John Woo
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Sunday Shorts: ‘Hostage’, directed by John Woo and starring Clive Owen
Today’s film is the 2002 short Hostage. The film is written by David Carter, Greg Hahn, and Vincent Ngo, and directed by John Woo. It also stars Maury Chaykin, Kathryn Morris, and Clive Owen, and is part of BMW’s series of The Hire short films. BMW recently announced that they would be making a new […] More
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Shot Block: Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Gravity’
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 […] More
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Director & Actor Teams: The Overlooked & Underrated (Part 1 of 2)
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 […] More
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TIFF Cinematheque presents a Summer in France: The reputation of ‘Eyes Without a Face’ has not been greatly exaggerated
Eyes Without a Face Directed by Georges Franju Written by Boileau-Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude Sautet and Pierre Gascar France, 1960 At an Edinburgh Film Festival screening of Eyes Without a Face, seven audience members, according to L’Express, fainted and “dropped like flies”. In response, director Georges Franju opined, in a particularly tactless exercise in foreign […] More
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‘Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale’ proves you can’t buy success
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 […] More
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Top 5 Jean Claude Van Damme films
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 […] More