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Sean Gilman

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Sean Gilman lives in Tacoma and is a critic and editor at Seattle Screen Scene and reviews primarily East Asian films for the Mubi Notebook and The Chinese Cinema. Find Sean @TheEndofCinema

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Red Sonja (2025) 56% EDIT “With this history, expectations had to be low for a new version of Red Sonja. But, in a pleasant surprise, it’s found a novel way to avoid the Robert E. Howard curse: it doesn’t try to be a Howard adaptation at all.” – Seattle Screen Scene Aug 15, 2025 Full Review Sham (2025) 81% EDIT “The truly harrowing position of Sham is not that there’s no such thing as truth, but rather that there is truth, and we, as a flawed people, have yet to develop a system in which we can find it.” – In Review Online Aug 12, 2025 Full Review Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025) 79% EDIT “Seems more designed to set up future episodes than is relevant to this movie, but the... final result is plenty pleasing enough that no one should complain if more entries do eventually arrive.” – In Review Online Aug 12, 2025 Full Review Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards (2024) EDIT “Cinema has delivered a lot of oddball action comedies in the last few years, but few have been able to pull off the the mix found here between fun fights and quirkiness.” – In Review Online Jul 29, 2025 Full Review Rewrite (2025) EDIT “Every twist and turn of Rewrite are a delight to engage with, opening up new ways to understand... what it means to live in a reality mediated by stories that can change and disappear and remake... themselves with or without our knowledge.” – In Review Online Jul 29, 2025 Full Review A Useful Ghost (2025) 86% EDIT “Though the film seems at times dangerously close to becoming cute, ultimately it navigates deftly both the uncanny and the beautiful, finding the sadness in romance and the romance in righteous anger.” – In Review Online May 22, 2025 Full Review Girl on Edge (2025) EDIT “The best movie about youth sports we’ve seen in years.” – In Review Online May 22, 2025 Full Review The Old Woman with the Knife (2025) 93% EDIT “Lee excels in the non-fight scenes, especially floating around in the background of shots, dressed in an overcoat with a cap pulled low over her eyes, like if Kaji's Sasori tossed aside her big black sombrero and adopted a gray tweed bucket hat.” – The Chinese Cinema May 15, 2025 Full Review The Shadow Strays (2024) 92% EDIT “A maximalist action flick packed with incredibly creative ways of maiming, dismembering, and annihilating human bodies.” – In Review Online Oct 15, 2024 Full Review Caught by the Tides (2024) 99% EDIT “Nothing more or less than a romance... Tides feels like an attempt at summarization, a way to close the book on a chapter of Jia’s filmmaking before (hopefully) moving on to new and original products.” – In Review Online Oct 7, 2024 Full Review Veteran 2: I, the Executioner (2024) 100% EDIT “Hwang’s performance is a bit more subdued this time around, while the action is less fun and more brutal.... This shift in tone is entirely appropriate. . . I, the Executioner feels very much like a work or self-examination, if not self-accusation.” – The Chinese Cinema Sep 28, 2024 Full Review Dead Talents Society (2024) 95% EDIT “An existential comedy about scary movies and celebrity, a kind of Scream meets Monsters, Inc. meets All About Eve, deeply steeped in the aesthetics of 21st-century East Asian horror... Dead Talents Society is a breeze.” – In Review Online Sep 17, 2024 Full Review Chime (2024) EDIT “Kurosawa’s trick is that all of this blends together because of his mastery of visual filmmaking: framing, camera movement, editing. No director has ever been better at expressing the uncanny, the unseen, and the unknowable than Kurosawa.” – In Review Online Sep 3, 2024 Full Review The Lyricist Wannabe (2023) EDIT “The Lyricist Wannabe is [Wong's] follow-up, coming five years after [her] promising debut... [and] It likewise obstinately refuses to fit into any neat category. ” – In Review Online Jul 24, 2024 Full Review Last Hero in China (1993) 71% EDIT “Through it all, Li's Wong stands as the embodiment of honor, dignity and rectitude. Until, quite to his surprise, he finds himself in a Wong Jing movie, where everything is given a devious twist, ranging from slight exaggeration to the seriously demented.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review I Did It My Way (2023) 20% EDIT “I love old Milkyway Image movies as much as anyone, of course. But this obsession with the stars of the past, with old men way past the age when they could plausibly be working undercover in drug gangs, is doing nothing for Hong Kong cinema.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (1983) EDIT “A filmmaker who feels like he’s reinventing cinema with every movie he makes.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review Onlookers (2023) 77% EDIT “The most wonderful thing about this are the subtitles. They are quite simply the most beautiful and poetic captions I’ve ever seen. Scene after scene plays out like a little haiku, adding an undeniably sardonic and wistful edge to this very playful film.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review Heroic Trio 2: Executioners (1993) 90% EDIT “A film that has all the trappings of an anti-communist, Handover-anxiety dystopia, but the real enemy all along turns out to be corporate capital.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review The Heroic Trio (1992) 81% EDIT “The Heroic Trio holds up well, making for a highly entertaining generic exercised anchored by the performances of its three stars (plus Anthony Wong, who steals every scene he’s in).” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review Death Notice (2022) EDIT “No Hongkonger navigates the system as well as Yau, and with Death Notice he’s slipped his most directly anti-authority film in quite awhile past the powers that be. Possibly because the film’s plot is too dense for any clock-punching bureaucrat to parse.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review The Nomad (1982) EDIT “Tam wasn’t alone in turning slice-of-life stories of Hong Kong’s youth into stories of sliced-up-lives. They respond to their world not with anger or cruelty, but by looking cool and falling in love. But violence will come for them anyway.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review My Heart Is That Eternal Love (1989) EDIT “A true romance, a tragedy about people finding themselves in traps where the only way out is to sacrifice their body for the person they love, which in turn only leads to more violence and more heartbreaking dilemmas. Call it Romantic Bloodshed.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review The Mystery of Chess Boxing (1979) EDIT “What’s remarkable about The Mystery of Chess Boxing is that even in its most debased form, and with the obvious deficiencies in its storytelling, it remains one of the more transcendent of martial arts movies. ” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review Beach of the War Gods (1973) EDIT “Wang Yu filters Seven Samurai through Kurosawa's successors: its Hollywood remake and the Spaghetti Westerns he inspired. Above all, he twists the template to his own ends, virulently nationalistic and patriarchal, and gloriously violent.” – The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Full Review
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