Dante Lam Operation Mekong (Dante Lam, 2016) Opening this week is the latest action film from director Dante Lam, whose Beast Cops and Jianghu: The Triad Zone were two of the better Hong Kong films to come out during the industry trough that followed the colony’s handover to China in the late 1990s. More recently, his
Kim Jeewoon The Age of Shadows (Kim Jeewoon, 2016) Hot off its premiere at the Venice Film Festival and the announcement of its being chosen as South Korea’s submission for the Foreign Language Academy Award, the latest film from director Kim Jeewoon opened this past Friday. But not in Seattle: it’s only playing at the Alderwood Mall
Derek Tsang Soulmate (Derek Tsang, 2016) A young woman, Ansheng, is tasked by her boss with tracking down the author of an in-progress serialized web novel, as their company would like to option it for a movie adaptation. (This is a thing that happens: the best film of 2014, Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After (now
Sono Sion Love Exposure (Sono Sion, 2008) ‘Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,’ The shade replied, — ‘If you seek for Eldorado!’ Love Exposure is an epic four-hour romantic comedy about terrible fathers, upskirt photography, Catholicism, and the meaning of love. Where Bicycle Sighs was a fairly typical minimalist
Sono Sion Suicide Club (Sono Sion, 2001) Don’t try suicide Nobody’s worth it Don’t try suicide Nobody cares Don’t try suicide You’re just gonna hate it Don’t try suicide Nobody gives a damn Suicide Club opens with a montage of the city at night, documentary realist footage of pedestrians moving through
Sono Sion Bicycle Sighs (Sono Sion, 1990) Sono Sion’s 1990 debut feature is a coming-of-age story heavily influenced by the then newly fashionable minimalist style, but with a few distinctive quirks. Sono himself plays Shiro, one of three friends hanging around delivering newspapers while they study for their college entrance exams. Shiro’s best friend, Keita
Edward Yang A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991) Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day was released earlier this year by the Criterion Collection. A home video event years in the making, rumors of its impending inclusion in the canonical collection (as part of Criterion’s partnership with the World Cinema Foundation) have been swirling since as far
Matt Wu One Night Only (Matt Wu, 2016) An Aaron Kwok movie is opening on Seattle Screens for the second time in three weeks, as the now venerable pop star/actor follows up his taciturn performance as the cooly rational police bureaucrat in Cold War 2 with a turn as a compulsive gambler with unresolved family issues in
Longman Leung and Sunny Luk Cold War 2 (Longman Leung & Sunny Luk, 2016) Picking up right where their 2012 hit film, which featured an all-star cast and swept the Hong Kong Film Awards, left off, Longman Leung and Sunny Luk present another suspenseful tale of corruption and double-dealing in the highest echelons of the Hong Kong police department, its two institutional halves at
Longman Leung and Sunny Luk Cold War (Longman Leung & Sunny Luk, 2012) In a slick chrome and black Hong Kong, two halves of the police force war with each other over methods and tactics. One one side: the operations department – active, aggressive, channeling the “we break the law to enforce the law” ethos celebrated in HK films since at least the mid
Jevons Au Trivisa (Jevons Au, Frank Hui, & Vicky Wong, 2016) Trivisa is the latest product of Johnnie To’s Milkyway Image studio (at least, until his new film opens here on June 24th). Directed by the young trio of Jevons Au, Vicky Wong, and Frank Hui, it’s a crime story set on the eve of Hong Kong’s handover
Strange Tales The 50 Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century When Film4 published a list of their “100 Must-See Films of the 21st Century [http://www.film4.com/special-features/top-lists/100-must-see-films-21st-century] ” and only bothered to include two Chinese films (Yi yi and In the Mood for Love , of course), I countered with this list on letterboxd of 100 Must-See Chinese
Devils on the Doorstep Hong Sangsoo Don’t Take Pictures: The Films of Hong Sangsoo — January 29, 2018 Hong Sangsoo: Director of the Decade — November 30, 2019 Reviews: The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996) — January 6, 2018 The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) — January 7, 2018 Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000)
