Okinawa Rendez-vous (戀戰沖繩, Gordon Chan, 2000)

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Romantic confusion ensues when a collection of Hong Kongers and Japanese gangsters meet in Okinawa in Gordon Chan’s breezy rom-com Okinawa Rendez-vous (戀戰沖繩). Set in the picturesque environment of a seaside resort, the film takes on the trappings of a heist caper but is really about misdirected romanic attraction brokered by some missing money and more than a few acts of wilful deception as master thief and mailroom cop become locked in a game of cat and mouse.

Hong Kong cop Dat (Tony Leung Ka-fai) is on holiday in Okinawa with his girlfriend Sandy (Gigi Lai Chi) whom he plans to break up with and her friend Cookie (Stephanie Che) whom he hates. His trip is brightened when he spots Jimmy (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing), a master thief he remembers from his police files but is not actually wanted for anything right at this moment. Meanwhile, Jimmy is in Okinawa trying to blackmail a yakuza by threatening to expose his diary. The yakuza, Sato (Masaya Kato), was all set to pay him, but his Hong Kong girlfriend, Jenny (Faye Wong), runs off with the money and beings living a simple life working at a seaside bar while living with the owner (Asuka Higuchi) who is so obsessed with Hong Kong hitman movies that she’s picked up fluent Cantonese through osmosis. Dat takes a liking to Jenny while using her in his plot to catch Jimmy through entrapment by plotting to a rob local bank, while Sandy draws closer to Sato who cared less about getting the money back than he did about Jenny but is learning to let go of both of them.

Apparently on a tight deadline, Chan assembled the cast in Okinawa with only a vague plot outline and no script hoping to improvise the rest. The main thread is the competition between Jimmy and Dat for the affections of Jenny, along with the obvious contrasts between the cop and the thief. Ironically named “Mr. Law”, policeman Dat is not especially sympathetic and seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is actually involved in plotting a robbery that would take him down as well Jimmy if actually went ahead. For reasons best known to himself, he’s brought his girlfriend on holiday with the idea of breaking up with her, which seems like an awkward scenario begin with, but perhaps sped up by his attraction to Jenny whom he mistakenly assumes to be some kind of pure woman at the centre of intrigue rather than a thief herself.

Jenny tells Sato that she just fell out of love with him and was looking for an exit, while Dat also says something similar about his relationship with Sandy, hinting at the transient nature of love and along with it its meaninglessness. Nevertheless, even as playboy Jimmy strings along other local women and pretends he’s only interested in conquest, he seems to develop genuine feelings for Jenny while she strings Dat along and uses both men to protect her money but is secretly trying to help Jimmy. After being dumped by Dat with a plagiarised poem he probably gives to all his girlfriends, Sandy finds love with Sato and plans to stay in Okinawa, while romance may be blossoming between Cookie and Dat and Jimmy’s right-hand man takes up with the recently dumped bar owner who finally gets the Hong Kong “killer” she’d always dreamed of.

Which is all to say that Dat was right when he said that life is unpredictable, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Despite the potentially dangerous nature of this situation, no one ends up getting (physically) hurt, and everyone eventually finds their way to where they’re supposed to be, positioned for maximum happiness. Making the most of its picturesque Okinawa setting, the film, in the end, comes down on the side of love. The stolen money is reduced to a MacGuffin, while the blackmail and entrapment plots fall by the wayside as each begins to discover new and unexpected romantic possibilities in this otherwise transient place. Light, breezy, and filled with gentle humour, there is, however, a genuine sense of poignancy in the final scene as the lovelorn Jimmy discovers his romantic destiny just might work out after all.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Never After Dark (Dave Boyle, 2026)

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When people talk about the veil between this world and the other, it may seem that where one ends the other begins, but it’s often more like a two-way mirror with each occupying the same space. Flip the switch, and you’ll see a different reality. At least that’s sort of how it is for travelling psychic Airi (Moeka Hoshi) in Dave Boyle’s gothic chiller, Never After Dark, as she finds herself tasked with dispatching another wandering soul at a disused hotel.

Having just purchased the property, wealthy widow Teiko (Tae Kimura) struggles to convince her sceptical son Gunji (Kento Kaku) that there really is a malevolent spirit stalking the halls rather than a figment of her imagination provoked by her loneliness and sense of isolation while living alone in this vast and empty space. Doors seem to open on their own, and she’s seen the terrifying figure of a man with half his face missing. After consulting a shaman, she calls in Airi to help deal with the problem but is surprised when she arrives alone. The shaman had told her about “a pair of sisters” who deal with cases like these. But the truth is that Airi is alone and not alone. Her older sister Miku (Kurumi Inagaki) is a spirit herself, frozen in the form in which she died, though Airi is now much older than she’ll ever be.

