Tag: Mandarin

It’s My Time (魔方小姐, Bai Xue, 2026)

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A no-nonsense grandma gets a new lease on life after discovering the joys of cubing in Bai Xue’s warmhearted dramedy, It’s My Time (魔方小姐, mófāng xiǎojie). Inspired by a true story and much less gritty than Bai’s debut The Crossing, the film is partly a rebuke against those who try to write off the older generation and a reminder that it’s never too late to try new things or make a change in your life.

For Yanzhong (Michelle Yeoh), however, cubing is also a kind of grudge match in which she tries to overcome her sense of humiliation in having become the victim of a scam which cost her her home. The stress caused her to have a stroke, so she’s currently living in a nursing home with her childhood best friend Shuzhen (Sa Rina). She does not, however, take very well to the kind of infantilisation that the well-meaning staff subject her to. Ironically, the roles have been reversed and every time she causes trouble, the manager calls her mild-mannered son, Dawei (Bai Ke). For unexplained reasons, Yanzhong seems to speak Cantonese with her son when they’re alone while they speak Mandarin with everyone else, perhaps bearing out their close bond and Yanzhong’s isolation from most of the residents who disapprove of her rabble-rousing antics, encouraging her to remember her age and suggesting that she’s just making things hard for her son whose boss is forever yelling at him on the phone. 

When down on his luck former “magic cube” champion Youwei (Liu Haoran) arrives to teach a class on “cubing” which he claims helps prevent dementia, Yanzhong discovers a hidden talent that gives her something new to live for. For Youwei, meanwhile, it seems as if his reduced circumstances are partly down to the death of his mother for which he blames himself. His father had a gambling problem and then abandoned the family, leaving Youwei to pay off all his debts which is one reason why he’s constantly hassled by a loan shark who seems to consider himself family. All of which perhaps leads him to look to Yanzhong as a kind of mother figure, especially as she tries to take care of him by getting him a place to stay at the nursing home after noticing that he’s technically homeless while promising to pay off the money he owes and buy him a house if they succeed in becoming cubing superstars. 

Even so, Youwei is the teacher here if one trying to convince her that slow and steady wins the race while others such an unscrupulous media boss push her to make the most of her viral success as the cubing grandma by aiming too high too fast. He writes off people like her as members of the “slowest and most useless group”, while Yanzhong is constantly trying to be seen as a human being who still has a life to live rather than just waiting around to die. She does, however, have a sharp tongue which as her friend points out hurts herself as well as others as she often lashes out defensively and ends up pushing people away. After achieving cubing stardom, she starts trying to “help out” her son’s family by telling him to quit his job and work at the cube factory, while his wife should close her nail salon and open a magic cube training school, and she’ll send her granddaughter to a private school. Of course, they’re pretty happy with the life they have and irritated by Yanzhong’s attempts to railroad them into her vision of familial bliss. They support her cubing career, but only because they want her to be healthy and happy.

The irony being that Yanzhong stuck it out at the home because she thought she’d be a burden to her son and his family if she went to live with them, just as her best friend Shuzhen really wants to live with her daughter in the US but is too afraid to ask her. The film’s English-language title is then a reference to Yanzhong rediscovering that it’s her time to shine, and also the hyper focus that cubing requires that presents Yanzhong with a stream of images from her past all of which remind her what’s really important in life. Even when facing setbacks and hardships, she never gives up, and her friends and family never give up on her despite the odd harsh word or misunderstanding. A gentle tale of intergenerational friendship and the energising power of sports, Bai’s warmhearted comedy insists that it’s never too late start something new and just like a magic cube, there are infinite possibilities in life’s twists and turns.

It’s My Time is in UK cinemas from 16th October courtesy of Central City Media.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Atlantic Rhapsody (大西洋, Zhong Kaifeng, 2026)

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After accidentally boiling a shark alive at the supermarket where he works, a young man embarks on an epic quest to find the estranged father he hasn’t seen since he was a child in Zhong Kaifeng’s surreal treatise on sound and memory, Atlantic Rhapsody (大西洋, Dàxīyáng). Set between the early ’80s and the present day, the film charts the fates of those who have been displaced by the economic reforms of the ’90s and the increasingly consumerist society of today.

There is something rather absurd about the idea of keeping a mini shark in a supermarket just for decoration. This fearsome marine predator has been placed in a box and constrained, a lonely figure who exists only to be looked at with a pane of glass continually between it and the rest of the world. In some ways, Ding Mao (Roy Wang) will come to feel this way about his father who has become inaccessible to him except through the memories he is able to conjure up after heading north to his hometown.

Ding Jianguo (Yin Fang) was a fan of The Man From Atlantis which they all watched dubbed into Mandarin in the town square. He hears a strange tale from a mysterious blind fortune teller but can only remember that it was about a man who came out of the sea and then returned there, as he perhaps will do. Meanwhile, his tooth seems to regrow after it gets knocked out by an angry local on their arrival at the hotel where his crew have been sent for a free trip in lieu of severance when the factory they worked at is closed down. Ding Jianguo is one of a host of men cast adrift in the increasingly capitalist post-economic reform society and himself dreams of opening business.

