Movieline Online

While  Ford vs. Ferrari  provided a slick, entertaining view into the cutthroat tendencies of the auto industry, director Yasuza Masumura's 1962 film  Black Test Car  is an ugly indictment of capitalism at its worst as two rival car companies compete to rush their sports model to market, sabotaging the other at any physical, financial and moral cost.   An industrial espionage thriller with shades of classic film noir,  Black Test Car  is wonderfully stylized, pitch black in tone, and shocking in its portrayal of yakuza brutality by its "salaryman" characters, all of whom are complicit in their corporate crimes.  From bribes to beatings to sabotage, company success is portrayed as a sort of madness that leaks into every aspect of daily life.   Even our ostensible hero winds up pimping out his own fiancé, played with femme fatale appeal by Junko Kano.     It's all played with the same sort of scandalous cynicism as...

The  yakuza  - or gangster - film is more deeply ingrained in Japanese cinema than perhaps any other genre.  Likely because the rise to power in those post-war years is best translated by the gritty, violent stories of outlaws, ambition and family honor.  And the work of director Kinji Fukasaku is most representative of the genre's style and conventions, notably in his epic  Battles Without Honor and Humanity  and its sequel.  Yet his 1975 film -  Graveyard of Honor  - bucks many of those traditions to deliver a yakuza tale that paints a much more severe and nihilistic view of the yakuza lifestyle.   The ambitious but singularly self-destructive Rikio (Tetsuya Watari) refuses to take orders from anyone, even his own godfather.  After being banished from the family, he falls under the protection of a rival gang headed up by his friend Kozaoburo Imai, but even that relationship is strained by Rikio's unpredictable ...

Although his career is wrapped up in  The Fast and the Furious  franchise, Vin Diesel’s coming-out party was really the sleeper hit  Pitch Black , director David Twohy's ode to pulp sci-fi novels (specifically the Eric John Stark adventures written by Leigh Brackett) that introduced the world to Riddick, an escaped con with enhanced night vision and a permanent chip on his shoulder.   When a spaceship full of pilgrims crash lands on a strange planet overrun by carnivorous monsters that only come out at night, Riddick becomes an unlikely anti-hero as he attempts to lead the group to safety.  But are his action really altruistic...or just all-for-himself?   The film produced two sequels to date (with  another  installment in the works) that built a complex mythological back-story around Riddick's lone wolf mystery man.  But here we simply get a survival story, populated by characters with just enough personality to make sure...

A French-Canadian production that played the film festival circuit and runs a scant 73-minutes,  Game of Death  is, at the very least, more edgy and interesting than most of the Blumhouse productions that capture the teen horror market these days.  Built around the concept of a  Jumanji -type board game that forces its players to kill-or-be-killed, it's loaded with gore and expendable millennial characters, staging the resultant murder spree with Tarantino-meets-Tobe Hooper style.   When their house party gets a bit dull, seven 20-somethings discover a piece of retro entertainment called Game of Death.  After a surprising finger poke, an onscreen countdown begins and instructs the players that 21 people must die before time runs out or a sacrifice will be chosen among their group at random.  It only takes a couple of exploding heads for our characters to realize the game means business.  Siblings Tom and Beth plan to survive a...