This week offers a rare chance to see Tsui Hark’s The Butterfly Murders on the big screen.

Top five films to watch in Hong Kong this week (April 27-May 3), from The Salesman to a rare Tsui Hark

Iranian Asghar Farhadi’s foreign-language Oscar winner, a new print of a 13-hour French New Wave art film, Tsui Hark’s debut feature film, a sublime turn by Isabelle Huppert and a real-life legal drama are recommended viewing

Edmund Lee

Published: 7:00am, 27 Apr 2017

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1. The Salesman

While it’s a consensus that this isn’t Asghar Farhadi’s best film (that would be 2011’s A Separation), the Iranian writer-director’s second foreign-language Oscar winner is nonetheless a thoroughly engaging tale of male pride and conflicted moral decisions – complete with a wallop of a final act. (Opens on April 27)

2. Out 1

The last screenings of this year’s HKIFF will take two days to sit through. A labyrinthine story revolving around two avant-garde theatre groups, Jacques Rivette’s legendary 13-hour art film from 1971 is shown here in all its newly restored glory. (April 29 and 30, part of Hong Kong International Film Festival)

3. Things to Come

At age 36, Mia Hansen-Løve is already becoming one of France’s best filmmakers with her delicate and nuanced dramas. She has Isabelle Huppert to thank for this fifth feature, a sublime film based on the life of the director’s mother that reveals so much more about love and the irreversible passage of time. (Now showing)

4. The Butterfly Murders

There isn’t a better starting point to appreciate Tsui Hark’s idiosyncratic oeuvre than his 1979 debut. Ostensibly a wuxia epic, the supernatural murder mystery set in a castle features a writer as its detective – and millions of butterflies as its suspected killers. (April 29, part of Revisiting the New Wave programme)

5. Denial

Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall are among the best actors of their generation, and their commanding turns – respectively as scholar Deborah Lipstadt and Holocaust denier David Irving – certainly help to lend some much needed emotional complexity to this by-the-numbers courtroom drama. (Now showing)

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