Look, I usually spend my time watching 1970s Italian cannibal flicks, shot-on-video weirdness or movies that get under a 2 on IMDb. But every now and again, a movie comes along that is so completely outside of the B&S comfort zone that I just have to sit down and watch it.

That brings us to Someone Like You.

It’s a 2024 faith-based tearjerker directed by Tyler Russell and written by his mom, Karen Kingsbury, based on her own bestselling novel. This is pure, unadulterated, wholesome melodrama made for the crowd that thinks a PG rating is pushing the envelope.

The plot sounds like something out of a weird 80s sci-fi soap opera, but played with absolute, deadpan earnestness. Sarah Fisher pulls double duty here as London Quinn and Andi Allen. London tragically dies early on, leaving her architect boyfriend, Dawson Gage (Jake Allyn), utterly shattered. But wait! It turns out London was an IVF baby and there was a secret second embryo donated to another family. Dawson tracks down the biological secret twin sister, Andi, and healing, tears and clean romance ensue.

What makes this movie worth talking about for a drive-in mental case like me? The cast connections, of course! Well, the moms are played by Robyn Lively — yes, Lana from Teen Witch — and Lynn Collins, who was Silver Fox in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Dejah Thoris in John Carter.

Someone Like You knows exactly who its audience is. It’s sentimental, it’s glossy and it moves with the slow, deliberate pace of a Sunday morning. It treats its bizarre embryo-swap plot with the kind of soft-focus reverence that secular critics hate, but Kingsbury fans absolutely devour.

You can get this from Deep Discount.

After flipping the bird to the Shaw Brothers assembly line in Hong Kong to set up his own Grand Motion Picture Company in Taiwan, director Li Han-hsiang decided his opening statement shouldn’t just compete with his former bosses. It should make Hollywood’s bloated historical epics look like a local high school theater production.

The result? An absolute monolith of mid-century Asian cinema. This was a massive, 120,000-extra, 334-day shoot, a movie so big that it premiered as a colossal two-part epic released months apart. The version in the 88 Films release is the condensed, 2.5-hour omnibus edit prepared for a later re-release. While the complete, multi-hour mega-cut is tragically lost to time, this version remains a gorgeous testament to classic filmmaking on a scale that will make your jaw drop.

The kind and noble King of Yue, Goujian (Zhao Lei), finds his kingdom thoroughly subjugated and himself thrown into a degrading, years-long exile by the sadistic, lecherous King of Wu, Fucha. When Goujian is finally allowed to crawl back to his ruined home, he doesn’t just plan a standard-issue counter-attack. Instead, he orchestrates a twenty-year-long game of court intrigue, psychological warfare and total economic destabilization.

The ultimate weapon in this multi-decade chess match isn’t a massive division of chariots, but rather a young woman named Hsi Shih (Jiang Qing). Ostensibly sent to the Wu palace as a submissive gift of fealty to satisfy King Fucha’s legendary lust, she is actually a highly trained political operative. Her mission? Infiltrate the royal bedchamber, weaponize her own staggering beauty and slowly rot the Wu government from the inside out while her king builds a secret army back home.

If you come to this expecting the kinetic, acrobatic swordplay of late-sixties King Hu or the razor-sharp martial arts choreography that would soon define the region’s output, you are going to get left behind in the palace corridors. This is a massive, slow-burning period piece where the primary weapons are whispered rumors, political double-bluffs and the heavy silence of impending betrayal.

Did this thing have a big budget? You better believe it. The sheer scale of the old-school production design—with enormous, practical palace sets, sprawling armies that stretch to the horizon without a single digital pixel, and stunning widescreen compositions—is breathtaking. The 4K digital restoration rescues the film’s vibrant palette from decades of fading, letting the ornate costumes and massive crowd scenes pop with the kind of grand cinematic illusion that no longer exists.

If you miss the days when epic meant thousands of actual humans standing in a field wearing hand-stitched armor, you need this on your shelf. 88 Films has absolutely knocked this one out of the park for collectors. You get a brand-new 4K remaster of the movie, an interview with Asian cinema expert Tony Rayns, a trailer and a restoration comparison. Buy it from MVD.

We’ve all spent late nights falling down the rabbit hole of weird internet mysteries, clicking from one creepy, low-res YouTube video to another until the sun comes up. YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann turned that exact modern obsession into his Kickstarter-funded directorial debut, Shelby Oaks. Starting out as a viral, real-world alternate-reality game called The Paranormal Paranoids, the original videos convinced som epeople this was all real.

This starts with those Paranormal Paranoids — Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), Laura Tucker (Caisey Cole), David Reynolds (Eric Francis Melaragni) and Peter Bailey (Anthony Baldasare) — disappearing while investigating a prison in Shelby Oaks. The bodies of all but Riley are found. One camera is recoved and it shows Riley losing her mind. Then, the film follows her sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) twelve years after her sister Riley  and her amateur ghost-hunting crew vanished from the face of the Earth in an abandoned Ohio town.

When a crazed stranger shows up on Mia’s doorstep, mutters a cryptic warning and paints the porch with his brains, he leaves behind a mini-DV tape that blows the cold case wide open. Soon, Mia is divorced from reality (and her husband, played by Brendan Sexton III), chasing down the former prison warden of Shelby Oaks (Keith David) and hiking into the decaying heart of the penitentiary to find out what happened to her sister.

The first 17 minutes of this movie play out like a slick, dread-inducing true-crime documentary mixed with found footage. Shooting at real-deal spooky midwest locations like the Ohio State Reformatory and Chippewa Lake Park gives the film a gritty, rust-belt decay that you just can’t fake on a Hollywood soundstage.