Zhong films these sequences in a heavy grain that echoes 16mm and in a style that recalls that of the Sixth Generation. Its realism stands in stark contrast to the surreal composition and bold aesthetics of the modern day setting in which pretty everyone ends up wearing some variety of woolly hat in the shape of a marine creature. Yet the picture we see of North Eastern China is that of post-industrial decline. Ding had another reason to go to Shenyang in that someone had seen one of his videos in which he found an iron nail in a bit of discount sausage, spitting it out much like Ding Jianguo did his tooth, and claimed it belonged to their pet who had a knee operation shortly before going missing. Li Xin (Li Xueqin) thinks he’s her long lost classmate, and Ding Mao can’t actually remember if he is or not, but in any case she takes him to the site of a disused theme park. This place used to be thriving and prosperous, she says, but now it’s just overgrown ruins. She’s been trying to recreate a rollercoaster in sound with the help of some local children.

Ding Mao has also been hearing strange noises he’d like to get tot the bottom of. They sound sort of metallic with a bell at the end, a little like some kind of sea creature. He also comes across the mysterious fortune teller who gives him a special free gift and also tells him to find his father. While he has encounters with several other eccentric people including a Japanese picture book writer who has memories of being a tiger hunted by Japanese soldiers in a past life, but struggles to find a place for himself while trying to figure out what exactly happened to his father. Li Xin tells him of another shared memory, the time a shark was killed and there was a local furore about the rare chance to eat shark meat. All of these stories and memories eventually coalesce around Ding Mao as a kind of raucous rhapsody of China’s recent history. In a strange way, he is able to transcend this world and enter that of his father, though only as an observer. They remain on opposite sides of the glass unreachable to each other. Like the man in the story, Ding Mao has regained his memories, or perhaps come up with new ones, but can never be reborn into that world. A surreal odyssey through an oddly ethereal vision of deindustrialised China, there is a kind of poignancy in Ding Mao’s quest and search for meaning but also serenity as each of its disparate plot threads slowly coalesces into one.

Atlantic Rhapsody screens 16th/17th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East (欢迎来龙餐馆, Wen Muye, 2026)

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Culinary comedies are a staple of the Chinese holiday movie which often revolve around the importance of family and the bonds that can be generated through the sharing of a meal. FunAge is similarly known for zany comedies, though their output has become a little more serious of late. In Once Upon a Time in the Middle East (欢迎来龙餐馆, Huānyíng lái Lóng Cānguǎn), Wen Muye subverts many of these conventions in marketing the movie as a fish-out-of-water comedy starring comic actor Shen Teng as a debt-ridden chef who takes a job in the Middle East in the early 2000s for the high pay, only to suddenly plunge him into a war zone.

One can open a mouth with a spoon as well a gun, Xu Fu (Shen Teng) later reflects having reaffirmed for himself that the most important things in life are good food and raising children well. The irony is that on being introduced to Zaid (Sherif Sobhy), a civil servant and owner of Loong Restaurant where Xu is to be employed, Xu is told that his food does suit the local tastes, but he insists on cooking authentic Chinese cuisine rather Chinese-American fusion food. He says he’ll walk if he’s asked to cook bowdlerised dishes like General Tso’s Chicken, but is later forced to do so to curry favour with an American officer, having been incarcerated in a military prison after being accused of being party to an act of terrorism.

The early part of the film is indeed fiercely critical of the Americans whose involvement in the Middle East is depicted as a thinly veiled war of aggression for imperial conquest mitigated as an act of revenge. Political figures are seen on television making ultimatums about regime change before the tanks start rolling in, while the American soldiers act with undue brutality and entitlement. They insist that the children Xu takes in after their orphanage is bombed are all terrorists or soon will be, and therefore fair game targets that should be neutralised to stop the spread of violence. But it’s clear that the War on Terror is simply breeding more “terrorists” as orphaned children are radicalised and exploited by extremists who recruit them as child soldiers and later force them to become suicide bombers without their knowledge or consent.

Xu, by contrast, takes a local boy under his wing and attempts to train him as a chef as a means of pulling him away from the destructive desire for vengeance. The ideological conflict plays out in the heart of Saif (Omar Sherif) as he’s pulled between the fatherly influence of Xu and that of the extremists who sell stories of glorious battles, but in reality send children out to die. Xu hopes that by training Saif as a chef, he can prevent him from becoming radicalised and prepare him for the world to come after the war, but finds himself frustrated by the circumstances that surround him. Meanwhile, he too is corrupted by the promise of wealth that can come with war by setting up a side business smuggling alcohol into this country where drinking is forbidden in order to sell to American servicemen and later turning the restaurant into a kind of speak easy for foreigners remaining in the war-torn city.

After challenging an American soldier who complained about his circumstances that it is largely their own fault for waging this war, Xu has to admit that he has profited from it and is only able to make this kind of money because of the conflict. As an older man, he admits he stayed too long because he got greedy, preferring to stay and make more money long after paying off his debts. He often says that this war is nothing to do with him, though as he’s later questioned, if his partner was involved in terrorism and his friend was the victim, he can’t really claim not to be involved which seems like a fairly subversive comment on China’s business and foreign policy. Nevertheless, the film ends with a reminder that China is working with other nations to enact the UN Convention on the Human Rights of the Child, while it is children who are the primary victims of war. 

