On a gut level, there is something very satisfying in seeing an elaborately choreographed action sequence executed with style and creativity. And The Furious has several of these. Watching the movie, the lineage of Hong Kong action blockbusters is apparent, as director Kenji Tanigaki combines the often outrageous techniques of those films with a more grounded and gruesome violence -fighters still appear at times indestructible, but they show more visceral blood and bruising until they do arbitrarily succumb. And you are in no hurry for that as an audience given the consistently entertaining new ways these figures get back up after a walloping to continue the beef. The Furious doesn’t let up on this easily, and perhaps thankfully so, as outside of the action there is very little distinct or compelling to the film. It is a movie that has a charmingly pan-Asian character to it. It is produced by Hong Kong, but directed by a Japanese filmmaker and shot entirely in Thailand. Its cast is c...
For a director who has often been associated with extra-terrestrials (to the point one of his most famous movies is named after the subject), Steven Spielberg hasn’t actually made many movies about aliens -really just four out of thirty-five. But he is a filmmaker known for spectacle and the alien movies he has made are each very interesting, reflecting his own intense curiosity with the subject of UFOs. In 1977, he related that compulsion very brazenly for the first time in Close Encounters of the Third Kind . Nearly fifty years later, he does so again in Disclosure Day , which in some respect feels like a spiritual follow-up -the 2020s equivalent one might say. His last alien movie before this, 2005’s War of the Worlds , is also the last time he has made a movie set in and about contemporary times -having preferred historical settings for the bulk of his work in the last two decades. And like that film, Disclosure Day has the opportunity to be a commentary on the world it is ma...