It has been nearly two decades since Donnie Yen last co-directed a film (2004’s “Protégé de la Rose Noire,” with Barbara Wong Chun-Chun). This year, Yen gets in front of and behind the camera with the new release “Sakra,” a martial arts action extravaganza based on Louis Cha’s epic wuxia novel “Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils.”

Co-directed by Kam Ka-Wai, “Sakra” finds Yen starring as Qiao Feng, orphan raised by a couple from the Song Empire who is at war with the Khitan (a minority of the Mongols) a sect of the Liao Empire, Qiao’s true heritage. 

In the Land of High Concept, this has got to be among the more outlandish—but somehow it works. Toni Collette is Kristin, a sexually frustrated mother in midlife who one day discovers her husband in flagrante with a much younger woman, with the paramour’s fake-apology going as follows: “I’m a feminist!” So therefore OK? It’s been quite a week for Kristin, who also learns that her Italian grandfather has recently passed away

The "Strange Case of Jacky Caillou” is the feature film debut from director Louis Delangle. This unique piece is an interesting folktale that pulls off its balancing act of the naturalistic and the fantastic, finding the harmony between the two narrative styles.

Thomas Parigi  is “Jacky” Caillou, a young man who lives with his grandmother Gisele (Edwige Blondiau) in a village high in the Alps.

"BAD AXE" Director: David Siev

David Siev set out to make a documentary about his hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan, but what he wound up chronicling was how the covid pandemic affected his family’s small business. The pandemic saw Siev move back home to his small town from New York, where he and his mixed Asian-Mexican-American

Elizabeth Blake-Thomas’s “Hunt Club” (written by David Lipper and John Saunders) is an exploitation flick with a strong message of female empowerment and the type of picture that was a dime a dozen back in the grindhouse era of the seventies. 

Films like these would feature a band of women (usually trapped in a prison or held by slave traffickers) who are tortured during