Xu becomes friends with a Chinese-American soldier of Malaysian-Chinese heritage (Aarif Rahman) who is conflicted about the war which is not really anything to do with him personally, just as it’s nothing to with Xu, the children, or even really Zaid who is forced to buy cancer drugs from an American serviceman who is exploiting him financially while claiming that he just wants to help him save his little girl. They’re all at the mercy of wider geopolitical machinations that set people who once got along peacefully against each other. Though the film may in some senses have a strong “we were never friends” mentality echoing that of Dead to Rights and suggesting once again that Chinese citizens are only safe in China, it does also make the case for a more positive path to better global relations through friendly cultural exchange as evidenced by the fusion food that Xu creates in the most difficult of circumstances which seems to have sustained those he left behind to make better futures for themselves away from hate and violence.

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is in US and Canadian cinemas now courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Girl Unknown (无名女孩, Zou Jing, 2026)

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A young woman finds herself continually displaced in the wake of China’s One Child Policy in Zou Jing’s empathetic drama, A Girl Unknown (无名女孩, wúmíng nǚhái). Dedicated to the director’s grandmother, the film sees its heroine pass through three different identities while struggling to find a place for herself and carrying both the trauma of continual abandonment and a sense of hopeless worthlessness that she will never feel loved or wanted but always asked to be grateful for what little she has.

Lin Juan’s first displacement echoes the growing urbanisation and industrialisation of the nation as she’s taken away from her idyllic rural childhood and sent to live with strangers in the city following her father’s sudden death and her mother’s subsequent relationship with another man. It’s clear that Mr Li does not want to accept Juan, but also that her mother A-Hui has few options other than remarriage for economic support. She first considers leaving Juan at a temple, but reconsiders and tries to persuade Mr Li. When she becomes pregnant with his child, however, it becomes clear that she cannot keep Juan and decides to have her adopted by a seemingly childless middle-aged couple in the city. 

No one really explains this to Juan who has no idea that she’s been abandoned. Her adoptive mother Meishuang (Shen Jiani) at first reassures her that her mother will return at the end of the summer holidays while somehow hoping that Juan will get used to living there and stop asking to be taken home. For reasons which later become clear, Meishuang is operating under a maternal fantasy without really considering how difficult it might be to adopt a child of Juan’s age nor how traumatic this displacement may be for her. Meishuang’s husband Wieqiang (Zu Feng) is also not happy about the arrangement and hostile toward to Juan, irritated by her “hillbilly name” and by her presence in their home. At school, meanwhile, she’s bullied by the other children who make fun of her for having come from the country, though it’s Juan who gets into trouble for fighting back. 

Meishuang is, however, kind to Juan and tries to treat her with maternal affection only it isn’t the kind that Juan wants, nor is Juan really the daughter she wanted. Later we come to Juan’s adoption is also, in its way, a result of the One Child Policy, though it appears that she was abandoned once before simply by virtue of being a second daughter born to a family who wanted to hold out for a son. Her birth family tries to reclaim her, but their home is full of photos of the other two siblings who seem to have a close bond while there are obviously none of her. Their home is full of absence, and though they may be related by blood, they are still strangers to each other. Once again she is expected to live up to someone else’s idealised image of a longed for daughter while largely denied a sense of self or a chance to define her own identity. 

While her birth family appear to have become wealthy, Meishuang and Weiqiang are struggling under the economic pressures of the changing ‘90s economy with Weiqiang eventually laid off and made dependent on an old colleague who, unbeknownst to them, sexually abuses Juan partly because he sees her as someone of little consequence owing to being an adopted child. The pain of being unable to speak about what’s happened to her further fuels her resentment and low sense of self-worth believing that she will never be anything more than a disappointing substitute to her adoptive parents. 

After running away and getting a job in a textiles factory, Juan, now going by the name Lian (Li Gengxi), becomes friends with a slightly older woman who is saving money to open a shop in her hometown. Her new friend, however, becomes the subject gossip as the other girls believe she is sleeping with the foreman to get ahead, but in reality the foreman is sexuality exploiting her. Despite her own experience, Juan rejects her too leading to tragic consequences that bear out the ways in which women’s lives have little currency in this oppressively patriarchal social structure. Juan lives under three different names, but in other ways women are seen to be almost interchangeable while Juan herself has no concrete identity. She has, however, perhaps undergone a kind of rebirth and in having uncovered and bared all that was hidden found her way back to herself and a future that is of her own choosing.

A Girl Unknown screens 9th/11th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Clip (English subtitles)

Deadline (自殺通告, Kiwi Chow Kwun-Wai, 2025)

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What does it mean to get “an education”? Is the school system only really there to brainwash the young into following accepted the path and prepare them to be receptive to authority, actively destroying both the ability and desire to think for oneself? The fact that Kiwi Chow’s Deadline (自殺通告, zìshā tōnggào) was not approved for release in Hong Kong on the grounds of “national security” may indicate the direction of its perspective on the interplay between the intensity of the education system and entrenched authoritarianism.

