A Better Tomorrow

These are the Newcomers, 21st century filmmakers who have yet to establish themselves in one category or another.

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The Sparring Partner (Ho Cheuk-tin, 2022) and A Guilty Conscience (Jack Ng, 2023)

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Wolf Pack and Baby Assassins (Michael Chiang, 2022 and Sakamoto Yugo, 2021)

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Chan Tze-woon

Reviews: Yellowing (2016) – October 5, 2016 Blue Island (2022) – January 29, 2022

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Philip Yung

Reviews: Where the Wind Blows (2022) – November 16, 2023 Capsule Reviews: Port of Call (2015) – September 30, 2015 Podcast: The George Sanders Show Episode 70: VIFF Report #1 – September 28, 2015

Wei Junzi

Kung Fu Stuntmen (Wei Junzi, 2020)

Wei Junzi’s documentary Kung Fu Stuntmen is about exactly what it says it is: the people who made Hong Kong action cinema the most breathtaking in the world for the past 60 years. It’s also about the decline and fall of that cinema, about nostalgia for a past

Li Jun

Cloudy Mountain (Li Jun, 2021)

The big hit of this past Mid-Autumn Festival season on Chinese screens was Cloudy Mountain, the latest in a series of disaster films that double as propaganda pieces that praise the resourcefulness of the Chinese people and bureaucracy (not necessarily in that order) in responding to the cataclysmic side effects

Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers

Inside the Red Brick Wall (Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, 2020)

Inside the Red Brick Wall is a hour-by-hour accounting of what happened when the Hong Kong police department trapped several hundred pro-democracy protesters inside the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University in November of 2019. It joins Chan Tze-woon’s Yellowing and Evans Chan’s We Have Boots as essential

Yang Lina

Spring Tide (Yang Lina, 2019)

Out today from indie distributor China Lion Films, streaming through iTunes and Fandango, is one of the better Chinese films to see an American release in this plagued year 2020. Spring Tide is the long-awaited second feature film from director Yang Lina. I caught her first fiction film, the moody

The Other Tony Leung

Midnight Diner (Tony Leung Ka-fai, 2019)

I am, as I suspect many people are, afflicted with an unquenchable fondness for movies about food. Close-ups of meat sizzling, the sound of tea being poured into a china cup, the crispy crunch of vegetables being chopped, it all triggers some kind of ASMR-like pleasure center deep in the

Kam Ka-wai

Big Brother (Kam Ka-wai, 2018)

Into the hallowed tradition of high school movies wherein juvenile delinquents are straightened out by an unconventional teacher steps none other than Donnie Yen, his furious fists solemnly taking up the mantle of Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dangerous Minds. It’s clearly a project that means something to

A Better Tomorrow

A Better Tomorrow Capsule Reviews

Sunny Chan: Men on the Dragon (2018) — July 7, 2018 Four middle-aged men work at a Hong Kong telecommunications company. In order to woo a potential client, the company signs them all up for a dragon boat race (basically an 18-man crew competition). As the company is laying off workers

Su Lun

How Long Will I Love U (Su Lun, 2018)

It’s been awhile since we had a Chinese release of interest here on Seattle Screens, but this time-travel rom-com certainly fits the bill, the kind of clever, unique popular cinema that the Mainland film industry will hopefully start churning out in greater numbers, as opposed to cartoonish action films

Huang Bo

The Island (Huang Bo, 2018)

Opening this week at the Oak Tree is the directorial debut of Huang Bo, a comic actor probably best known here for playing the Monkey King in Stephen Chow’s Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons. In The Island, he’s reunited with one of his co-stars from that

Chin Ka-lok

Golden Job (Chin Ka-lok, 2018)

In the wake of the 1997 Handover, when Hong Kong turned from a relatively independent British colony to a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, the Hong Kong film industry, which had been for most of the previous 30 years or so one of the glories

Cui Siwei

Savage (Cui Siwei, 2019)

Cui Siwei’s directorial debut is not, unfortunately, a remake of the classic blaxploitation film Savage (tagline: “On the streets, or in the sheets, he’s. . . SAVAGE!”). Instead, it’s another moody Chinese noir, this one headed by two excellent actors and set in a snowy mountain wilderness. Chang Chen

Qiu Sheng

Suburban Birds (Qiu Sheng, 2018)

The Northwest Film Forum’s commitment to rethinking the movie release calendar continues this week, and part of last week, with the oddball Wednesday-Tuesday run of Suburban Birds, the feature debut of director Qiu Sheng. That the film should play here at all is somewhat remarkable, contemporary Chinese cinema releases

Fei Xing

Mojin: The Worm Valley (Fei Xing, 2018)

A prequel to 2015’s Mojin: The Lost Legend, in which a band of intrepid treasure hunters brave mysterious wilds and scary animals in search of a MacGuffin that will cure a curse they picked up during an earlier treasure hunting expedition. Where the first Mojin film had an exceptional

Yang Ya-che

The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful (Yang Ya-che, 2017)

The winner of this past year’s Golden Horse Awards Best Picture is shockingly bad. Generally considered the top awards body for Chinese language film, The Golden Horse has a sterling reputation, though perhaps that is unearned. Looking back over recent winners reveals more than one questionable decision (2013’s

Wong Chun

Mad World (Wong Chun, 2016)

For more than a hundred years, all over the world, what is taken to be serious cinema has been defined more often than not by content. Films for grown-ups are supposed to be sober examinations of the social and political issues of the day. These are the movies that win

Chan Chi-fat

Weeds on Fire (Chan Chi-fat, 2016)

One of the three new films playing at SIFF this weekend as part of their miniseries commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, along with Mad World and Cook Up a Storm, Weeds on Fire was one of the surprise hits of 2016

Derek Hui

This Is Not What I Expected (Derek Hui, 2017)

One of two romantic comedies that tried and failed to unseat the powerhouse Fast & the Furious 8 at the Chinese box office this past May Day weekend, This Is Not What I Expected opens here on Friday, a week after its counterpart Love Off the Cuff. It’s a

Cheng Er

The Wasted Times (Cheng Er, 2016)

The Wasted Times was originally slated to be released in October of 2015. The film’s trailer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH1HTm51lts] has been playing before presentations of Chinese-language films here in North America for at least that long, but the film kept getting pushed back. There was

Yang Chao

Crosscurrent (Yang Chao, 2016)

Poetry is the subject of the moment for 2016. Like Volcanos and Asteroids and Mars before it, we’ve been blessed this year with a plethora of films about writers of verse. Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion, and Pablo Larraín’s Neruda have all the

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

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