FANTASIA21 REVIEW: Yakuza Princess [2021]

There are no harmless old men. We enter twenty years into the past at a birthday party in Japan. This wealthy family spared no expense for the celebration, but no amount of money can stop what’s coming. Swords are drawn, guns are fired, and soon enough everyone is dead save a little girl taken from her mother’s lifeless arms. The assumption is that the victors have stolen her to nurture as their own before the inevitable discovery of her real heritage and her subsequent desire for revenge. Learning the opposite…

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REVIEW: 情牽拉麵茶 [Ramen Teh] [Ramen Shop] [2018]

He kept her memory alive with every bowl of ramen. While Eric Khoo‘s Ramen Teh [Ramen Shop] is at its core a story about a young man looking to reclaim a part of his heritage that was lost, it’s also a rather poignant account of the lasting scars of war and the struggle to separate hate from love when two worlds collide. Because it’s not simply that Masato (Takumi Saitoh) never returned to Singapore after leaving with his parents at age ten. He wasn’t welcome there. Despite the country being…

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