The Projection Booth

Kenji Tanigaki is anything but furious when he discusses his latest film, The Furious (2025). The film stars Xie Miao and Joe Taslim as two men united by a common enemy - child trafficking. The movie combines pathos with some breath-taking fight scenes in a film reminiscent of The Raid, Taken, and John Wick. 

Check local listings for where The Furious is playing near you.

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Mike welcomes Andrew Nette and Jedidiah Ayres back to dissect Dark of the Sun (1968), a brutal, kinetic men‑on‑a‑mission film whose pulp thrills sit atop a surprisingly rich political and historical foundation. The trio digs into the movie’s Cold War backdrop, its depiction of the Congo Crisis, and the real mercenaries who inspired characters like Curry and the sadistic Henlein — from “Mad” Mike Hoare to Siegfried “Congo” Müller, whose Iron Cross‑wearing exploits echo through the film. They explore Jack Cardiff’s muscular direction, the film’s obsession with logistics, its uneasy colonial gaze, and how Rod Taylor and Jim Brown anchor a story that veers from heist film to war movie to moral reckoning. 

Chainsaws, trains, diamonds, and geopolitics collide in one of the wildest action films of the 1960s.

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Mike talks with re-recording mixer Duncan McRae and sound designer/supervising sound editor Jeffrey A. Pitts about their work on They Will Kill You (2026), the action-comedy horror film directed by Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov. Co-written by Sokolov and Alex Litvak, the film stars Zazie Beetz as an ex-convict who answers an ad for a housekeeping job at a mysterious New York City high-rise, only to discover the building has a long history of disappearances. Sokolov stages brutal combat sequences in wide angles with largely unbroken takes before introducing a supernatural element that raises the stakes further.

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In 1968, Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie completed his second film, Reconstituirea — known in English as Reconstruction or The Reenactment — and, within a month of its 1970 release, it vanished. Not banned outright, but buried: withdrawn, never televised, never revived for nearly two decades. By the time Romanian audiences could see it freely in 1990, it had acquired near-mythological status. A 2008 critics' poll ranked it the greatest Romanian film ever made.

The premise is deceptively simple: two young men, Vuică and Ripu, get drunk at their graduation party, brawl with a bartender, and are offered a deal — reenact the fight for an educational film about the dangers of alcohol and walk free. What follows is a sustained, darkly comic, and finally devastating examination of what happens when institutional power turns a camera on the people it controls.

Mike talks with Spencer Parsons and Andrei Idu about Pintilie's deliberate subversion and why this film  became the foundation for the entire Romanian New Wave. Guest interview Radu Toderici -- whose essay about the film will be featured as part of the upcoming book ReFocus: The Films of Lucian Pintilie.

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Mike talks with filmmaker Kimi Takesue, whose work — spanning documentary, fiction, and experimental forms — is now collected on the Criterion Channel. Takesue grew up shuttling between Honolulu and Massachusetts, and that cross-cultural, biracial upbringing informs every frame she has made, from early shorts rooted in identity politics to acclaimed features documenting cross-cultural encounters in Uganda, Laos, and Hawaiʻi.

Her films, including Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go, and Onlookers, examine those encounters through an observational lens, tracing the power dynamics and unspoken tensions that emerge when tourists and locals share the same unequal terrain. Takesue discusses her practice of traveling without research or agenda, letting one thing unfold into the next, and how a devastating failed fiction project directly led to the making of Where Are You Taking Me? She also talks about the rhythm and formalism of Onlookers, the tension between aestheticizing beauty and critiquing the tourist gaze, the influences she only fully embraced later in her career, and her current work-in-progress following tour guides at Cambodian atrocity sites.

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