As for Airi herself, she’s much more comfortable with the dead than the living and a fairly stand-offish presence which somewhat disappoints the bubbly Teiko who tells her that she’s interested in becoming a psychic herself and was hoping to witness the ritual. Airi, however, prefers to work alone and tells her that it’s far too dangerous for her clients to be present, none of which helps to head off any lingering doubts as to her authenticity. Though told to stay away for their own safety, unbeknownst to her Teiko and Gunji each sneak back for a quick peek at what she’s up to, which also includes drinking alone and listening to records late at night. She waits for dawn to break before entering the spirit realm through a process of self-hypnosis, otherwise the balance would be tipped the wrong way and the forces of darkness would hold all the power.

But there are other ways in which the living can be haunted. The film seems clear in its cosmology that Miku is a “real” presence in the other world. Through she appears only in reflective surfaces, she is not only a reflection of Airi’s grief, guilt, and internalised shame about this “gift” that she’s inherited from an apparently absent mother. Nevertheless, Airi’s aversion to the living is born of this same trauma in being constantly doubted, accused of fraud or witchcraft, and facing threats of irrational violence from apparently “rational” people who reject the idea of the supernatural.

Airi may be right when she says she has more to fear from the living than the dead, but what she encounters here is more like an echo of the future reverberating in the past. Miku recalls being pursued by a girl with white eyes she later understood to be her own ghost shortly before she died, blown back in time by the force of her grief. In that sense, perhaps everyone is alive and dead at the same time, even if Airi is both dead and alive, alone and not alone, in less literal ways. Even so, the force she’s battling seems to have the power of foresight, just not as regards their own fate, and identifies with a kind of emptiness in Airi that is reflected in their own search for a soul by stealing those of others.

Faced with a threat that’s more flesh and blood than she was expecting, Airi’s first instinct is to run. This isn’t in her remit, she claims, and therefore not her problem, only for Miku to remind her that she has a responsibility not only to help the dead move on, but to her living clients, while in this case it may amount to the same thing. A hotel is, after all, a transient space and there is something uncanny about its disused state as a nexus of time where all moments become one moment and one may be both alive and the same time dead. Perhaps it’s time for Airi to move on too, if only into another purgatorial existence, as her candle burns itself down to its last.

Never After Dark is available on digital platforms in the UK from 2nd November.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Dull-Ice Flower (魯冰花, Yang Li-kuo, 1989)

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A mischievous little boy’s daily life beings to change following the arrival of an inspirational teacher in Yang Li-kuo’s poignant drama, The Dull-Ice Flower (魯冰花, Lǔ bīnghuā). Adapted from the novel by Chung Chao-cheng and set in the 1960s, the film was released shortly after the lifting of martial law and examines the many ways in which A-Ming’s (Wong Kwan-Yuen) life was defined by forces outside his control from his family’s poverty and the feudalistic nature of local society to the rigidities of authoritarian rule.

Indeed, there is something quite sad in seeing the once bright and energetic boy at the film’s centre gradually lose his spark, become listless and dejected, and finally succumb to the same illness that took his mother’s life. A-ming and his sister Cha-mei (Lee Suk-Ching) live in a remote mountain village where their father Shi-sung (Lin I-hsiung) grows tea. Though A-ming loves drawing, his father is always chastising him for being lazy and not working hard enough on their farm. He is bottom of his class in terms of grades and has a reputation as a troublemaker among the teachers.

It’s only on the arrival of Mr. Kuo (Yu Han), and idealistic art teacher from Taipei, that A-ming gains the courage and confidence to embrace his talent, though not everyone is as convinced of it as Mr. Kuo. Many of the other teachers favour Chih-hung, the son of the local mayor (Chan Chung-Yung), who was previously selected to represent the school in an art competition but didn’t win anything. Chih-hung’s drawing style is technically proficient, but in Kuo’s view overly naturalistic and lacking in both feeling and imagination. After Kuo starts the art club, Chih-hung is unable to draw anything without being given a subject first and when told to draw the class immediately gets up and starts counting the number of people in the room. He measures everything out and aims for accuracy in depicting the world around him. As Kuo’s fond of pointing out, a camera could do that just as well, while A-ming’s drawings are full of abstract ideas and childish flights of fancy. While Kuo sees genius in the them, the teachers dismiss his work as incomprehensible because in their rigid, authoritarian way of thinking they prize only “realism”. Not only are they unable to understand A-ming’s paintings, they have no desire to.

At the same time, they are all obsessed with currying favour with the mayor, Mr Lin, and local politics dictate that no one challenges him or his family. When Kuo tells Chih-hung that his drawing doesn’t make sense and all he needs to do is colour the flag red, it causes the boy to burst into tears because no once has ever given him anything other than praise so he feels personally attacked. The incident provokes a minor crisis that sees the other teachers rally round Chih-hung while telling a baffled Kuo not to bring “politics” into his work. Seemingly left-leading, Kuo speaks his mind and represents a new kind of democratic spirit that sees him advocate for egalitarianism and freedom of thought.

