Firecracker. 14.

"The annual Metro Manila Film Festival-Philippines is a film festival like no other," writes Erika Franklin in the new issue of Firecracker. "Quite simply, for two weeks, during the busy Christmas period (a time when most Filipinos and their many extended families are busy eating their way through a dizzying array of festive delights) all cinemas in the Metro Manila area suspend their regular programme to exclusively show Filipino movies." And the number of indies screened, she notes, is on the rise.

Nick North reviews Tom Mes's Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto and Mes and Jasper Sharp's The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film.

Franklin interviews This Charming Girl director Lee Yoon-ki.

Reviews:

• Mike Atherton on the "cool-as-ice Korean revenge thriller" A Bittersweet Life, on "three classic Yuen Woo Ping movies in a box set with extras aplenty for the price of a single DVD," and on R-Point, "probably best viewed at home on the small screen with a lap full of nibbles and the lights turned off." And Wishing Stairs "has its moments, but tends to waver towards melodrama rather than out and out horror."

  

• Dean Bowman: "That Kurosawa's already expansive oeuvre could still contain undiscovered gems seems incredible, yet Eureka's recent release of two previously unavailable films from the early part of his career, Scandal (1950) and The Idiot (1951), proves that the mine is by no means exhausted."

• North on "the light-hearted rom-com" Drink, Drank, Drunk, a "Platinum Edition" of the Bruce Lee classic Fist of Fury, two by Sammo Hung, "the enjoyable Jackie Chan starrer Wheels on Meals, and the justifiably classic period flick Knockabout."

• Robert Williamson on Monday Morning Glory, which director Woo Ming-Jin sees "as the first in a series of five films covering major issues at stake in contemporary Southeast Asia."

• Bertha Chin on "the first musical to be produced in China in more than 30 years," Perhaps Love and on Chen Kaige's The Promise.

Posted by dwhudson at January 8, 2006 5:41 AM