★★★
“It is very chilly in Korea.”
I should be clear, this is not to be confused with next year’s action movie about a female killer called Ballerina. That one will be part of the John Wick universe. This South Korean film isn’t. Indeed, it’s very much its own creature – perhaps too much so. It feels like a hit-woman film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn: it’s all neon lights and understated emotions, to the point of coldness. For some reason, it feels as if everything past getting out of bed is a chore for the characters here, with almost every action feeling as it it were preceded by an imaginary sigh. The ennui is overpowering, to steal a line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galazy.
The heroine is Okju (Jeon), a bodyguard whose best friend Min-hee (Park) kills herself after being abused by serial predator and sex trafficker, Choi Pro (Kim). Okju makes it her own, personal mission to take revenge on Choi. It’s a difficult job, due to the protection he’s afforded by being part of a larger criminal enterprise, run by Chief Jo (Kim). Min-hee realizes edged weapons aren’t enough, and needs a firearm – something which proves considerably more difficult to obtain locally, than in your typical action movie. On the other hand, Jo is increasingly tired of Choi’s attitude, as he becomes more trouble than he’s worth. Still, giving up a member to an outsider isn’t something any gang leader does casually.
It does feel like this is very much a case of style over substance. After an opening which sees Okju utterly unfazed when wandering through a convenience store robbery in progress, you will have quite a while to wait for the next slice of action. That takes place after she has convinced Choi to take her to a seedy motel, after she has discovered the horrific truth about his activities. The subsequent set-piece illustrates an odd tendency for the film to shift into comedy, as someone attacks Okju with a chainsaw, only for an unfortunately timed door opening to derail the attack. More successful is the later scene where she buys weapons from a travelling husband and wife, which has a quirky charm that’s endearing. I’d watch Adventures of the Gun-Running Van.
The rest is occasionally successful, and occasionally not. The action is over-sharply edited, though does stay on this side of coherence. However, there just wasn’t sufficient emotional connection for me. Admittedly, this may have partly been deliberate. It felt we were never given much reason to get on board with Okju’s guest for vengeance: her revenge seems more of a job than a passion project. She shows up, does what’s necessary, then clocks out and goes home, to stare blankly off into the distance, illuminated by a pastel glow. I’m hopeful 2024’s Ballerina – the title here refers to the best friend, incidentally, not the protagonist – will be more memorable than than this well-crafted piece of neon fluff.
Dir: Lee Chung-hyun
Star: Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Ji-hoon, Park Yu-rim, Mu-Yeol Kim


We’ve written about Griselda Blanco before. In particular, we reviewed telenovela La Viuda Negra, which was loosely based on her life and
To my pleasant surprise, that’s not the case at all. Obviously, there’s a certain allure here, but it doesn’t needlessly glamourize or condemn its subject, and instead manages to do a good job of painting both sides, and depicting Griselda as a surprisingly complex character. This is particularly clear at the end, when her youngest son – named, amusingly, Michael Corleone – says of his mother, “Yes, it’s a legacy of violence. But she was a woman that had to become savage in a world that wasn’t made for her.” Then Detective Diaz, who headed the Miami task force charged with bringing her down, counters, “We have this bitch from hell who decides she wants to be meaner and more powerful than anybody else… Violence. Arrogance. Greed.
This one does take a while to reach the necessary threshold: probably only truly qualifies for the final twenty minutes or so, though it does talk a good game until that point. Also, it’s a decent enough combination of Western and home-invasion genres to that point, to pass muster. Nothing special, mind you. It just knows its limitations and is careful enough to work within them. It takes place in the Old West. whee Beth (Bernadette) and her twin children, Brian and Irene (Betsy) now live with her new husband, Robert (Krause). The trio appear to have escaped an abusive relationship, and it’s not long after a railroad surveyor pays a visit, before Irene is cheerfully telling him, she’s going to go back and kill her father some day.
Director LaBute is best known around these parts for his ill-conceived remake of classic horror The Wicker Man, which is generally regarded as spectacularly bad, and is probably best-known for spawning memes involving Nicolas Cage and bees. So expectations going into this were… not high, shall we say. On that basis, the three-star rating is something of a pleasant surprise, though most of the credit for this should got to its star, rather than the director. Tess (Q) is a veteran of the war in Iraq, who is struggling to reconnect to her two sisters. Rose is getting married, and is nice enough that Tess is willing to attend her bachelorette party at the family cabin, deep in the country. But Beth (Foster) is a straight-up bitch.
By coincidence, I watched this not longer after the not very good
On Amazon, this is subtitled, “A full-throttle Thailand thriller,” but that’s a little bit of a misleading label. The bulk of the story – at least, the bits that matter – actually take place in China. The book itself goes with “A full-throttle thriller throughout Asia,” Except it starts off in the not-exactly Asian setting of San Bernardino, California, where Bree Thomas is just about to graduate. This is despite the problems of her adopted family, who she was sent to live with after her parents were killed in Thailand. She gets a chance to escape it all, in the form of an apprentice program with the Meng Foundation, a charitable group who help refugees around the world.
To be honest, I enjoyed this a good bit more than the rating above would indicate – probably another star or so. But I have a particular tolerance for cinema with rough edges, which I know not everyone will share. This is such an entity. I can’t really recommend it, since most people won’t be able to get past the micro-budget anesthetics, which the film rarely bothers even to try and hide. But I could appreciate the obvious passion that went into this. Put it this way, if I had twenty quid with which to make a movie, it could end up looking something like this. Probably not with such a kick-ass poster though.
In one of the odder remakes I’ve seen in a while, this is a repurposing of the French 2013 film, Les reines du ring, which translates as “Queens of the Ring”. The core concept is retained, but the location is changed from France to Mexico, and the idea is expanded to a ten-part series. These changes make for a bit of a mixed blessing. Pro wrestling is certainly a more well-established part of the cultural landscape in Mexico, where lucha libre is extremely popular. On the other hand, the multiplication of the running time a factor of about four, leads to the necessary injection of superfluous storylines, which definitely reduced the entertainment value as far as I was concerned. It’s less a wrestling soap-opera, than a soap-opera with wrestling in it.
I was going to go with “Tree’s company” as the tagline, before I realized I’ve actually used that in three separate, forest-set movies. So I decided to adjust it slightly, and what’s above is indeed very apt. There is a cast of three (3) and the entire thing unfolds in the woods. There isn’t a single set or interior shot in the whole film. Indeed, if you’d asked me, I’d have said this had all the hallmarks of a COVID-era project, designed to be shot with a small cast and in a nicely sanitary, outdoor location. Not so, even though Tubi dates it as 2020. There was a screening in April 2019, well before anyone had heard of Wuhan, and the IMDb gives it a year of 2017.
I had quite forgotten that Rose was part of John Wick: Chapter 2 in 2017. That