Even so, A-ming continues to suffer because of his family’s poverty and the feudalistic ties between the villagers and the mayor. It’s the mayor who rents the land to A-ming’s father, while he also took out a sizeable loan with him during his wife’s illness. Shi-sung fears that a poor harvest could result in his inability to pay the rent to Lin, leaving them homeless. Consequently, he pulls the children out of school to help kill an infestation of tea bugs, disapproving of their involvement with the art club because it means they come home later and less have time to work. Though she is also talented and enjoys drawing, Chi-mei gives up the art club so that A-ming can continue going while she works in the fields. Kuo later brings the class to them to help kill the tea bugs so the Chi-mei and A-ming can go to school and be in the art club. Chih-hung is apparently taken with this brief foray into the mountains, while Kuo later takes up the family’s plight with Lin who has the field sprayed as a symbolic gesture but then later presses Shi-sung for the repayment of his loan when he fails to vote for him after taking A-ming to the hospital on election day.

Forced to sell his pigs early, Shi-sung is unable to pay for the medical treatment and takes A-ming out of hospital early, though he thinks he’s recovered and is excited about returning to school and participating in the art contest. “Rich kids have a better chance at everything,” he laments sadly on hearing that Kuo was overruled when he nominated him for the contest as the other teachers all insisted on Chih-hung. This final disappointment seems to put paid to all his dreams to the point that Ah-ming gives up painting entirely as his illness intensifies. His painting of the tea bugs expresses his fears that everything will be taken away from him from food to the opportunity to go to school and paint. Shi-sung laments that it was this poverty that led to his wife’s early death, while later exacerbating Ah-ming’s illness and preventing him from receiving medical treatment.

This sense of unfairness permeates the film, as does a wonder and respect for the natural world echoed in Ah-ming’s desire to paint something just as beautiful on a large canvas so that the world could see. The teachers come to regret the way that they treated Ah-ming along with their dismissal of his artwork, though the mayor is full of self-serving hypocrisy announcing that they will now be sure to focus on artistically talented children when his own son is an aspiring artist. Even so, like the lubin flowers of the title, A-ming’s presence does seem to have enriched the world around him, kicking back against the elitism of an authoritarian regime with raw talent and finding new ways to express himself in an otherwise conformist culture.

Finale in Blood (大鬧廣昌隆, Fruit Chan, 1993)

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A wandering ghost trapped in an umbrella sticks around to get revenge on her philandering husband while becoming an accidental radio star in Fruit Chan’s torrid answer to Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, Finale in Blood (大鬧廣昌隆). Inspired by a classic folk legend passed down through Cantonese recitative, the film uses the medium of a ghost story to examine the nature of love as, as someone later puts it, love doesn’t necessarily “possession”.

The witness to the tale is hapless radio announcer Ming-Pao (Lawrence Cheng Tan-Shui) whose job it is to read out food prices on a station that has become popular for its soap opera-esque tales of horror. Down on his luck, he agrees to help a friend who smuggles Western medicine complete a job only to find himself subject to a police rad during which he gets knocked into the harbour. Somehow he is saved by the haunted umbrella which turns out to belong to Fang Yin (Ruth Winona Tao), a recently deceased young woman who subsequently becomes attached to him and co-opts Ming-Pao into helping her get vengeance against her cheating husband, Ma (David Wu).

Ming-Pao ends up unexpectedly hosting the ghost story spot during which Fang Yin steps in to tell her own story, though everyone assumes it’s Ming-Pao mimicking a woman’s voice, and becoming a huge hit as the populace appears to sympathise with the various ways Fang Yin was made to suffer because of her husband’s poor treatment. The way she tells it, she came to Hong Kong to take over her father’s hotel, but found it quite a dull business before taking a liking to a mysterious guest who turned out to be an undercover policeman whose case she accidentally blows. Nevertheless, the pair enter an awkward courtship in which Ma seems to delight in introducing her to the seedier side of Hong Kong in its brothels and opium dens. Ma is evidently not a particularly diligent policeman, and has a kind of arrangement with a sex worker (Chikako Aoyama) who intensely resents Fang Yin and is confused about the ambiguous nature of the relationship she has with Ma.

Fang Yin also finds herself confused and humiliated as Ma often fails to return home, forcing her to go looking for him low places and often discovering him with his mistress. Ma meanwhile, defends himself claiming that it’s only natural for a man to stray and that he was just “on a moral holiday” when Fang Yin returned early from a trip and found the pair together. Ming-pao, meanwhile, is the total opposite of Ma. Though he may be a bit hapless, getting involved in his friend’s smuggling business, he feels sorry for Fang Yin and the way her husband treated her. Though he is originally irritated to have been saddled with a ghost, after that he tries his best to help Fang Yin, even digging up her body and placing it in moonlight so she can temporarily possess it. This does, however, place him at risk as Ma and his mistress begin noticing the similarities between the radio story and the murder they’ve committed.

