debated in Taiwanese society. The short film tells the story of eleven-year-old elementary schooler Qiu Qiu, who has two gay fathers, one of which is his biological father.

There is no natural disaster in "Executive Order," a new Brazilian film starring Alfred Enoch, but the world is ending all the same. Centering on three Black people and a distinctly Black perspective, the film takes on human-made disaster, effectively eviscerating white power structures and narratives along the way.