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Lionheart / Death Warrant

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My name is Greg and I’m a JCVD apologist. Actually, there’s no official support group out there (not that I’m aware of, anyway), but it often feels like fans of the “Muscles from Brussels” should get together twice a month for a reassuring pat on the back. Putting the actor’s personal life aside, his filmography isn’t something the average Letterboxd user would brag about. But there’s something irresistible about the “go-for-broke” way Jean-Claude approaches every project; good, bad or brutally average, JCVD is always unashamedly himself. Lionheart (1990) finds him playing Lyon Gaultier, a deserter from the French Foreign Legion making his way to L.A. to visit his dying brother. Short on cash, Leo teams up with a street fight promoter (Harrison Page) and fights his way across the country, facing one badass after another, in hopes of providing financial support to his sister-in-law and five-year-old niece. Taking a kinder, gentler approach to the ‘90s action formula, director Sheld...
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Ping Pong

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Sports movies are rarely about the sports themselves. It’s the fuel that fires the competitors that gets most of the attention. Take Fumihiko Sori’s energetic table tennis film, Ping Pong , which uses all the trick shots and techniques involved in keeping a 1.6-inch ball on top of a 9-foot table as window-dressing for the story of two best friends whose approaches to the sport – and to life – couldn’t be more different. “Peco” Hoshino is a brashly overconfident hustler with raw skill but no discipline. “Smile” Tsukimoto is a misanthropic outsider with natural talent but no drive. Their bond as childhood friends gets complicated when an interurban tournament finds Tsukimoto casually rising to the top while Peco’s dreams seem to be swirling down the drain. As the competition heats up, the two find themselves settling into new roles to take on the star players from rival schools while struggling to come to terms with their own relationship. That summary might make Ping Pong sound l...
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Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

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In 1989, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Testuo: The Iron Man felt almost revolutionary. Picking up the body horror elements left behind by directors like David Lynch and David Cronenberg, the film fused together a distinctly Japanese take on cyberpunk with a hyperkinetic visual style that turned the movie into a rite of passage for a new generation of filmakers and fans. There was really nothing else like it. Fast foward a few years and Tetsuo's visual vocabulary would be adopted by Hollywood up-and-comers like David Fincher (the opening credits for Se7en ), Aronofsky's Pi,   and the Wachowski’s Matrix films. But Tsukamoto himself had less luck in furthering his influential franchise. After the release of a more narratively accessible, but less unapologetially punk, sequel, Tetsuo II:Body Hammer , the director brought things full circle with 2009’s Tetsuo: The Bullet Man , a one-hour-and-ten-minute refresher course on what made the original so memorable in the first place. Another n...
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Portraits of the Apocalypse

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Argentina is in the midst of a horror renaissance. Or, at the very least, one hell of a hot streak. Leading the charge is director Demian Rugna, whose one-two punch of Terrified (2017) and When Evil Lurks (2023) pushed the genre into traumatic new territory. But he isn't alone.  A growing wave of overlooked Argentine horror films is quietly haunting the various streaming services. Or you can skip to the front of the line with Portraits of the Apocalypse (2024), a zombie anthology that explores the rise of the undead through personal, spiritual, and familial perspectives. Split into four stories, the first segment, Murder at the Crime Scene , is a rough introduction. It drops viewers into the fractured psyche of a police officer struggling to clean up a gruesome mess before backup arrives. It's stylish, suspenseful, and intense, but the stakes are never fully established—unless something was lost in translation.  Rats is much more straightforward and showcases Argentina's ...
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The Boxer

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Despite a healthy homegrown film industry in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Japan became beholden to Hollywood imports during the blockbuster years of the 1970s. With Jaws topping the box-office in 1976, struggling Toei studios adopted a “if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em” mentality and drew inspiration from Rocky to produce its own version of an underdog fighter training his way to the top. 1977’s The Boxer might have begun life riding the coattails of the Italian Stallion but director Shuji Terayama ensures there’s enough originality here to go the full ten rounds. Tetsuo Tenma (Kentaro Shimizu) is a club-footed wannabe who’s reached a personal low. Responsible for the accidental death of a co-worker, who just so happened to be the fiancé of the women he loved, his boxing career is going nowhere when he petitions Terayama (Bunta Sugawara), the brother of the man he killed, to train him. The unlikely duo win a few matches and set their sights on the Rookie of the Year match. But the psycholog...
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The Double

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The “Antonioni effect” is on full display in 1971’s The Double , a decidedly non-linear pseudo-giallo that ends where it begins and challenges the audience to sort out everything in-between. Even though Blow Up was five years in the rear-view mirror, Italian cinema was still hopped up on artistic pretensions, most of which would be swapped out for exported box-office appeal in the coming decade. But director Romolo Guerrieri’s film is still somewhat essential viewing for fans with that “gotta-watch-em-all” mentality. A selfish, trust-fund playboy, Frank (Jean Sorel) is second-guessing his marriage to Lucia (Eva Aulin) when her mother, Nora (Lucia Bose) enters the scene. Instantly infatuated, Frank’s oedipal impulses wreak havoc during their trip to Morrocco and the troubles follow them home to Rome, where a free-wheeling hippie acquaintance creates a dangerous love triangle. Following the structure of a jet-set gialli but leaning far more towards psychological angst, The Double ’s ...
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The Outfit

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Author Donald E. Westlake was a crime-fiction superstar long before the “airport lounge” era of contemporary giants like James Patterson and Lee Child. Far from disposable entertainment, Westlake’s books (especially those written under his nom de plume Richard Stark) had a flair for criminal camaraderie and the rare ability to make readers feel like they were in on the job. His signature character, Parker, has been brought to the screen no less than seven times, but 1973’s The Outfit comes closest to capturing the hard, no-nonsense spirit of the books. Fresh out of a short prison stretch, Macklin (Robert Duvall) is fingered for a hit by the crime syndicate who owned the bank he robbed two years prior. Successfully avoiding the best efforts of top boss Mailer (Robert Ryan) to put him underground, Macklin proposes a deal: 250K and everything is forgotten. But one double-cross and several botched assassination attempts later, Macklin takes on the entire outfit to even the scales once...
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