In helping Fang Yin, however, Ming-Pao effectively uses the studio’s biggest star who has, against the odds, taken a likening to him mostly because of his performance on the radio show which is, of course, actually performed by Fang Yin. Though Sha-sha (Josephine Koo Mei-Wah) initially comes to the conclusion that Ming-Pao is the killer, she later sympathises with Fang Yin too and laments her situation as one third of an incredibly destructive love triangle. The unnamed sex worker is very possessive of Ma and almost boasts in claiming to have buried Fang Yin’s body herself. Ma is more equivocal, trying to placate Fang Yin though with a gun behind his back. Likewise, he eventually tells the sex worker that he never loved her and their relationship was always transactional. A coward, it’s never quite clear what his real feelings are, but only that this three-way relationship was always doomed to failure. Nevertheless, Ming-Pao’s smuggling friend diagnoses the problem as less one of Ma’s moral transgressions and more one of selfishness on the part of the women who should simply have learned how to be less “possessive” and share their man. Ming-Pao’s Hong Kong is though a more helpless place filled with a sense of despair and defeat. Chan lends the picture a kind of sleaziness, embracing the fetid atmosphere with rainstorms and sweatiness before ending on an ironic note of serenity as the three lovers are seemingly reunited for all eternity.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Last Romance (流金歲月, Yonfan, 1988)

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The close friendship between two women is disrupted when they fall for the same boy in Yonfan’s poignant melodrama Last Romance (流金歲月). Adapted from a novel by Yi Shu, the film takes place in the shadow of the Handover leaving each of the protagonists in a kind of limbo state uncertain of the future and afraid to strike out while longing to return to a bygone past of innocence and possibility.

Nancy (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) first meets So So (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung) close to the end of high school and describes herself as being struck by her vivaciousness and openness that gave her a feeling of intimacy. Yet when she wanted to look at her again, she’d disappeared like a sun shower. This opening monologue hints at Nancy’s repressed longing for her friend which may in itself be romantic. Into adulthood, Nancy appears to be to some extent queer coded, dressing in androgynous fashions except for the one occasion when she meets up with fellow childhood friend Ga Ming (Shingo Tsurumi), who has since become a journalist based in Hong Kong, for a date in a stunning dress and makeup that has even her parents wondering where she’s going.

It may be a little strong to call Ga Ming a childhood friend seeing as the girls only seem to actually hang out with him on a couple of occasions while otherwise playfully joking about which of them will get to date him. As 17-year-olds, they enjoyed a day out at Ocean Park which appears to have stayed with Ga Ming in the intervening years as he continues to dream that the three of them might one day meet up there again. For him it’s become a kind of touchstone of his innocent youth that is bound up with his own feelings of rootlessness and abandonment as a Japanese-Chinese young man raised in an orphanage. He appears to have valued the girls’ friendship in part simply because he no one else pays him very much attention and he has no other friends. Meanwhile, he is struck by So So in the same way that Nancy was, remarking that he’s never met anyone like her. But at the same time, he says that for him, Nancy and So So have become one entity that is destined to come as pair.

By her late 20s, Nancy has begun to resent this. She wants to be her own person, and also to fight for Ga Ming’s affections, betraying So So by choosing not to tell her that she’s been spending time with him alone rather than risk So So stealing her spotlight. So So, meanwhile, is equally rootless in having first gone to live with her aunt while her father went to sea to earn money and then being displaced again when he passes away and she begins to feel unable to stay due to the unwanted attention shown her by her slightly creepy cousin. Unwanted male attention seems to be something that plagues So So while she only really chases the ghost of her absent father. She says that she wants security and pursues older men, becoming a bar hostess and later mistress of wealthy businessman Mr Li (Kenneth Tsang), while essentially using them for money without being able to feel much affection for the various men she associates herself with. In an echo of the city’s rapidly rising economic prosperity and her own continual displacement, she is forever moving to new and more impressive living spaces reflecting her new financial standing.

Nancy, by contrast, lives a much more stable and middle-class life after becoming a designer at a fashion company. Nevertheless, she is strictly told that “no individualism is allowed” as she’s encouraged to copy more prominent designers’ designs and reminded that everything she does should be for the company even as her sexist boss has her buying plane tickets and making arrangements for his son’s piano lessons. Thus Nancy is encouraged to keep part of herself hidden in order to be accepted by this capitalistic society and also later experiences unwanted male attention from a younger colleague who appears to be infatuated with her. She seems to find this a little disturbing, to begin with, but eventually tries to initiate romantic intimacy with him after So So and Ga Ming get together only to be unable to go through with it. It may be that her affection for Ga Ming is only a displacement activity for her unrealisable yearning for So So by seeking to become close to the man who loves her and whom So So loves but feels she cannot have.

