by Sebastian Kluth
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets isn't only the best novel of the franchise but also the best movie along with the first entry Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone. The story revolves around a mysterious dangerous presence at Hogwarts that paralyzes...
Silver Talon is a young heavy metal sextet whose members have already played in quite a few bands such as speed metal group Spellcaster, power metal outfit Sanctifyre, thrash metal band Sabateur and gothic metal group Idle Hands. The sextet's first extended...
Releasing a live album without an actual audience is a rather strange idea but then again, it fits with Katatonia's elegiac rock sounds. The Swedish quintet offers twenty songs with a total running time of just below one hour and a half. It focuses on...
Vanguard is a quirky action movie that convinces with exotic locations in Europe, Asia and Africa, excellent fight scenes featuring martial arts elements as well as vibrant shootings and great action sequences including fast-paced car chases as well as...
Experimental Armenian-American alternative metal quartet System of a Down hasn't released any new music for fifteen years due to internal disputes and numerous side projects. The current Nagorno-Karabakh war which is essentially a conflict between Azerbaijan...
Outside the Coma, formerly known as Outpatients is a British-Japanese electronic rock quintet around singers Mikee W. Goodman and Yuuri B Joux. The former is known for his work in progressive metal band SikTh while the latter is now the singer of metalcore...
The Makarrata Project is the first studio album with new material released by Australian alternative rock band Midnight Oil. It's also the last release involving bassist and backing singer Bones Hillman who died a week after the album's official release....
Partially based upon historical events, Bernard Rose's Samurai Marathon portrays how a Japanese lord sends his men on an exhausting run to get them prepared for a potential attack by Western forces after centuries of isolation. The movie follows different...
Graveyard of Honor is one of the best and most influential Japanese gangster movies ever made. If it had been more popular abroad, this movie might have the same reputation as The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America and The Untouchables have today....
Horrors of Malformed Men is a quite experimental movie by veteran director Ishii Teruo that has been inspired by the tales of famous mystery and horror author Edogawa Rampo who had himself been inspired by Western authors such as Edgar Allan Poe. This...
Russian heavy metal pioneers Aria decided to re-record their two studio albums featuring former singer Arthur Berkut with the current line-up featuring singer Mikhail Zhitnyakov. In a certain way, this is a lack of respect for the former singer who had...
It's simply great to return to the cinema and watch a new movie for the first time in half a year due to the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to this, it's not just any movie but the new film by British cult director Christopher Nolan who has just celebrated...
Ladybaby is one of the most intriguing idol groups that has gone through significant changes in its career. The band formed back in 2013 but only released its first official song two years later. This first single called ''Nippon Manju'' was an instant...
Historical drama with depth and grit While everbody seems to be going crazy over Christopher Nolan's new science-fiction epic Tenet, I must admit that I have prefered Chinese historical military drama The Eight Hundred a little bit more. The movie tells...
The Invisible Man is a psycho thriller that imagines a new version of the famous horror film character. Written and directed by Australian genre specialist Leigh Whannell who has brought us genre masterpieces such as Saw and Insidious as well as the science-fiction...
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is the sixth and last entry in the live action franchise based upon the famous Japanese video games. To be honest, the plug should have been pulled much earlier. While the first movie has been excellent, the four sequels...
Eyecatch Junction is the first official movie made by famous director Miike Takashi. Just like many of his later works, this obscure V-cinema flick from the early nineties vividly combines genres that seem to be incompatible for Western audiences. This...
Shinjuku Outlaw is a direct-to-video gangster movie directed by legendary Takashi Miike. This is only his eighth movie early in his career and the film doesn't have the content, effects and flow of later Yakuza masterpieces such as Shinjuku Triad Society...
The Universal Migrator I: The Dream Sequencer Floating in Space When I bought Ayreon's double-album The Universal Migrator Part I: The Dream Sequencer and The Universal Migrator Part II: Flight of the Migrator as a teenager one and a half decades ago,...
The Haunted, also known as The Tag-Along, is a highly entertaining Taiwanese horror movie. An elderly woman from a vast apartment complex has mysteriously disappeared and her worried best friend starts having strange visions and hearing weird noises....
Battle of Jangsari is the second part in a loose trilogy about the Korean War that started with the brilliant Operation Chromite three years before this film. It tells the story of a group of students who only had a few days of military training that...
Nine Inch Nails' second Ghosts record, released simultaneously with the first, third and fourth parts, looks quite similar to its predecessor on paper. Once again, we get to listen to nine tracks. The track lengths vary between one minute and a half and...
Schönberg is a Japanese symphonic power metal quartet. Its first record Splendid Rosa Birth ～華麗なるロサ、誕生～ comes around with thirteen songs, including five instrumental tracks, with a total running time of forty-four minutes. The entertaining record convinces...
Godzilla vs. Megalon is the thirteenth entry in the Godzilla franchise and once again a family-friendly movie directed by Fukuda Jun. The film wasn't even supposed to be a Godzilla film in the first place and was intended to focus on the adventures of...
After the experimental Godzilla vs. Hedorah with a visionary ecological message and children's movie All Monsters Attack, director Fukuda Jun directed his first film of the franchise in five years. The twelfth entry Godzilla vs. Gigan is one of the weakest...
