Film - The Furious

A choreographer's second turn in the director's chair

Kenji Tanigaki spent decades staging other directors' fight scenes, from the Rurouni Kenshin trilogy to Raging Fire, picking up a Golden Horse Award and a Hong Kong Film Award for his choreography along the way. The Furious is only his second time directing, after 2020's Enter the Fat Dragon, and it's built the way you'd expect from someone who has spent a career thinking about fights rather than plot.

Xie Miao plays Wang Wei, a mute tradesman whose daughter Rainy is taken by a trafficking network operating across Southeast Asia. When the police won't help, he falls in with Navin, a journalist played by Joe Taslim who's chasing his own missing wife, and the pair go after the syndicate themselves. Jeeja Yanin and Yayan Ruhian, both familiar from The Raid, turn up on the other side of the violence, produced by Bill Kong of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.

Critics have been close to unanimous: 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from more than 150 reviews, a Special Jury Award at Sitges, and Xie Miao named Best Actor in an Action Movie at this year's Critics' Choice Super Awards. Reviewers keep calling the dialogue thin, but nobody argues with the fight scenes.

It's a big, bruising film for a 200-seat venue that only started showing anything at all in 2020, when the pandemic pushed the Barn to bolt a projector into a stage that was never built for one.

Monday 14 September 2026 · The Barn Theatre, Beeches Road, Cirencester GL7 1BN · Starts 8pm