Yu Qiu (Nick Cheung) is a police officer deep undercover among the city drug gangs. After rescuing a young girl from a kidnapping, he stumbles upon a criminal enterprise exploiting children at the behest of a criminal mastermind known only … Continue reading REVIEW: The Trough (2018)
Around 2010 I travelled to Hong Kong where – among other things – I watched a fantastic live performance at the music venue Hidden Agenda. Getting there for a tourist was an ominous experience: an MTR ride to Kowloon, and … Continue reading REVIEW: The Way We Keep Dancing (2020)
The career of director Johnnie To can be pretty easily split into two phases. From the late 1990s he established his own production company, Milkyway Image, and embarked on a hugely successful career directing idiosyncratic crime films, romantic comedies, and … Continue reading REVIEW: The Bare-Footed Kid (1993)
Double Tap, directed by Law Chi-leung in 2000, is what it is: a film in which two overly emotional men face off against one another on the streets of Hong Kong. As melodramatic as a soap opera and aggressively masculine, … Continue reading REVIEW: Double Tap (2000)
In February 1983 Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong fantasy Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain brought Hollywood visual effects to Hong Kong fantasy cinema, revolutionising the form and invigorating the genre. Yuen Woo-ping’s comedic fantasy The Miracle Fighters was released seven months earlier, … Continue reading REVIEW: The Miracle Fighters (1982)
You have to be careful with the English titles with Chinese language films. Take Hong Kong’s The Calling of a Bus Driver (2020), written and directed by Patrick Kong. With a title like that one would expect to see some … Continue reading REVIEW: The Calling of a Bus Driver (2020)
Nothing in global cinema is more culturally specific than comedy. I have written in the past about the Hong Kong comedy style known as ‘mo lei tau’, a sort of nonsensical and deliberately silly combination of wordplay, non-sequitur, and slapstick … Continue reading REVIEW: 92 Legendary La Rose Noire (1992)
The 1980s saw a new wave of fantasy pictures in Hong Kong, ones that combined pre-existing elements of Chinese wuxia with a Hollywood-inspired use of visual effects. The poster child for this wave is almost certainly Zu: Warriors from the … Continue reading REVIEW: The Peacock King (1988)
Johnnie To’s first – and, to date, only – international co-production does not quite scale the levels of inventiveness found in his Hong Kong-specific works, but Vengeance remains a beautifully staged and operatic action thriller. French chef Francis Costello (Johnny Hallyday) arrives … Continue reading REVIEW: Vengeance (2009)
When mid-level drug boss Timmy Choi (Louis Koo) is captured by mainland Chinese police – led by the stoic Captain Zhang (Sun Honglei) – he turns traitor on his underground empire, leading the cops into a complicated sting operation to shut … Continue reading REVIEW: Drug War (2013)