Likewise, So So’s inability to accept genuine romantic connection with Ga Ming may be partly motivated by her repressed desire for Nancy or else her feelings of inferiority and internalised shame over her life as a sex worker whose personal wealth was made thanks to the financial investment and tutelage of Mr Li. It’s also Mr Li who helps Nancy’s father with his financial portfolio, helping him to purchase stocks and get into real estate when the market booms yet warning him that he should sell quickly with a crash imminent on the upcoming negotiations on the Handover. The brief clip of Margaret Thatcher falling down some steps hints at the coming fall of the old regime along with the implosion of the nation’s nascent capitalist rise.

Realising that all his assets are now worth nothing, Nancy’s father dies of a heart attack implying that men like him cannot really enter coming post-Handover society while Mr Li is also ruined thanks to his association with So So having heavily invested in the shipping company belonging to the family of the man she married for money who never really accepted her. In an ironic way, it’s Mr Li who becomes the father figure that So So was always looking for and for it’s for him that she later sacrifices herself and her dream of love by agreeing to abroad and be the mistress of a man who disgusts her. This new Hong Kong has no space for her either. So So and Ga Ming are left behind with their only innocent memories of an idealised love of their youth and a yearning to return to an earlier time when such things seemed possible.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Fin (지느러미, Park Sye-young, 2025)

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A young woman working for a government service tracking down illegal “Omegas” begins to wonder if she’s on the wrong side after becoming suspicious of another young woman much like herself in Park Sye-young’s dystopian drama, The Fin (지느러미, Jineureomi). Following some kind of ecological disaster, Korea has been plunged into a post-apocalyptic existence in which water has become scarce. The nation has been reunified, seemingly with the North in control, while “protected” by various walls which keep the majority population “safe” from an underclass of “mutant” workers who are permitted to exist in return for clearing “toxic waste”.

Sujin (Kim Pureum), a member of the Korean Freedom Youth Civil Service, attends a lecture on how to identify Omegas at which she is told that they look like everyone else except for the fact they have three birdlike claw toes and a fin-like appendage at the bottom of the spine which helps them exist in water. The fin is the source of all their toxins, and their bodies are radioactive, so must be disposed of immediately. What’s more, if they scream outside of the water, it could kill you.

It appears that such people actually exist and have become an oppressed underclass, but it’s never clear how much else is true and how much convenient propaganda designed to spread fear and make people suspicious of each other to prevent them from challenging this apparently authoritarian regime. The film is peppered with propaganda announcements and videos which seem to be played to saturation to point so that they’ve become a part of the environment. Looking more closely, some of them seem as if they may have been AI generated, which creates a further sense of doubt in the “reality” presented by an otherwise absent authority which may not even in itself actually exist at all. There’s no way to know what’s on the other side of the great wall, or if the “toxic waste” and water shortage are real. Citizens are encouraged to appear with dirty faces as an act of patriotism to demonstrate their efforts to conserve water.

But the “water shortage” is also a means of fuelling resentment towards the Omegas who are blamed for “stealing” it, rather than towards the regime who apparently cannot provide the populace with adequate resources. Sujin’s mother, a hollowed-out figure glued to her TV screen, is forever shouting that they should all be “eradicated” and that their destruction is the only way back to the world of before. This desire to go back is symbolised by the Golden Faith fishing emporium that decadently contains a large pool of water and a selection of fish that people can eat there and then if they catch one. It reminds people of the time in which the sea was blue and open to all, and reflects their yearning to return to a simpler time.

Mia (Yeon Ye-ji), the young woman who works there, is one of many Omegas hiding their identity by cutting off their toes and concealing their fins. An unnamed Omega (Goh-Woo) risks his own life to bring back to her her father’s fin so that she can give him a dignified funeral, only she had no idea her father had been arrested and sent beyond the wall. “It’s because of cowards like you that we’re treated like this,” the man tells her, while crowds rage outside calling for the eradication of all Omega and begging the government to protect them from this mutation.

