Cinema

The Way We Dance

Very much cut from the same cloth as the Step Up series, Adam Wong’s Hong Kong dance comedy sees plucky young wannabe Fleur (Cherry Ngan in what will surely prove… Read More
Lesson of the Evil

Prolific Japanese director Miike Takashi returns to his exploitation roots with this darkly comic story of a murderous high school teacher, who takes dead aim at his own students. Read More
Jurassic Park

What better way to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of one of the best summer blockbusters of…umm…the last 20 years, than by re-releasing it on the big screen for a whole… Read More
Bad Film

Ambition conquers aesthetics in Sono Sion’s epic Tokyo Gagaga experiment from 1995, which is only now seeing the light of day. 160mins of gang fights & gay love shot of… Read More
Nobody’s Child

Newly restored by the HK Film Archive, this 1960 adaptation of Hector Malot’s novel Without Family, stars a young Josephine Siao Fong Fong as a young girl in search of… Read More
The Act of Killing

Joshua Oppenheimer’s chilling, surreal and at times very funny documentary tracks down some of Indonesia’s most notorious death squad leaders, who are only too happy to recount and even act… Read More
Heaven’s Gate

Another of the grand restored classics to play at this year’s HKIFF was the fully restored 216-minute version of Michael Cimino’s calamitous Western. This was not the first time I… Read More
Blancanieves

Director Pablo Berger re-locates the Brothers Grimm classic Snow White in the world of Spanish bullfighters, while also harking back to Silent Cinema. Read More
REVIEW: Blancanieves

The great thing about attending a large international film festival like HKIFF is the element of discovery. There is always plenty of variety on offer, much of which even someone… Read More
After the Curfew

I’m a sucker for restored classics at a film festival. What better way to catch up on an unearthed masterpiece from yesteryear than in a boffed up print on the… Read More
G.I. Joe: Retaliation

The first G.I. Joe film proved a shamelessly enjoyable piece of throwaway action nonsense, in large part thanks to the playful team dynamic and the fact nobody was expecting anything… Read More
No

I first became aware of Chilean director Pablo Larrain and his regular leading man Alfredo Castro from their startling 2008 collaboration, Tony Manero. I was less enamoured, but no less… Read More
Gangs of Wasseypur

How does one even begin to describe Anurag Kashyap’s incredible crime epic that spans three generations of a gangster family in the Eastern state of Bihar. The film essentially charts… Read More
What Richard Did

Lenny Abrahamson’s low budget but nicely pitched Irish drama does a great job of creating believable, likable characters who then fall foul of a second’s intervention from fate, luck or… Read More
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

Taiwanese director Arvin Chen follows up his hugely entertaining debut, Au Revoir Taipei, with a perhaps even better second effort. Richie Jen is excellent as an unassuming family man who… Read More
Stromboli

Much derided at the time of its original release, Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 drama has been restored by Martin Scorsese’s film preservation initiative and is ripe for reassessment. I had never… Read More
A Hijacking

No sooner had I got off the plane from Japan, it was time to dive right back into HKIFF. And what better way to do it than with this fantastic… Read More
Flicker

My last film at Okinawa was actually this Swedish comedy drama that picked up the AMD Next Wave award at Last year’s Fantastic Fest. Somehow I had failed to watch… Read More