The Furious review – dial-shifting dadsploitation mayhem as father goes in search of kidnapped daughter

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There’s more than a whiff of Taken in Kenji Tanigaki’s exhilarating martial-arts movie, in which a handyman goes after some evil people traffickers It keeps happening: every few years, usually during a run of lethargic Hollywood spectacles, the Overton window of screen violence gets recalibrated by a muscular wonder from the east. Thundering along in the bloody footsteps of the Raid films and the Hindi punch-’em-up Kill, this martial-arts showcase from Japanese-born, Hong Kong-based director Kenji Tanigaki opens in generic dadsploitation territory. “Somewhere in Southeast Asia”, as a caption has it, mute Chinese handyman Wang Wei (Miao Xie) tears off after the traffickers who have nabbed his daughter (Enyou Yang). Having Hulk-smashed its way out of the Taken box, though, The Furious starts to crank it up. Boy, does it crank it up; the closing half-hour achieves a pummelling intensity unlikely to be matched by any other release this year. There are one or two plot developments. Cribbing...
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Who was Muriel Box, Britain’s most prolific female film director?

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She was also the first woman to win an Oscar for best original screenplay. Now a new radio documentary aims to give her pioneering work a fresh appraisal

In 1991, as a film student, I was offered £50 by a German women’s collective to shoot Muriel Box. But when the documentary director and I arrived at her home we were told that she was too ill to see us. She died a few months later aged 85. While I regret never meeting her, I’m also relieved. How terrible to have shown even a glimpse of my full ignorance of her achievements, a pioneering film-maker who had fought her way through an industry hostile to women to make a major contribution to cinema.

Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and remains Britain’s most prolific female director. Her titles, made for a mainstream audience, include The Passionate Stranger, an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form; the controversial juvenile courtroom drama Too Young to Love; and Box’s favourite, The Truth About Women, an eclectic tapestry of the complex lives of women.

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