Outside of the city, which appears to have been at least partially reclaimed by nature, the landscape has taken on a scorched, reddish hue to the extent that the once blue ocean now resembles a sea of fire. The inside of Golden Faith is, however, cooler. Not quite so bland as the brutalist buildings that surround it but light and colourful. Sujin seemingly has a choice to make, or perhaps she doesn’t. In any case, Park’s dystopian vision hints at the compromises we might be able to make in service of preserving a comfortable “reality”, throwing others to the wolves in the hope that they will not come for us.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kung Fu Soccer (功夫女足, Stephen Chow, 2026)

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Seven years on from New King of Comedy, Stephen Chow returns with another reimagining of a past hit in Kung Fu Soccer (功夫女足, gōngfu nǚzú), a new take on the 2001 global sensation Shaolin Soccer. Throughout the ‘90s, Chow had been one of Hong Kong cinema’s most bankable talents with a series of mo lei tau or “nonsense” comedies. There’s no getting away from the fact that the Cantonese language is intrinsic to the genre which heavily relies on zany puns and wordplay in addition to slapstick humour, though the later phase of Chow’s career has largely been in Mainland-friendly Mandarin as is Kung Fu Soccer.

As such, the film struggles to achieve the kind of comedic rhythm that made Chow’s earlier work so popular while its nonsense gags such as a man burning his leg in order to get rid of unwanted hair after mistakenly thinking someone talking on the phone about cooking pork was talking to him play out less successfully. As in Shaolin Soccer, Chow turns subpar CGI into a kitsch feature, leaning in to the unreality of virtual stadia and the uncanniness of a CGI ball being knocked around the pitch to create a cartoon world where the normal rules of physics do not apply.

This time around, the action follows the Emei women’s football team who face ageism and sexism after making a belated bid to win an Asian championship. Headstrong captain Shuang (Zhang Xiaofei) and her childhood friend Jade (Dilraba Dilmurat) are struggling to overcome a falling-out over Jade’s decision to leave the sport and get married only to return following her divorce, while Shuang has dedicated her life to football and kung fu but now at almost 40 is beginning to realise that she may have missed out on other life experiences and has no plans for the future. Shuang is an orphan who found a place within the team and fears abandonment, whereas Jade is a wealthy heiress whose devil-may-care attitude is informed by her financial security.

As expected, part of the path for the team’s success is getting the pair to patch things up, which they eventually do after a little manipulation by “Grand Uncle” Xu Feng (Lay Zhang), another childhood friend with a longstanding crush on Shuang she in fact returns but is unable to act on due to being arrested emotionally having done nothing but sport and kung fu since she was a child. The conclusion that Shuang is gradually guided towards is that she’s too intense and has lost her love of playing the game. She has a lack of empathy for her teammates and an autocratic management style that alienates those around her, a criticism that has been levelled at Chow himself in the past. It’s this internalised pressure that makes it difficult for the players to perform. If they chilled out a bit and rediscovered the joy of it, they might be better placed to face their opponents who also have their own particular quirks.

The film has also come in for criticism for the ways that it depicts the other Asian nations in the competition, most particularly the South Koreans who are shown to be obsessed with beauty and play in underhanded ways while the Korean spoken in the film is delivered unconvincingly. The team from India similarly have some kind of super-stretchy ability and the Australians are defined by aggression and tactlessness. The Japanese team, coached by Takeru Satoh in a cameo appearance, are mainly just violent while the decision to make their goalie a figure of fun for not being considered conventionally attractive seems very outdated and undercuts the film’s other messages of female power and solidarity. The Emei team face questions of ageism and are forced to constantly prove themselves, but eventually come out on top after learning to trust each other, pool their respective strengths, and just have fun playing the game. Backed by Carina Lau’s mahjong-obsessed grandmaster, they have perhaps learned to integrate their martial arts abilities and love of sport to overcome not only the prejudice held against them, but their own internalised anxieties.

Kung Fu Soccer is in North American, UK, & Ireland cinemas from 23rd October.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Ghost in the Cell (Joko Anwar, 2026)

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“This is Indonesia, not Norway,” the protagonists of Joko Anwar’s horror comedy Ghost in the Cell keep reminding each other as a means of explaining their dismal circumstances. The prison they’re confined within isn’t so different from the wider society, and even while inside they’re subject to the same hypocrisies, hierarchies, injustices and inequalities as they were outside. Ghosts, however, cannot be bound by prison walls and will seek bloody vengeance down to the last angry man.

Indeed, one of the ghost’s characteristics is that it seems to feed on negative energy, targeting the angriest man it can find to sustain itself. It generally manifests as a kind of doppelgänger in which the victim is essentially confronted by themselves, their own rage and frustration turned back on them. To that extent, the message seems to be that in the end your anger will consume you if you don’t do something to mitigate it, forcing the men to take advantage of the tools they’ve been given to calm themselves such as prayer and dancing. Every so often during a fight, one of the men will call out that their friend’s aura is turning red which places them at risk of being targeted by the ghost, so they should immediately bust out some dance moves to improve their mood.

But at the same time, their anger can be a powerful weapon if turned in the right direction as de facto leader of the prisoners Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya) later says. Many of them are in here because of some kind political manipulation. He was cheated out of his house by land sharks who wanted to build a luxury resort, so he tried to rob them but got caught and ended up in prison. One of the other men is a university professor who tried to expose corruption in his institution but was framed for theft and incarcerated. “It’s easier to survive in this country if people think you’re dumb,” he later reflects on reassuming his intellectual persona during the mini revolution provoked by the arrival of the ghost.

