Author: Andrew Skeates

If you like slick, glossy action flicks with lots of pretty boys posing, then ‘The Sniper’ is right up your street.

A visually stunning piece of sci-fi Anime, ‘Wonderful Days’ is thrilling to look at but let down by a hollow core and one dimensional characters.

‘Skills’ is a decent effort for a parkour themed action film, but is only sporadically entertaining and not as thrilling as it should have been.

‘Silent Assassins’ gets a couple of stars as its got enough Eastern flavoured action to keep it rollicking along, a bunch of B-movie stars hamming it up and is perfect fodder for some low rent action fun.

The cast are all gifted fighters and the film does pack in a fair bit of martial arts, just a shame the rest of the film is so amateur, haphazard and, well, naff.

Not the best of its kind and it drags a little too much with the running time, ‘Shogun’s Samurai’ is still a decent slice of Samurai drama from a time when they used to make them big.

It doesn’t come close to reaching the creepy heights of ‘Ju-on’ but it’s a moderately spooky horror flick with some unnecessary but occasionally groovy 3D additions.

Director Guo Xiaolu does manage some scenes of striking realism where the drama and relationships work but soap opera theatrics derails the overall dramatic impact of ‘She, A Chinese’.

Equal parts goofy, exciting and tedious, the flick works best when Li and his band of pint sized pugilists are kicking butt and performing amazing feats of acrobatics.

‘Shanghai’ is an entertaining watch buoyed by an impressive cast which features several Eastern superstars showing they can hold their own against some of Hollywood’s finest.

Yu’s epic is often stunning to look at, is a lot less stuffy and longwinded than many a recent Chinese period epic, moves at a fair clip and delivers a surfeit of adrenaline surged spectacle.

It doesn’t touch the likes of ‘Ong Bak’, ‘Chocolate’ or ‘Raging Phoenix’ in terms of scale or epic action but ‘The Sanctuary’ still shows why the Thai’s are at the top of the fight action game.