Once the movie ditches the found-footage/documentary style and shifts to a conventional narrative, it loses its footing. It’s like watching two different movies stitched together by a mad scientist. By the time we get to the basement of a dilapidated farmhouse, the movie throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. We get a violent prison inmate who didn’t want to escape, an elderly cultist mother (Robin Bartlett, a parasitic incubus named Tarion, a squad of Swedish-imported hellhounds and a demonic pregnancy plotline.

Neon bought the movie after its 2024 Fantasia premiere, ordered reshoots to amp up the gore, altered the ending, and cut 11 minutes of backstory. Is that why the result feels rushed and a bit incoherent by the time the credits roll?

Stuckmann clearly knows his horror history and shows flashes of real directorial confidence, especially when he’s letting the quiet dread build. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but as a calling card for a new filmmaker, it’s fine. You could do a hell of a lot worse.

The transition from the narrative focus of 2021’s Mortal Kombat to its sequel is nothing short of a franchise fatality performed on its own setup. By disposing of Cole Young — the original audience surrogate — so ruthlessly at the hands of Martyn Ford’s towering Shao Kahn, the film effectively signals that the training wheels are off. It’s a bold, albeit polarizing, subversion of expectations: killing the protagonist within the first act is a classic Poochie-died-on-the-way-to-his-home-planet move, but here it serves as a visceral promise that no one is safe.

Directed by Simon McQuoid and written by Jeremy Slater, this time the movie has course corrected to have the hero be Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), a washed-up martial arts actor recruited by the thunder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to join a series of fighters for Earth, including Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), a reborn and reformed Kano (Josh Lawson), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Jax (Mehcad Brooks) against the forces of Shao Khan’s Outworld army, which has Edenian princess Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), her mother Queen Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), a reborn Kung Kao (Max Huang) and Jade (Tati Gabrielle).

Yes, it turns out that Earth is about to lose to Outworld. Plus, Shao Khan hedges his bets with the aid of sorcerer Quan Chi (Damon Herriman) and Shang Tsung (Chin Han), who have sliced Raiden’s throat and taken his power to give Shao Khan immortal power. 

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) has learned how to transform Hell into his own paradise, getting past his anger at Bi-Han/Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), until he learns that he’s still kind of alive and has also split into a second fighter, Noob Saibot. Then there’s Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) and the Tarkatans, who are the only ones who can get into the castle.

If you played the games — and yes, I have and still do — you’re going to find so much to love, like actual energy bars showing up at one point and a devotion to gory fatalities. I mean, Ed Boon shows up twice, once as a bartender, and his voice says Scorpion’s “Get over here!” It’s fan service, but why else would they make this movie?

That makes it kind of hard to rate. If you’re someone just walking in, I guess there’s entertainment here, particularly if you like martial arts movies. If you’re someone who knows how to pull off an animality or a friendship, you’re probably going to like it way better than the last one. Then again, nothing has ever been better than the original, but such is life. Or death, in the case of Mortal Kombat.

TL: DR Johnny Cage was awesome, a human brain pops out and lots of fingers get sliced off. I cheered. Here’s to Nightwolf and Stryker being in the next one.

I love: 

• Beat up kids rising up against the odds
• Foreign movies that make no sense
• Godfrey Ho cinematic universe films

This has all those and more.

Also known as Thunder Ninja Kids: Little Kickboxer, Kickboxer Kid and Korean Boy, this is the story of Biao (or Choi, depending on where you watch this movie), a kid with a heavy burden and a surprisingly high pain tolerance. After his father is murdered by a ruthless gang leader, Biao realizes that stranger danger is the least of his worries. Under the tutelage of a wise (and likely underpaid) taekwondo master named Don, he undergoes a rigorous series of training montages to dismantle the criminal syndicate threatening his family and find closure for his father’s death.

Biao’s mother doesn’t want him to fight. She’s raised him to be kind, and he’s friends with all of the girls in school, while the boys beat on him unmercifully. But in a massive coincidence, Don was trained by Biao’s father Tiger Jack, so mom decides that her son dying in the octagon is a good idea because it all lines up spiritually.

Don and Gloria, the mother of one of Biao’s schoolgirl chums, are both falling in love and in the middle of a protection scheme from organized crime. Don and Biao beat the hell out of some lower-level thugs, so the boss sends his best fighter to break Don’s leg. That man? Well, he’s Pichai, the same guy who killed Jack. It all comes full circle, and everyone just goes along with a literal child facing a man who has murdered before. 

Wouldn’t Don say, “Hey, this guy dropped a literal bomb on my leg, and it’s in so many pieces I may never walk again, and I’m an adult, and you’re, like, 11?” 

No, no one says that.

Let’s let IDF themselves tell us what this is about: “Hyuk-jin is a model student in the 6th grade who is tormented by his physically superior peers. He sees Chloe-ho fight a bunch of hoodlums and is moved to learn Taekwondo. His mother is shocked to learn about Hyuk-jin’s determination to learn the sport that killed his father, who died in a tournament. But she learns that Chloe-ho was her husband’s pupil and on of his acquiesces. Hyuk-jin trains during summer break and is transformed into a physically powerful young boy. He roughens up Nak-joon’s men who come to his mother’s restaurant to collect rent. Nak-joon runs a fake gym while controlling a crime organization on the sly. He brings the Thai kick boxer who killed Hyuk-jin’s father and opens a martial arts tournament. Hyuk-jin sees this as the perfect chance to avenge his father.”

Letterboxd says this was directed by Lim Seon. Other sources say Godfrey Ho. I think Godfrey Ho — yes, I have seen him show up in extras, I know he’s real — is some sort of AI that cuts and pastes these movies. That’s how I want to think of him. It. Whatever.

You can watch this on Cultpix.