Lee B. Golden

Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Amir Zargara is back with a new short after taking off with 2021’s Become The Wounded. I haven’t seen that one but the logline hints a great deal at the kind of filmmaker Zargara wants to be in front of the viewing public, something he remains clear about in his latest work, A Good Day Will Come.

Andy and Brian Le are percolating a little more these days with content-loaded return to their YouTube channel at Martial Club. The two have been busy in the film arena having since contributed to the works of directors like Bao Tran, the Daniels, Destin Daniel Cretton, Chaya Supannarat, and the late Pearry Teo to name a few while still working on some of their own in-house projects.

Director Alexandre Laurent’s eight-part live-action adaptation of Tsukasa Hojo’s manga caper classic, Cat’s Eyes, is already streaming exclusively on French streamer TF1 as of last month. To this, the series is also poised to launch on Amazon Prime in France and we now have an official trailer to help proliferate things a bit.

I don’t typically do horror, but I love a good, intense, well-made thriller in the various subsets of the genre. In particular, I love what Fede Álvarez accomplished with Alien: Romulus, which is currently streaming on Hulu.

Cameras are rolling in New York City for Serena, a new sci-fi thriller being directed by Rob Alicea (The Hat Man) in his feature debut. The cast includes Andi Matichak (Halloween Trilogy, Son), Steven Strait (The Expanse, Magic City), Ashleigh Murray (Riverdale, The Other Black Girl),Tyrone Marshall Brown (Power, Love Is), and María Gabriela González (Tyler Perry’s Mea Culpa, Fantasy Island) along with actress Nicole Gut.

It’s been a while since I promoted anything Arrow Player-related. The streamer is back this month with a new line-up announcements for its January rollouts and it’s chock-filled with classic action titles and horror delights to help meet it’s subscribers demand. The streamer itself is available in North America and the UK and you can learn more about it at the official website.

Just Being Alive Is Love director Sekine Kosai is returning in the new year with pandemic thriller, Frontline. The film stars Shun Oguri, Tori Matsuzaka, Sosuke Ikematsu, and Yosuke Kubozuka, from a script by Jun Masumoto who also planned and produced the pic.

Netflix has been winning in the last few years on the live-action adaptation front for Japanese IP. Depending who you are among manga readerships, this could very well extend to the audience being courted for Demon City, the latest production from the streamer launching February 27.

It’s not pretty. None of it seems appealing in the least. My country is currently falling ill to a fascist oligarchy, and the first signs of its failing tenure are already showing. I live in America, a born-and-raised New Yorker, and I’m ashamed to be a citizen of a country that just voted to re-elect a man whose administration deliberately undermined our collective response to a pandemic that killed more than 1.2 million Americans citizens. This, on top of the fact that he’s a convicted fraudster who has also been found liable by a judge to have sexually assasulted a well-known journalist, as well as illegally used campaign funds to pay off a porn star he had an illicit affair with. And, thanks to the millions of people who were too stupid to do their research and keep from having to only recently google ways to undo their votes, we now have this dickhead back in the White House.

Malaysian filmmaker Adrian Teh is busy making another cinematic memory for us to endulge in the new year these days. In the meantime, his most recent work, Reversi, had made its way through the international festival circuit long enough to garner some publicity in the past year.