The following animated shorts were shown at this year's Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei Read More
Fruit Chan's Coffin Homes (鬼同你住) is unlikely to find success on the international film festival circuit. For one, the film is likely to be billed as a comedy horror, though it is more accurate to locate the film in the mo lei tau style of Hong Kong slapstick Read More
Despite no international marketing blitz comparable to Island Nation or SEQALU, Gold Leaf proves the same kind of work, in seeking to dramatize a pivotal period of Taiwanese history. Based on the memoirs of Jiang A-hsin, the founder of the Yong-guang Tea Company, Gold Leaf focuses on the Zhang family, a prominent Hakka family of tea manufacturers in Hsinchu in the 1950s. The Jiang family was once Taiwan’s largest exporter of tea Read More
Gatao: The Last Stray is a competent gangster film of its genre, as a prequel and the third of three films in the Gatao franchise. Of course, one would expect a romanticization of gangster life from a film of the genre and, in this respect, Gatao stays the course Read More
Island Nation 2, the second season of 2020’s historical drama Island Nation, continues the first season’s dramatization of recent Taiwanese history. Though the season is off to a stronger start in its first two episodes than the shaky first few episodes of Island Nation, whether or not the show can find a broader audience outside of Taiwan is still up in the air Read More
Man in Love, adapted from the 2014 South Korean film by the same name, is an impressive first outing for director Yin Chen-hao. Yin notably entered the film industry after founding a production studio in graduate school, while studying chemistry Read More
Offering a fluent interplay of the humorous and melodramatic, A Leg is a standout film. A Leg is the directorial debut of Chang Yao-sheng, who penned the script for A Sun, which won Best Film at the 2019 Golden Horse Awards. As such, it may not be surprising that A Leg manages to be a similarly deft work. Chang successfully makes the leap from scriptwriting to directing Read More
No Man is an Island interviewed Kelvin Chan Kin-long, the director of recent Hong Kong film Hand Rolled Cigarette Read More
Mickey on the Road has the makings of a great film, but fails to live up to its promises. Consequently, it represents much wasted potential for what could have otherwise been a strong entry in the road movie genre Read More
Wuhan Wuhan, directed by Yung Chang, is a humanistic look at everyday residents and medical workers in Wuhan at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. The documentary begins shortly after the peak of cases in the city, and follows residents of Wuhan until the end of the city’s lockdown in April 2020 Read More
With violence against Asian immigrants in the US spotlighted by incidents such as the shootings of Asian spa workers that took place in Atlanta in March, Snakehead is not just a film in remarkably poor taste, it is also a comically bad film. This is all the more so, in consideration of the production crew, which seems to largely consist of Asian Americans Read More
Father is a standout documentary, whose strengths primarily derive from the revealing moments it manages to capture on camera. This is due to the fact that director Deng Wei is filming his father and grandfather as the documentary’s subjects. Read More