MovieSorter

loading Title loading Tws summary loading Trust ▲ loading Year Viewable
The Grandmaster
OK 66 Points 2013

Stately to a fault, reverential to an extreme, The Grandmaster is kung fu cinema elevated to formal art. Stodginess aside, it no doubt lingers in the mind’s eye of hard core kung fu fans, let alone for the legendary Ip Man’s disciples. For the rest of us – focused on the Bruce Lee connection …

Full Review »
WikChip Image Hey, isn't that little Bruce Lee?
Thérèse
Great 66 Points 2012

Thérèse is a great film by the great Claude Miller of the great French novel Thérèse Desqueyroux, 1927. Think of it as Madame Bovary in the pine forests of Southwest France. Only Thérèse barely has sex, let alone affairs. Talk about a banal life. Look at her stunning poster visag…

Full Review »
WikChip Image Taking in their combined estate.
Gomorra
Great 66 Points 2008

A new addition to the canon of great mafia movies, Gomorra entertainingly details the mundane savagery and sociopathic activities of Italy’s oldest organized crime organization. Darkly funny, Gomorra brings to life Roberto Saviano’s hugely important book

Full Review »
WikChip Image Camorra Country: Cancer @ the heart o...
Ip Man 2: Legen...
OK 66 Points 2010

Ip Man 2 was supposed to focus on the legendary Grandmaster’s relationship with Bruce Lee, his most famous disciple. But Lee’s descendants didn’t go along with the plan, so the movie ends up being about Ip Man’s post-war struggles to establish Wing Chun kung fu in colonial Hong Kong. The resul…

Full Review »
WikChip Image Ip Man teaches Wing Chun kung fu
Closed Season
Great 66 Points 2012

Closed Season’s home-front Holocaust drama gets amplified by delving into some serious sexual intrigue. Result? A great movie, one that’s titled Ende der Schonzeit in its native Germany. Google translates that as “End of the grace period”. Hmm, besser in Deutsch.

A near feudal German…

Full Review »
WikChip Image "I need you to impregnate my wife here."
The Secret in T...
Really Great 66 Points 2010

More than your ordinary police procedural, this affecting Argentine import includes a decidedly grown-up office romance & insight into Perón’s Argentina. Veteran Law & Order director Juan José Campanella deserves his Best Foreign Language Oscar for an &1 if nothing else.1

His film’s two…

Full Review »
WikChip Video Argentine Law & Order Writ Large
The Warlords
Really Great 66 Points 2007

As essential to understanding China as Gone with the Wind is to understanding America, The Warlords brims with operatic history, passion, blood and beauty. GWTW romanticized the 1861 American Civil War; This 21st Century Chinese production romanticizes the – a – Chinese Civil War, also f…

Full Review »
WikChip Image Slaughtering 4,000 men splits bloodbr...
The Wind Rises
OK 66 Points 2013

Hard not to think of The Wind Rises as The Zero Movie, as it’s about the engineer who designed Imperial Japan’s lethal fighter – the dreaded Japanese Zero. Instead, Jirô Horikoshi gets painted in hagiographic terms in a movie nominated this year for an Oscar and a Golden Globe: Best Animate…

Full Review »
WikChip Video Flights of Fancy in a Fatally Flawed ...
The Raid 2
Good 66 Points 2014

Life is cheap in Jakarta. Guys get killed. Girls get, well, you know, treated disrespectfully in The Raid 2. The fun – this being a hell of a fun movie – comes from seeing how the guys get knocked off, as it’s often spectacularly inventive and/or a complete gross-out, with a body count that …

Full Review »
WikChip Video Iko Uwais teaches Fight Choreography
The Edge of Heaven
Great 66 Points 2007

Father-son, mother-daughter, daughter-mother, Germany-Turkey: This movie grippingly explores the intersections of four relationships – three familial, one cultural. Superior to Babel and Crash, simil…

Full Review »