Arthouse-Action Film Genre

Directed by: “The People’s Cinema Machine” Runtime: 98 minutes (including credits) Language: Mandarin, with occasional German shouting Budget: ¥11,000 There are films that wear their influences on their sleeve. Then there are films like Velocity of Fragility, which steals the entire sleeve, stitches it to a knock-off leather jacket, and insists,somewhat poetically,that it invented sleeves … Read more

Sir, I write with growing dismay regarding your recent critical enthusiasm for the so-called new film genre, Arthouse-Action. If this term is unfamiliar, allow me to clarify: it is an unholy marriage of cinema’s two most incompatible instincts,the contemplative sigh of the arthouse film and the explosive grunt of the action thriller. The result is … Read more

Reviewed by: Ludovica Anxley, Cinema Correspondent-at-Large Dir: Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs Runtime: 143 minutes Language: Bulgarian (mostly whispered) Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs’s Fragile Velocity announces itself like a bailiff and proceeds to unfold precisely as one might expect: slowly, beautifully, inexplicably, and, given it is of the new art house-action genre, with a fair amount of gunfire in a … Read more

In a candlelit café somewhere near Kreuzberg, I meet Fernanda Lübeck,the elusive Brazilian-Swiss director whose work in the emerging Arthouse-Action genre of films has quietly detonated expectations of what a fight scene can mean. Dressed in a red jumpsuit, Lübeck greets me with a normal right-hand handshake, then a second, silent handshake with her left … Read more

There was a time,not long ago,when the action genre was straightforward: guns, explosions, a grizzled man growling about injustice. Then, quietly at first, things began to change. Gunfights got slower. Dialogue got sparser. Entire city blocks would explode in the background while the camera lingered on a moth trapped in a teacup. And from this … Read more