Featuring stand-out performances from Michelle Wai and Elaine Jin, Ready or Rot is a pleasant and touching romantic drama that is a vast improvement on its prequel, 2021’s Ready or Knot.
Ann Hui’s Elegies, a documentary about Hong Kong’s contemporary poetry scene, focuses on interviews with Hong Kong poets Huang Canran and Liu Waitong – and obliquely touches on the city’s ‘situation’.
Starring Wallace Chung, Francis Ng and Eddie Cheung, Chinese crime thriller Death Stranding, the latest film from Hong Kong’s Danny Pang, is a dull and illogical tale of corruption and revenge.
Hong Kong’s First Feature Film Initiative was founded in 2013 to spot new directing talent and help fund their first features. We look at the performance of the 13 films funded in the FFFI’s first 10 years.
Hong Kong family drama Time Still Turns the Pages, by writer-director Nick Cheuk, uses student suicides as the cue for a poignant tale of emotional torture, regret and redemption.
Cantopop star Michael Cheung’s first feature film is a madcap comedy about mortuary thieves, vengeful gang members and a supernatural live stream. Poorly written, it wastes a good set-up.
Based on a true story, In Broad Daylight follows a journalist, played by Jennifer Yu, who works undercover at a Hong Kong care home for the disabled to expose abuse and mistreatment.
Cantopop star Kay Tse plays a struggling musician who forms a band with her dysfunctional Hong Kong family in Band Four, a movie about forgiveness and the power of music to bring people together.
Hong Kong’s entry for best international feature film at the 2024 Oscars is A Light Never Goes Out. We recall other entries from the past 10 years, from Better Days to Zero to Hero and Port of Call.
Terry Ng’s Hong Kong gangster drama The Brotherhood of Rebel, starring Bosco Wong, Louis Cheung and Carlos Chan, charts the downfalls of flawed gang members navigating the criminal underworld.
Time Still Turns The Pages leads Hong Kong contenders at the 2023 Golden Horse Awards, a Taiwan showpiece film event that has been boycotted by mainland China for the fifth year running.
Lonely Eighteen, partly based on the life and career of its co-star, Hong Kong actress Irene Wan, charts the contrasting fortunes of a pair of actresses. While the film is sincere, it ultimately has no emotional pay-off.
Anson Kong of Cantopop group Mirror stars in Back Home, a supernatural horror that is chilling enough, but will probably be more appreciated as a thinly veiled critique of Hong Kong’s sociopolitical environment.
A young man (Ng Siu-hin) who wants to become a stand-up comic lives with his father (Ben Suen), who has a mild intellectual disability. They learn to savour their time together while enduring life’s hardships.
Despite a good turn from Chrissie Chau as a jailed businesswoman, Prison Flowers is so badly scripted it makes nothing of the friction between inmates and guards and resorts to desperate plot devices.
Cantopop boy band member Lo plays a grief-stricken waiter who goes camping with friends on a spooky island. Initially derivative, Kelvin Shum’s film hits its stride in a chilling stream of hallucinatory sequences.
Three Hong Kong friends getting together for a reunion dinner after 25 years each have some drama involving their mobile phones on the way in indie filmmaker Amos Why’s laid-back comedy.
Herman Yau directs Louis Koo, Julian Cheung and Francis Ng in murder mystery Death Notice, which sees a police task force hot on the heels of a serial killer who re-emerges after disappearing for a decade.
Superficially another satire of the Hong Kong property market, Yum Investigation’s narrative about dreams and fighting for one’s home is a comment on the social unrest that gripped the city a few years ago.
The third movie in this Hong Kong anthology series features a trio of short films, all involving murder. Atmospheric but uneven, they suggest this formula may soon have run its course.
Aaron Kwok and Louis Koo play policemen working undercover in Lau Ching-wan’s drugs gang in Herman Yau’s explosive thriller. A big-budget genre film without much subtlety, it is impressive nonetheless.
In One More Chance, an old-fashioned human drama that may or may not be inspired by Bruce Lee’s teaching, Chow Yun-fat plays a down-on-his-luck gambler who discovers he has a son.
Horror anthology series Tales from the Occult returns to take on the slasher horror genre with a fun, if forgettable, trio of films in the anthology series in Body and Soul.
Writer-director Gilitte Leung’s second feature, Social Distancing, is a pandemic-set Hong Kong horror thriller filled with interesting ideas that is ultimately let down by dreadful storytelling.
Stephy Tang and Edward Ma star in Twelve Days, a bleak marriage drama that is a pale echo of writer-director Aubrey Lam’s hit 2000 romance Twelve Nights.
Lam Ka-tung and Mirror’s Lokman Yeung try to exert their free will and change their destiny in director Soi Cheang’s Hong Kong-set genre thrill ride with a dash of fantasy thrown in.
Post film editor Edmund Lee picks the likely winners in all 19 categories at Sunday’s awards ceremony, which The Sparring Partner is likely to dominate and where recent Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh is expected.
Sylvia Chang’s Golden Horse-winning performance as a grieving widow anchors this gentle story of loss in which Hong Kong’s iconic but disappearing neon signs are the real star.
Teresa Mo, Ronald Cheng and Wong You-nam star in comedy drama Over My Dead Body, which pokes fun at Hong Kong’s property market and the city’s negative social climate in recent years.
Anthony Wong and Sahal Zaman represent refugees from different generations in Hong Kong-based Malaysian director Lau Kok-rui’s first feature film.
