Ciaran Conliffe 274 posts 6 comments

It’s December, and all around the world people are getting ready to celebrate Christmas. Sometimes it’s easy for people in the English-speaking world to think that our version of Christmas is universal, but that’s far from the case. Even…

As we discussed in the first half of this two-parter, Yuen Woo-Ping is a director with an extremely long career in Hong Kong cinema. He’s been the lead director on 31 films and the action director on about twice that many. He’s worked on…

Even if you’ve never heard of Yuen Woo-Ping, I can almost guarantee you’ve seen his work. A legendary Hong Kong film director in the 80s and 90s, he’s responsible for launching the career of not one but two martial arts legends. His first…

High school drama is an international genre. From Derry Girls to Riverdale, the heightened emotions of teens combined with the mixture of structure and freedom that define their lives create plenty of opportunities for conflict. It also…

Note: while the shows listed here used to be available on Netflix, they aren’t any more. Still, explaining the stories behind this weird series was one of the reasons I initially started this column. Hopefully the Ultimate Class will…

Do you ever feel like the place you’re in is not the place you know? Something just isn’t right. It’s like everyone else has vanished, or like things aren’t quite where they should be. Unfamiliar names on the television, unfamiliar shapes…

French cinema has always had a reputation for artistic flair. The very word for a great director who brings his vision to the screen, auteur, comes from the French word for author. In France cinema is idiomatically known as le septième art…

The idea of a “genre mashup” is a lot less surprising these days than it used to be, though some (like the superhero/comedy style of Takiki Watiti’s Thor movies) still raise a few eyebrows. Genres, though, are a purely cultural phenomena.…

One fun aspect of watching foreign shows is learning about the folklore of other lands; whole unfamiliar mythologies. One of these is the fashion in Korean drama for the last few years of shows about “grim reapers”, messengers of death…

Netflix users at the beginning of 2021 were justifiably confused when they noticed two new movies, both Chinese fantasy films, and both with almost identical names. One was The Yin Yang Master, while the other was The Yin-Yang Master:…