The mere fact that En Shan high school is described as “elite” already implies that it exists to perpetuate a kind of social inequality, though in other ways some might say that it also encourages social mobility in that the students come from all backgrounds and are selected for academic excellence rather than simply the ability to pay the fees. Education does seem to be life’s make or break. Students who don’t make it to university are perceived as being relegated to a kind of underclass from which there is no other escape. Yet at the same time, perhaps university isn’t right for everyone and not all of the pupils want to live a life dedicated to achieving conventional success that might otherwise leave them miserable.

Chun Chiu (Jimmy Liu) is one of the few brave ones who’s decided he doesn’t want to go to university and is happy enough pottering around with his plants. He doesn’t care if people look down on him because he knows he’s happy in himself, and they probably aren’t. Consequently, he’s also the only one to really see what’s going on at the school and to want to try to stop it. Despite its elegant name, there’s a kind of bloodthirstiness that underlines the survival of the fittest mentality at En Shan where they wear mildly fascistic uniforms and start the day with a haka-style dance in which they recite the school’s mantras about being the best of the best and that there’s no point coming second. These children are prevented from forming real friendships or developing social skills and empathy because they’ll always be rivals waiting for the ideal time to stab each other in the back.

The school reinforces this sense of judgment and hierarchy through adopting a social credit-style system in which pupils’ “privileges” are linked to their performance and obedience levels. Chun Chiu is at one point locked out of the garden because his scores have fallen so low he’s not allowed outside the prison-like school environment. Everyone at the school, including the teachers, is under constant surveillance with an AI programme responsible for assigning grades and points. Headmaster Kung wants to get rid of Mr Gao (Huang Di-yang) because the system says his performance is poor, while star teacher Mrs Tien tries to defend him. To begin with, Gao seems as if he might be resisting in another way by giving care and attention to struggling pupils like Heng (Bai Run-yin) who is taking medication for ADHD. But it turns out that Gao is so worried about losing his job as he has to pay maintenance for his ex-wife and child that he’s been giving the kids performance enhancing drugs in the hope of boosting his own approval ratings in the app.

Heng is also getting bullied by some of the other pupils, not just because he’s different but because they resent it that they think he’s being given special advantages by taking medicine that helps him concentrate and being given extra time to finish exams. This leads Heng to try and and cancel his accommodations in a bid to avoid being singled out and in a mistaken gesture of solidarity with the other kids to prove he’s not being given any extra privileges. Meanwhile, they’re all taking similar medication that’s designed to aid concentration and reduce the need for sleep for they can study for longer. But the drugs also prevent them from sleeping when they want to and suppress their appetites so they don’t eat. They cause low mood and suicidal ideation, which, coupled with the already high-stress environment, is a recipe for disaster.

To combat this culture, someone drops a series of ominous flyers threatening the school that there will be a suicide if they don’t “stop poisoning us” by ending the practice of holding exams under medication. While headmaster Kung appears oblivious to the monster he himself has created and has no real idea what’s going on in the school, to his credit he does seem keen to find out if there are any pupils in danger of harming themselves rather than solely trying to silence the whistleblower or save the school’s reputation. He has no idea about the drugs and is shocked on realising how prevalent they’ve become in the school. When they start doing drug tests and discover that over half the pupils are taking them, the director of the board of governors, who has the real power, tells him to stop the testing before they find any more.

But it turns out that this problem extends far beyond the school as in some cases it’s the parents who are making their kids take these drugs, and the head of the student council, Mo (Michael Chang), that’s been selling them. After a few deaths have occurred, Tien and Kung want to stop the exams, but are prevented from doing so, in part because the education system is a national machine. The kids can’t just take the exam on another day because they can’t come up with all new papers just for them at short notice. In a truly chilling moment, Mo gets up on his chair begins chanting the nonsensical mantra “exams are a human right” while insisting on being allowed to take them even if it means that more pupils end up dying. After all, that’s just less competition for him. They’re already locked into this system and refuse to be cast out of it, in part because they’ve learned how to manipulate it so perfectly.

Then again, obsessive study doesn’t leave you with much time to think about anything else even if you’re not also sleep deprived and malnourished as a result of long-term drug use. Chun Chiu’s friend Peiching (Tai Ya-chih), the current number one, becomes conflicted in part because she realises that she does not really know who she is and is incapable of determining what she wants out of life. She said she wanted to be a doctor because that’s what her parents were so she thought she was supposed to be too, but doesn’t know if that’s actually what she wants. Peiching seems genuinely worried about rival Ruoyan (Mimi Shao Yi-mei) who self-harms out of frustration and feelings of inadequacy, but equally only perhaps because thanks to the drugs she stands a real chance of knocking her off  the top spot. Mrs Tien may secretly be thinking of moving abroad precisely because her own daughter does not suit this rigid educational system, but remains largely unable to change it while the students have, it seems, already internalised its tenets unable to let go of a world in which everything is defined by numbers and ranking without the intrusion of independent thought or human empathy.