Dimas (Endy Arfian) ought to understand this better than anyone after being framed for the brutal murder and dismemberment of his boss. He’d just finished an article on the illegal clearing of a protected forest to build a nickel mine with investment from people in the government. His editor did not, however, want the hassle of publishing it especially as the paper is on its last legs. He objects to Dimas’ focus on the series of mysterious deaths that have taken place there, something he describes as better suited to a trashy clickbait outlet whereas their last remaining readership has stuck around for their rigorous reporting. The implication being that rigorous reporting is not sustainable in Indonesia, though another prisoner suggests that Indonesians care more about celebrities than their own lives and journalists have simply followed the money to give them what they want with a constant flow of salacious stories to distract them from the bigger issues such as the inherent corruption in their society.

This corruption exists within the prison too as one wing is dedicated to hosting corrupt politicians who live in luxurious cells with fridges and air conditioning. They can even leave whenever they want and treat prison like some kind of retreat where they can deflect press interest while basically carrying on doing the same things while inside. The irony is that both the prison warden and the corrupt politician behind the nickel mine were both once former activists who wanted Indonesia to be a better place. The warden joined a political party because he thought he could change it from inside before coming to the conclusion that nothing was going to change, and if you can’t beat them, join them. “In Indonesia it’s the survival of the fittest,” he explains, “they call it corruption, I call it reward for the smarts.”

In a way, perhaps that’s the real ghost in the cell, the imprisoned spectre of their youthful idealism. “We just need to save ourselves,” the warden tells his underling, an argument immediately countered by Anggoro who points out that they could all continue to prioritise their own survival, but the ghost will come for them in the end unless they work together to try to stop it. The message seems to be that they could save Indonesia too, if only they stopped allowing themselves to be distracted and remained united. Reminiscent of Silence of the Lambs, the ghost likes to create gruesome and ironic tableaux of its victims while itself perhaps distracted, sating its lust for vengeance while searching for the real source of injustice, but only finally finding it when the people work together for a common cause.

Ghost in the Cell is on digital platforms 26 October 2026 from Blue Finch Film Releasing.

Trailer

Traces of Justice (神探之痕迹, Chen Sicheng, 2026)

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Best known for comedy including the incredibly popular Detective Chinatown series, actor/director Chen Sicheng has been in a more serious mood recently. Like 2024’s literary adaptation Decoded, Traces of Justice (神探之痕迹 shéntàn zhī hénjì) examines China’s 20th-century past but this time through the lens of forensics. Essentially a propaganda piece in praise of the scientific side of law enforcement, the film is in some ways surprising in its implications in hinting at the reasons why these crimes may have occurred along with difficulties of solving them which are often down to political realities.

In 2016, Cui Xun (Zhang Yi) prepares to accept a national honour for his contribution to police sciences while asked to consult on a serial killer case in which the police are struggling to find evidence to charge the suspect with the last remaining victim despite his confession. As evidence of law enforcement’s care for each and every citizen, the policeman in charge brushes off another’s insistence that they don’t need to charge him with the last case because the other 10 are watertight and enough to secure the death penalty. If they don’t officially link him to this case too, the little girl he killed and her family will not receive justice.

The serial killer case reminds Cui of one he investigated back in 1971 in which he pioneered dental indentations being used to identify suspects in the same way as fingerprints. 1971 is, of course, right in the middle of the Cultural Revolution and so Cui is hampered by persistent anti-intellectualism and distrust of science. The first thing he has to do is get his mentor out of a re-education camp, while a girl who narrowly escaped being caught by the killer was vulnerable in that she was currently living alone as both her parents had been “sent down”. The new local police squad leader, Wang (Chen Minghao), also gets in Cui’s way with his “old-fashioned” policing. His officers refuse to let forensics on site first and ruin the crime scene by stomping all over the evidence. One even triumphantly brings a nearby bicycle to dust for prints though his own hands have now been all over it, paying no heed to Cui’s rational response that they’ve no way of knowing if the bike even belonged to the killer.

By 1983, things are quite different. Wang no longer dresses in military uniform while Cui and his team have been given civilian outfits. Cui now has a sizeable team of assistants and students, while a school has been set up to teach modern forensics techniques. Wang secures the crime scene and grants access for the forensics team first. The issue this time around is the chaotic circumstances of the economic reforms. The prime suspect is a man with a rich and influential father who tries to frame a colleague as he had argued with the now murdered boss about black market profiteering. The suspect resents people mentioning the fact that he’s his father’s son, while simultaneously playing the rich kid card with the police by telling them they’re making a big mistake keeping him locked up. Cui is determined to use a broken fingernail found on one of the victims as an identification method, but again faces an uphill battle to have his ideas taken seriously.

