If you’ve spent any time on the road, you probably know highway rest stops can get weird. Sometimes very weird. What director Rebekah McKendry’s (All the Creatures Were Stirring) new movieGlorioussupposes is, what if, instead of a weird rando on the other side of that roadside glory hole, it was something much darker, more sinister, and exponentially more powerful?
I’m a sucker for documentaries about punk, metal, or really any other musical genre popping up in places you don’t normally expect. Death Metal Angola,Los Ultimos Frikis,A Band Called Death, among others come to mind. Fitting nicely into this specific niche is Rita Baghdadi’s documentarySirens, which chronicles Lebanon’s first all-female heavy metal band, Slave to Sirens.
A frenetic action movie about a tired-of-life assassin that begins with a hatchet fight? From the director and star of The Swordsman? Uh, that’s a big old hell yes from around these parts. And that’s precisely what we get from Choi Jae-hoon’sThe Killer. Not to be confused with John Woo’s 1989 classic of the same name, this is nevertheless also a kickass time. (This latestKilleris an adaption of Bang Ji-ho’s novel,The Kid Deserves to Die, and it’s easy to understand why the title was changed for multiple reasons.)
Yoo Min-ho (So Ji-seob, A Company Man) is arrested for killing his mistress, but released on bail as his trial is in progress. Fleeing the prying eyes of the media, he retreats to an isolated, snow-bound cabin to meet with a Yang Shin-ae (Yunjin Kim,Lost), a new lawyer, one who has never lost a case. Over the course of a night in director Yoon Jong-seok’sConfession, Yoo spins his tale, lies pile up, perspectives shift, and true intentions come to light.