Deadline screened as part of Hong Kong Film Fest UK and opens in UK cinemas 16th October.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Red Rose White Rose (紅玫瑰白玫瑰, Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, 1994)

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“He is a decent, respectable man who draws a clear distinction between a lady and a whore,” according to one of the excerpts from Eileen Chang’s novel that pepper the screen in Stanley Kwan’s sumptuous melodrama set in the Shanghai of the 1930s, Red Rose White Rose (紅玫瑰白玫瑰). Zhen-Bao (Winston Chao Wen-hsuan) is though entirely delusional, a man who desires absolute control but has no mastery over himself and at times appears rather pompous, believing himself to have a kind of higher purpose though achieving little of note.

According to the narrator, this is an age in which most men have two women, though Zhen-Bao does indeed seem to draw a line between them as evidenced in the opening sequence comparing his time as a student in Paris and Edinburgh. We see him meet a Parisian sex worker, and then his “first love” in Scotland, Rose, whom the narrator describes as a simple and open girl that Zhen-Bao found “innocently attractive”. Nevertheless, Zhen-Bao abruptly dropped her when he left the city demonstrating his determination not to be romantically entangled or allow a woman to alter the course of his life.

This seeming dichotomy is reflected in Zhen-Bao’s two roses, though there may be some debate about who occupies which role. “Red Rose” Jiao-Rui (Joan Chen) is the wife of a friend with whom he eventually embarks on a passionate affair, while “White Rose” Yen Li (Veronica Yip Yuk Hing) is the simple and innocent girl he marries as an “ideal wife” to please his mother and fulfil his image of himself as a “decent, respectable man”. Despite insisting on his independence, Zhen-Bao is blind to the influence his mother wields over his life and perhaps also what it actually means to be “decent and respectable” on anything other than a superficial level. His colleagues find him to be old-fashioned, but admire him for his attitude to work and life. “No one is more attentive to his mother than he,” they add, praising his diligence and reliability before describing him as a “practical man” who does not believe in something as unscientific as reincarnation. Chang’s description of him as the archetypal Chinese man of his era may be ironic, but also echoes Zhen-bao’s conception of himself as an idealised figure of patriarchal authority.

It’s this vision of properness along with his need for control that eventually leads Zhen-Bao to abandon Jiao-Rui after she falls in love with him and writes to her husband to ask for a divorce. Furious that she did this without consulting him or “considering [his] future”, Zhen-Bao strides out into traffic and is hit by a car. After this he is sort reborn as once again “decent and respectable”, resolving to break with Jiao-Rui on the grounds that their relationship was always improper because she was his friend’s wife and the scandal would destroy them both.

The world of Red Rose is one of opulent decadence, filled with colour and passion. The exposed brickwork of her apartment is broken by stretches patterned with rough shards of stone that echo the chaotic destructiveness of their affair. The world of White Rose, by contrast, is entirely sterile. Everything is white save for a pattern of pink roses the occasional cherub echoing the frieze on their wedding cake. This may be the world of absolute control that Zhen-bao was trying to create. For a while after the wedding he wears traditional Chinese dress and plays the part of a “decent, respectable” husband, yet his old habits soon resurface in his irresponsible womanising.

Meanwhile, he treats Yen Li with nothing but contempt. He regards her as stupid and avoids introducing her to his social circle lest she embarrass herself and show him up. Zhen-bao advises her to listen to the radio in order to educate herself and often flies into violent rages. When he sleeps with her, he merely uses her body as an object and does so only with the intention of conceiving a child, never considering her pleasure, consent, or even subjectivity. Despite the pressure to have a son, this seems to stop when the couple have a daughter whom Zhen-bao later enrols in boarding school seemingly out of spite.

Yen Li enters a depressive state in which she locks herself in the bathroom and refuses to come out, even taking her meals in there. Yet as she becomes used to her mistreatment by Zhen-bao, she is eventually able to overcome it to the extent that she no longer cares what he does or says. She has taken control of her world, embarking on a clandestine affair with her tailor and caring for her daughter, otherwise ignoring Zhen-bao’s existence. He vows to himself that he will once again start over as a “decent, respectable man” but seems to have come to the realisation that he is not and never will be while clinging to this delusional image of himself.

His failure is rammed home when he unexpectedly runs into Jiao-Rui on a street car. Despite his brother having said that he had seen her looking old and worn out with too much makeup, she still radiates beauty and allure. Zhen-bao behaves as if he’s encountered a saviour, but she has long since moved on. Jiao-Rui is happy and has found a steadier kind of relationship with her second husband, remarking that Zhen-bao taught her how, but also who, to love. Realising his desire to return to her will not be fulfilled, he lies that he is happy and talks about his career success rather than his marriage before breaking down in tears. As he ironically remarks to himself that it ought to be the woman crying in this sort of situation, Jiao-Rui appears a little embarrassed and abruptly disembarks this particular train. In the end, Zhen-Bao is reduced to an empty figure of patriarchal authority who appears almost as a ghost in his own home, continuing to delude himself that he is “a decent and respectable man” in the height of his impotence. 

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

Full Moon in New York (人在紐約, Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, 1989)

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“We’re all Chinese, why argue?” asks one exasperated woman in Stanley Kwan’s tale of displacement and reunification, Full Moon in New York (人在紐約). While the three heroines hailing from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China respectively may stand in for a pan-Chinese identity along with an attempt to preserve cultural identity in a third place, they also discover a sense of solidarity in being young women cast adrift in a sometimes hostile city and changing times.