One might think that these problems have then been resolved, but the 1998 sequence depicts much of the same anxiety as it begins to become clear that one of the men suspected of blowing up a bus was a disgruntled worker laid off amid the economic changes of the ’90s which saw many factories close. In an ironic touch, Cui’s investigation HQ is located in a disused factory. Like We’re Nothing At All which is inspired by the same incident, the film also suggests the two men involved were a romantic couple and that societal homophobia was a factor in their decision to end their lives.

Cui once again posits new methods of forensic investigation, but at the same time ends up alone with even his assistant leaving him to take up a position in Beijing. His dedication places a strain on his marriage as his wife, a doctor, is forced to pick up his slack given that he is often absent from the domestic space. Nevertheless, his contributions to science are well noted as is his legacy as “China’s Sherlock Holmes”. In some ways, the subtle implication is that the authorities will stop at nothing to catch wrongdoers, so the Chinese citizen is well protected, though this is, in other ways, a little oppressive in the “everything leaves a trace” messaging and may not reflect the reality of modern policing even if the film is surprisingly critical of law enforcement in places, depicting corruption and hinting at violence and forced confessions. Even so, it is at least keen to insist that the police force is a modern institution defined by science and rooted in forensics rather an irrational “gut feeling” or prejudice. Meanwhile, there is also something comforting in the idea that we all leave traces of ourselves in the world when we are gone that transcends a noirish sense of fatalism to become something richer and warmer in the positive impact our lives can have on those around us in whom we live on.

International Trailer (English subtitles)

Hearing (Thính Giác, Lê Bảo, 2026)

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Unlike listening, hearing is a passive action. Though in some senses we can be selective about what we choose to hear, in a real sense we cannot. Silence can therefore be both liberating and oppressive. Ninh’s job involves installing decibel meters which cast an eerie purple light whenever the sound surpasses safe levels, as if he personally were involved in this act of regulating communication. But the irony is that the silence that surrounds him is more active and, in its own way, noisy with unspoken thoughts.

A direct contrast is drawn between the cacophony of the natural environment and the manmade sounds of the city, though even if this silence provides the opportunity to clear one’s head it can also be isolating. A rural worker laments that they have endured silence too long and it’s worn everyone out. They have nothing to say to each other when they return home and gradually their homes have become silent as the grave. Their petty resentments fill the air and block out the desire for communication.

Ninh’s own home is, in some ways, like this. Divorced, he lives with his mother whose marriage to his father has broken down to the point that his father lives elsewhere and refuses to see her. This is despite the fact that his father was abusive within the relationship. Ninh seems to bear some resentment towards him for this and the impact it’s had on his own life. Though he resented the way his father treated his mother, he found himself becoming violent towards his own wife which is why she eventually left him. He desperately misses his children and former family life, but is unable to heal this rift. The time for communication has passed. All there will ever be now is silence. His wife has married another man she says treats them better and also provides them with a greater level of material comfort. She asks him to stop going to his children’s school, as if reminding him of the new boundaries that exist within their relationships.

By similar token, his mother seems to see his father superimposed on him. She communicates more than it might be convenient for him to hear, abruptly revealing that she just remembered the first time that his father made love to her. Ninh’s attempt to pave their garden with cobble stones perhaps stands in either for the desire to build a path back towards healthier relationships, or a gradual filling of the space that leaves no room for communication. His mother remarks on the ways his rounded shoulders remind her of his father, though Ninh may not wish to be seen this way or be reminded of the paternal legacies he cannot escape.

In someways, the noisy bar in Saigon is a place where people can talk freely, if also perhaps inconsequentially. Their noisy conversation disrupts the world around them, disturbing the residents of a florist’s above, while another man is so driven to distraction that he throws a plant from the balcony which is later lovingly scooped up to be repotted in a new environment. A sheep stands incongruously outside a nightclub in which it is literally too noisy to hear oneself think as those inside either work out their frustrations physically or communicate in other ways. Or else, perhaps this noise has, in fact, driven them out of their minds, leaving them obsessively chasing sensory overload to escape the cacophony of their own unspoken thoughts.

Even the monkeys have withdrawn in fear, no longer swarming around the food that’s been left out for them while someone explains that there is ongoing conflict in the monkey world. There is a kind of stillness and serenity to be found in nature, Ninh’s mother caressing rain soaked rocks and then her own face, yet also a painfulness in the absence of human sound that has begun to turn itself inward and become destructive. A traditional opera troupe sings songs of longing that seem to echo a sense of lonely disconnection in Ninh and others who cannot seem to find the right frequency for human communication but remain trapped within their own soundscape amid the cacophony of emptiness.

Hearing screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)