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The Killer is one of John Woo's many case-studies in how to make cinematic action magic a reality: have a buddy-film type of frenemy dynamic, make the action important to the characters, and use the slow-motion as a sort of juxtaposition to the relentlessly fast-paced bullet-storms sprinkled throughout the film.

The Killer is a simple yet effective love story of a gold-hearted assassin going out of his way to help the woman he blinded during an assassination job gone awry. In the midst of this, the Triad and Hong Kong police are on The Killer's trail. The ending for this adventure is bound to be a messy one where no one is untouched by the carnage.

The Killer is 1980s Hong Kong action at its very best: briskly paced and never boring or misfired in its commentary on crime and honour and showing gunplay as the cinematic art form it can truly be in action movies.

The Killer gets 5/5 stars. 10/10 IMDbs. John Woo knows how to make guns sing in ballads of lead and blood. This film's no exception.

Mobile Suit Gundam has been revered and spun-off with sequels, other shows having their own continuities, and of course the booming billion-dollar toy industry it kicked off: still strong today. To say Gundam's been influential for Japanese pop-culture is a huge understatement indeed. It's become a milestone for sci-fi, and showed that anime was the ideal medium for space opera stories, and of course for giant robots duking it out on-screen.

Mobile Suit Gundam is good escapist fun, and shows what fun anime could have with the 'real robot' genre of science fiction: it's like an animated tokusatsu film told in half-hour 'shots' of entertainment. Fast forward from 1979 to 2025, and Gundam is a franchise comparable to the likes of Batman, Spider-Man and Star Wars in terms of money and the production of the countless films and television shows those franchises have spawned in turn.

The Gundam franchise is one of anime's longest standing and most successful stories; and it's bound to stay that way for the next generation of otaku too. It's fun stuff, and it began a very fruitful journey into film, television and beyond.

Mobile Suit Gundam gets 9/10 IMDbs. 4.5/5 stars. For fans it's classic leisure: for others, let it be a visually stirring time capsule for when the future still seemed genuinely exciting and bigger than ourselves. Gundam is something of a pop-culture unifier, and one of Japan's leading multimedia titans for sure.