As if to ram home the themes of reunion, the film opens with a wedding but one filled with awkwardness and contradictions. Chinese-American businessman Thomas makes a few off-colour jokes about his new bride, a woman he met while travelling to Shanghai, to the effect that it’s very funny he’s married a woman from the Mainland while praising the pastry chef who made their wedding cake for bothering to make the bride and groom like Chinese people. Zhao Hong (Siqin Gaowa) is confused and doesn’t get his jokes while struggling with the foreignness of an American-style wedding, uncertain as to how to cut the cake while Taiwanese guest Hsiung-Ping (Sylvia Chang) quips that she will teach her how to cut up men.

Hsiung-ping is an actress in the middle of a breakup with an obnoxious American boyfriend who has defaulted on the rent for their apartment which is owned by no-nonsense Hong Konger Jiau (Maggie Cheung). Jiau has fallen headlong into the capitalistic abyss of the 1980s in which she chases business success at all costs and is determined to make serious money. “I like taking risks,” she tells the boring the businessman she’s set up with while, despite having been in relationships only with women, apparently falling for his business savvy friend. She’s intermittently stalked by Stella, seemingly an ex that she struggles to move on from.

Though originally at odds with each other, the three women develop a sense of friendship and solidarity not least by being outsiders finding solace in their culture. After getting drunk at Jiau’s father’s Chinese restaurant, Hsiung-ping abruptly breaks into a rendition of a Taiwanese song, while Zhao Hong joins her with a folksong from northern China. Jiau looks on with confusion. She cannot think of what to sing as a woman from Hong Kong, signalling her difficulty in expressing her national identity, before settling on a Sally Yeh Cantopop track. She seems to be one of many choosing to seek their futures overseas with the Handover looming and the shadow of Tiananmen Square in the background. 

Hsiung-Ping, meanwhile, represents a second wave of migration as her father was a nationalist solider who went to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war. With the White Terror now over, men like him aren’t so welcome anymore, though as Hsiung-Ping points out who exactly has he been representing for all these years in America? “Once can save one’s country from abroad,” he answers as if singing the song of an exile and echoing each of the women’s attempts to preserve their culture, though what she comes to discover about him through his relationship with a Mainland Chinese woman who suffered in the Cultural Revolution disturbs her sense of righteousness and legacy.

The legacy of the Cultural Revolution is also what Zhao Hong is trying to escape, but finds herself frustrated by life in America while Thomas constantly brushes off her desire to bring her mother to live with them in New York. Thomas’ family are almost entirely Westernised while he seems to almost fetishise Zhao Hong’s Chineseness with quips about his Mainland wife. She tries to ask him about her mother and he changes the subject by remarking that what drew her to him was her black hair. When they visit his family for dinner, Thomas’ mother cooks a pot roast while his father asks him to dispose of an ancestral tablet that he can’t bring himself to throw away. To Thomas it’s just an antique that he jokes is probably worth something to the right kind of collector and would look “cool” in their apartment. Thomas’ Cantonese-speaking father asks if it’s true that ancestral tablets were forbidden during the Cultural Revolution and smashed, making this one yet another example of culture surviving in another place, but seems to be uninterested in the answer when Zhao Hong sadly recalls her mother carving her late father’s name into the back of a chair in defiance of the regulations.

Zhao Hong’s fatherlessness is also a reflection of her sense of dislocation. As she points out, both Jiau and Hsiung-ping have their fathers with them in New York while she has no one other than Thomas. She looks on in consternation as he chats with a white male employee about arranging visits to Chinatown as a collection of mainly elderly Chinese women get on with the actual work of sorting fabric behind them. He finally tells her she should learn to be more American and likens missing her mother to a mental illness, explaining that American people don’t want to live with their parents all their lives, entirely missing the point that the issue is not cultural notions of filial piety that he has now, to some extent, abandoned, but that the close bond between Zhao Hong and her mother forged during the Cultural Revolution has been disrupted by this migration and must now be resolved through reunion. 

Nevertheless, Jiau swears that one can only prosper here by embracing the qi of New York, on the one hand opening all her windows at night as advised by her feng shui practitioner, while, on the other hand, her Hong Konger father runs a Hunnan-style restaurant that serves Peking Duck to cater to American tastes and expectations with the staff and treasured guests eating the heads in the back. Hsiung-Ping is rudely asked by a white male theatre director why a Chinese woman thinks she can play Lady Macbeth, and Jiau loses her temper when a man deliberately bumps into her in the street chasing after him and then hitting him with her shoe. In various ways, this new environment can be hostile towards them, asking them to discard the culture they have come to save or otherwise to bastardise it, but nevertheless the three women discover a sense of community and solidarity even amid their own conflicts and contradictions.

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

Fight Against Evil 3 (东北警察故事3, Yang Bingjia, 2026)

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Top cop Li Hongqi (returns for another holiday gone wrong in the third instalment of the Fight Against Evil series, and there is indeed some serious evil to be thought. Directed this time by Yang Bingjia rather than Qin Pengfei, Fight Against Evil 3 (东北警察故事3, Dōngběi jǐngchá gùshi)received a theatrical release in Mainland China rather than premiering on IQYI’s streaming service and so benefits from slightly higher production values and features a mild tonal shift that sends the film into action comedy territory.

