John Woo

Twenty years ago this month, Jackie Chain broke through to American audiences. How does his introduction look today?

Now that Alfonso Cuaron’s long-in-the-making sci-fi spectacle Gravity has smashed its way through Venice and TIFF (it’s astounding), its detractors have raised two major objections: first, that its spectacle comes at the expense of its emotional content; second, that its lengthy, whirling camera movements are self-conscious and barely motivated, summarized by Nick McCarthy for Slant …

Cinema is a kind of uber-art form that’s made up of a multitude of other forms of art including writing, directing, acting, drawing, design, photography and fashion.  As such, film is, as all cinema aficionados know, a highly collaborative venture. One of the most consistently fascinating collaborations in cinema is that of the director and …

Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale Written and Directed by Wei Te-Sheng Taiwan, 2011 Billed as the most expensive film in the history of Taiwanese cinema, Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale had a lot of things going for it. It had the budget, a cast of fifteen thousand people, and was Executive Produced by …

Hard Target For 20 years Hong Kong director John Woo was the driving force in film on the Pacific Rim. Following the success of The Killer, Woo’s 1989 masterpiece of operatic violence, he made out to Hollywood with his chop-socky. Hard Target. Woo’s American debut took the Belgium-born Jean-Claude Van Damme to new lows of …