Topic

Chinese language cinemai

From Andy Lau to John Woo, from Jiang Wen to Tsai Ming-liang to Sylvia Chang, and from triads to kung fu to hopping vampires to costume epics, this is the place to go for features, interviews and reviews about Chinese-language movies from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. 

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  • Hong Kong’s first film at Cannes was Li Han-hsiang’s The Enchanting Shadow in 1960, with the director’s films also featuring in 1962 and 1963
  • Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To have both had multiple films screen at the festival, though Hong Kong has also seen long periods of absence from the event
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Christopher Nolan references and a love triangle don’t save Chinese drama Galaxy Writer, which follows two fledgling filmmakers navigating China’s commercialised movie industry.

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Viva Erotica (1996) and Vulgaria (2012) are two contrasting Category III satirical films that reveal a different side of Hong Kong’s once-famed, often crazy adult movie industry.

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Martial arts film icon and the 2024 Hong Kong Film Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Sammo Hung talks about his movies, stars like Donnie Yen, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan – and eating.

Sandra Ng Kwan-yue, now a respected Hong Kong actress and producer, started out playing minor, unattractive roles in the 1980s. But through hard work and humility, she carved a path to success.

The same five titles dominate the nominations in all major categories of the Hong Kong Film Awards 2024. Post film editor Edmund Lee predicts the winners and reflects on who or what actually should win.

Writer and director Sasha Chuk stars in her debut film Fly Me to the Moon, which follows a young immigrant from mainland China as she struggles to live life in Hong Kong.

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Hong Kong actor and director Wu Ma had a prolific career in front of and behind the camera. His best film, The Dead and the Deadly, showed the formula for success.

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The big mystery about this suspense drama is how a film with such a promising scenario – a star-crossed romance, identity swap and cold-blooded murder – can turn out so dull, nonsensical and awful.

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Michihito Fujii’s 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days simple tale of a young Taiwanese man exploring his first love’s homeland, Japan, proves surprisingly effective – despite its needlessly clumsy title.

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The first two Ip Man movies, directed by Wilson Yip, use old-school kung fu, nationalism and fabrications to make the eponymous martial artist, and the actor who plays him, Donnie Yen, household names.

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Nicholas Tse, the son of actor Patrick Tse Yin and actress Deborah Lee, has not just had a successful singing and acting career, he also founded a restaurant chain and a post-production company.

A heist movie that looks like it was dreamed up by a five-year-old, We 12, starring all the members of Cantopop boy band Mirror, is witless, lifeless and above all dull. For true fans only.

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From Martin Scorsese as Vincent van Gogh in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, to Kenji Sawada-led Yumeji and The Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway, 10 of the best films made in Asia about artists and their art.

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Zhang Ziyi, the star of internationally famous films Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Memoirs of a Geisha, is back in the limelight after nearly a decade away and she has stirred things up on mainland social media by snapping back at online snipers.

At the start of his career, Asian-American director Wayne Wang worked in his native Hong Kong and the United States, growing as a filmmaker, before shooting his first big hit, The Joy Luck Club.

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Overweight thirty-something Leying, played by Jia Ling, takes up boxing to turn her life around in Yolo, which Jia wrote and directs. However, the emotional punch of the Japanese original is largely missing.

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Our pick of the 200 films being shown at the festival includes Korean mega hit Exhuma, 2024 Berlin best film winner Dahomey, and all the movies of The Banshees of Inisherin director Martin McDonagh.

Three hidden gems of Hong Kong action cinema, To’s judo film Throw Down, Lau’s kung fu comedy and Lam’s relationship drama within a crime story should be on the radar of any serious fan of the action genre.

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The meaning of home and family when one is kept apart from them by a pandemic is a big theme of Tsang Tsui-shan’s film about once-a-decade festivities in rural Hong Kong for which emigrants cannot return.

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From Bruce Lee’s golden get-up in Game of Death to the nightmarish long hair and white nightdress worn by antagonist Sadako in Japanese horror Ring, we look at 10 iconic looks from Asian cinema.

We Are Family, Hong Kong comic Eric Tsang’s film about rent-a-families, starts off as a farcical showbiz satire before taking viewers on an emotional roller coaster, and ends as a poignant tear-jerker.

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Two crime films Johnnie To shot in the early 2000s changed the game for the genre in Hong Kong – 2003’s PTU, starring Lam Suet and Simon Yam, and 2004’s Breaking News with Richie Jen and Nick Cheung.

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Bloodsport is not a great movie but it always entertains. The Hong Kong-set action drama is best known for propelling Belgian martial artist Jean-Claude Van Damme into the Hollywood big league.

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Netflix drama 3 Body Problem, from the makers of the Game of Thrones series, is an adaptation of Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s sci-fi masterpiece, and depicts the fight against an alien invasion of Earth.

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A charismatic Chung Suet-ying stars in coming-of-age comedy The Lyricist Wannabe as a woman who tries – and continually fails – to become a Cantopop songwriter.

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Jet Li reinvented himself in the 1990s from a period kung fu movie star to a modern action hero. We look at three of his gun fu films fusing firearms and fighting, before he left Hong Kong for the US.

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Chinese-American actress Joan Chen never dreamed she would become a film star. She talks about her journey, and working with directors such as David Lynch, Ang Lee and Bernardo Bertolucci.

From singer to actor to director, Stephen Fung has worked with Marvel’s Paul Rudd, is close friends with Daniel Wu and married Shu Qi – we look at the story of the prolific Hong Kong showbiz figure.