In fact the first “fight” takes place off-screen as Honqi casually takes down a man who’s taken his wife hostage so that he can finish a telephone call with the rather demanding mother-in-law (Diama Lin Xiaojie) he hasn’t actually me though he and his wife Touzi have already been married for two years. Having become estranged from her birthmother, Touzi tells him not to bother with her because she’s a handful, though Hongqi is keen to be a good son-in-law and hopes to broker a reconciliation by agreeing to his mother-in-law’s madcap plan to stage a second wedding in her hometown without actually telling Touzi until she gets there. 

In any case, Hongqi is immediately distracted when Xinxin (Ma Qianyi) , a cheerful teenage girl he met on the plane, is reported missing, suspected of having fallen victim to traffickers after failing to reach her grandfather’s house. Hongqi feels personally responsible because he said he’d take her, but had to leave after hearing that his mother-in-law had been arrested for causing trouble in a cafe. Nevertheless, the mother-in-law proves to be unusually well connected and helps him track down the local crime kingpin whom she apparently knew when he was a snivelling child getting beaten up for his lunch money. 

On his arrival in the town, Hong’s old friend Sun Biao (Cui Zhijia) tells him that times are different now and they have to do law enforcement in a more “civilised” way, which might suggest that things work differently here compared to the city, though as it turns out Hong’s skills are still in demand as he finds himself repeatedly getting into brawls with the local bad guys. Even Baio also gets into the swing of things wanting to prove that his fighting skills are still as good as Hongqi’s. This is, however, violence very much in the service as justice as everyone involved in the fights is already an active participant in the world of crime and the violence is being used to subdue rather than interrogate them.

Meanwhile, the trafficking gang seems to be an offshoot of some kind of cult that attracts people who’ve encountered financial ruin due to contemporary social issues from being scammed to failing in business or developing a gambling problem. Most of the lower-ranking members are doing this more out of desperation and have abandoned their humanity as a means of survival, not that it excuses what they’ve done. The leader, meanwhile, experienced a tragedy of her own which seems to have affected her mind and has made her especially attached to young Xinxin who otherwise proves plucky and resourceful with her repeated attempts to escape from the gang.

Despite the grimness of the subject matter, the film finds plenty of opportunities for comedy not least in the zany antics of Hongqi’s mother-in-law who also has a justice-loving heart and at one point takes off to catch the kidnappers herself on her moped. There’s a fundamental absurdity to Hong’s existence in which he’s been yet again drawn into a case while supposedly on holiday while attempting to keep his demanding mother-in-law happy and keeping the whole thing secret from wife in the hope he can either bamboozle her into taking part or she will arrive and talk her mother out of it. This sense of absurdity also carries over into some of the fight scenes in which Hongqi has to fight off an entire gang while his mother-in-law hides under a table in a pool hall or has to go undercover in a club, despite looking the most like a policeman it’s possible to look without actually wearing a uniform.

It is not, however, all slapstick and still features some seriously impressive action sequences. The film also makes some attempt to mine humour in the decidedly unfunny customary series of title cards explaining that the nation is taking measures to combat human trafficking and explaining that everyone was caught and punished in accordance of law before finishing on a note that explains China has over two million police officers, which is intended to be reassuring but perhaps is also the exact opposite. Nevertheless, the film is a great deal fun as Hongqi and his mother-in-law fight off bad guys while simultaneously planning a wedding.

Fight Against Evil 3 screens 23rd August as part of Big Bad Film Fest.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese subtitles only)

Wings of Dread (万米危机, Ashton Chen Xiaolong & Qin Pengfei, 2026)

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Perhaps surprisingly, aeroplanes seem to be dangerous places in recent Chinese cinema. From the hardware failure of The Captain to Oxide Pang’s hijacking drama High Forces, something always seems to go seriously amiss when it comes to air travel. Streaming actioner Wings of Dread (万米危机, wàn mǐ wēijī) is the latest in this growing genre and once again carries a mildly patriotic message in praising the Chinese air police who are willing to put their lives on the line to ensure passenger safety.

Then again, former cop Chaoyang (Ashton Chen Xiaolong) may feel a little bit inferior after giving up his police career to become an aeroplane security officer in order to spend more time with his girlfriend, air stewardess Dong Lu (Nita), who also gave up her opportunity to work abroad. Dong Lu has evidently had enough of Chaoyang’s grumpy behaviour and moved out their flat, though he is carrying a ring he still hopes to give to her. Rushing to the airport in an attempt to convince her to move back in before her next flight, Chaoyang becomes distracted by a drug user and decides to take down their entire gang first. From a certain point of view, his priorities may be all wrong, though the main problem in the relationship seems to be that Chaoyang expects Dong Lu to be in stewardess mode all the time by being constantly cheerful and treating him like a prince without seeing her as a real person who needs to be able to switch off and relax after a long shift.