Sammo Hung My Beloved Bodyguard (Sammo Hung, 2016) Sammo Hung’s long-awaited return to the director’s chair (known as “The Bodyguard” here in the US and “My Beloved Bodyguard” everywhere else), his first since 1997’s Once Upon a Time in China in America, finds the now 64 year old star playing a recently retired security agent
Xu Haofeng The Final Master (Xu Haofeng, 2016) A dour myth of kung fu in the years before the Japanese war. Director Xu Haofeng excises most of what’s interesting in such tales in favor of a less-complicated-than-it-seems plot about a city’s martial arts schools governed by arbitrary and pointless rules, vague intimations of the historical period
Strange Tales Chinese Cinema Today A couple months ago I was asked to write this brief overview of the state of contemporary Chinese language cinema for the Estonian arts magazine Sirp [http://www.sirp.ee/]. You can read this essay in Estonian on their website [http://www.sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/film/merineitsi-kasvaja-ja-varisevad-maed/], and here, with
Yang Qing Chongqing Hot Pot (Yang Qing, 2016) The latest Chinese import to grace Seattle Screens is an absurdist thriller about trio of friends who own a failing underground (literally) restaurant and who accidentally tunnel into a nearby bank vault. After a tense prologue that recalls any number of Hong Kong gangster thrillers, men in black wearing Journey
Roy Chow Rise of the Legend (Roy Chow, 2014) Every generation gets the Wong Fei-hung they deserve. A fin-de-siècle doctor and martial arts instructor, the real life Wong has been inspiring cinematic incarnations for most of the history of Hong Kong’s film industry. The first was in a series of productions running form the late 1940s to the
Johnnie To A Moment of Romance III (Johnnie To, 1996) For his final film before launching the Milkyway Image studio, Johnnie To took a super-generic script, applied a Steven Spielberg visual aesthetic, and almost made an FW Murnau movie out of it. A rarity for To, it's a period film, a romance set during the second World War,
Yuen Woo-ping Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (Yuen Woo-ping, 2016) A straight-to-Netflix multinational English language collaboration that is the sequel to the highest-grossing foreign language film in American history, Sword of Destiny reunites star Michelle Yeoh with the action choreographer from the first film, Yuen Woo-ping. Belonging more rightly to the CGI-driven Chinese wuxias of the 2010s (and the cheaper
Zhang Yimou The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016) The Great Wall, an experiment in co-production between Hollywood and China, opens with the spinning globe of the Universal Studios logo, its computer-generated image rotating slowly as it zooms in on the eponymous defensive fortification, helpfully orienting the hoped-for American audience by showing them where exactly the nation of China
The Odd One Dies 30 Essential Wuxia Films With the highly-anticipated release of two King Hu masterpieces on home video by the Masters of Cinema organization, as well as the critical success of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin last year, it seems like the wuxia film is making some inroads into the Western critical consciousness. So I thought
Johnnie To The Fun, the Luck, and the Tycoon (Johnnie To, 1990) Following up on the smash hit that was All About Ah-long, Johnnie To went back to television for a two-part film called The Iron Butterfly. I haven’t been able to track it down, but it looks to be a modern cop/Triad thriller, with Anthony Wong and Mark Cheng
Johnnie To All About Ah-Long (Johnnie To, 1989) After an auspicious, if commercially unsuccessful, debut with the New Wave wuxia The Enigmatic Case in 1980, To spent the early 80s working in Hong Kong television. In 1986 he returned to film working under Raymond Wong Bak-ming at the Cinema City studio, where he made the popular, if not
Raman Hui Monster Hunt (Raman Hui, 2015) An effects-based comic wuxia directed by Raman Hui, a Hong Kong native who has spent most of his career working on animated Hollywood films, most notably on some Shrek and Kung Fu Panda shorts and as co-director on Shrek the Third. This appears to be Hui’s first Chinese film