This relationship issue is never resolved in a concrete way but only through the action movie trope of Chaoyang’s proving his heroism by saving Dong Lu when the plane they’re both on after he flew to her destination to win her back is hijacked by a criminal gang. One of China’s most wanted has been arrested in a fictional South East Asian nation and is being escorted back to the mainland. Among the passengers, there are both undercover members of the gang planning to break him out and plain-clothes security officers ready to deal with any trouble. Slightly confusingly, the gang have also brought a bomb and are threatening to blow everyone up if the captain doesn’t fly to their chosen destination, which at the very least seems counterproductive and a little bit reckless on behalf of the crooks.

That the bomb got on board along with a lot of 3D printed plastic guns can be attributed to lax security procedures at the airport in the fictitious South East Asian nation, but the point is that this plane is well protected by Chinese air police. Villain Paquet (Iko Uwais) sneers that Chinese police are “pathetic”, which proves quite irritating to Chaoyang who immediately bounces back to win the fight and prove that they are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure passengers reach home safely even at the cost of their own lives. The passengers too are unusually co-operative after being made aware of the bomb threat, giving up their bags to form a barrier and even joining in with the final fight against the bad guys. 

Qin, who is known for his skill in shooting action sequences in confined spaces, does some of his finest work in a fight between a female officer and gang member set entirely within a toilet cubicle, while otherwise making full use of the environment as passengers grab tray tables to attack the hijackers who equally throw opponents over shelving units and smash their heads into arm rests. Casting top international action star Iko Uwais as the villain adds a degree of prestige unusual for a streaming film, though choosing to dub his voice seems like an odd decision, especially as all his dialogue is in English. Nevertheless, the film is impressively put together and largely transcends its streaming origins in scope and ambition despite the looseness of its plot and occasionally awkward attempts at humour. 

Wings of Dread screens 21st August as part of Big Bad Film Fest.

Trailer (no subtitles)

All Wishes Come True! (八仙！, Mu Zhengyang, 2026)

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Long ago, a lantern defended humanity from the darkness. But now the lantern has gone missing, and the world is plagued by storms and turmoil. Those who can have fled to the glamorous city of Penglai where the mortal and immortal co-exist and destruction cannot follow. Mu Zhengyang’s animated epic All Wishes Come True! (八仙！, Bāxiān!) draws inspiration from the classic folktale Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea, dramatising it as an Oceans Eleven-esque caper in which a series of scrappy heroes must learn to put aside their greed for the greater good.

The very existence of Penglai is in itself a symptom of the problem. As some point out, the residents aren’t all that interested in finding the lantern because everything is fine in the city. The guardian gods who govern it, Fu Lu Shou, who represent luck, prosperity, and longevity, have become corrupt and are sitting on vast riches embezzled from citizens. Apparent hero Lü Dongbin believes that the lantern is hidden in their vault, but needs help to break in and retrieve it. He recruits local pickpocket Zhongli Quan, whom he believes reshaped the lantern to disguise it, on the promise of allowing him to take as much of the gold as he wants.

It turns out that Zhongli Quan was thrown out of the immortals academy for using an artefact to improve the lives of ordinary people suffering in a famine after prolonged drought. His master reprimands him that the vase is intended to help the elite, not a few peasants. He ironically curses Zhongli Quan that he will always be a thief and a liar, preventing him from living an honest life and forcing him into that of an outlaw. This has, in a way, made him cynical and greedy. The quest to retrieve the lantern presents an opportunity to break the curse and redeem himself, though Zhongli Quan always has half an eye on the gold. Lü Dongbin isn’t completely untainted either with the implication that he is the guardian who sold the lantern in a fit of pique having been passed over for promotion and is now trying to make it right by taking the lantern back. 

As such, the film presents an anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist message along with an ant-corruption sentiment as this team of ordinary mortals attempts to go against the gods by outsmarting Fu Lu Shou to reclaim the lantern and lift and the curse on the wider society. Zhongli Quan’s cynicism is an extension of that which has infected ordinary people who have been encouraged to believe that greed is good. As he and Lü Dongbin forge an uneasy alliance, there is a constant push and pull between them as Lü Dongbin does his best to bring Zhongli Quan back from the dark side by retrieving the lantern. 

The gang ironically attract some attention as apparent “thief catchers” signalling the ways in which people are not always who they claim to be. Nevertheless, they find themselves having to live up to the expectations of being a “hero”, gradually swapping their cynicism for a genuine desire to help those around them. This act of deciding to do the right thing in defiance of the authorities is both quietly subversive and a counter to the greed and selfishness which taken hold across the world along with the elitism that defines life in Penglai. 

At the same time, it’s clear that the gang can only succeed by working together and utilising each of their unique skills in harmony. In the end, they prosper precisely by calling in an unexpected ally who helps them pull off another heist on the villain through misdirection and subterfuge. Like many similar recent animated takes on classic folklore, the film humorously layers the modern world onto the fantasy setting through the swirling cloud highways that surround the city and opening taxi chase along with the magic wristbands that secure entry to Penglai’s VIP area. That the gang are later made immortals precisely so that the authorities can take credit for their actions is another ironic touch, suggesting that they can not really transcend the forces that constrain them. Nevertheless, what remains is the poignant tale of brotherhood and redemption in the relationship between Lü Dongbin and Zhongli Quan that quietly makes plain that in the end we save each other and kindness will always be repaid.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese and English subtitles)