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- Godzilla Minus One (2023)
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- Magnificent Warriors (1987)
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Mad Detective (2007)
Hong Kong’s most reliably excellent director brings back Lau Ching Wan for another collaboration in Mad Detective, their first in several years. It’s a Hong Kong police procedural, familiar territory to Hong Kong film fans, except that it has a rather creative twist. Lau Ching Wan plays Bun, a brilliant intuitive detective who has a knack for solving crimes through putting himself in the shoes of their participants, seeing their inner conflicts and motivations. Unfortunately, he’s also a little … (read more)
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Sparrow (2008)
Johnnie To’s films have been favourites here at Heroic Cinema for years: Alison showed me The Mission years ago and got me hooked on modern Hong Kong film. Hong Kong and its surroundings transform through To’s pictures into somewhere preternaturally cool: all rain-slicked night metropolis, populated by street-crawling thugs (often played by Lam Suet) and the occasional ambiguously dangerous Anthony Wong. And he makes it look easy, too — most of Milkyway Studios’ pictures are beautifully shot, from … (read more)
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Shaw Classics: Monkey – Journey To The West (1966)
The Shaw Brothers loved adapting classical stories from Chinese literature and folklore: during their time as a motion picture studio they filmed several stories from the great classical novels (Journey to the West, The Water Margin, The Dream of the Red Chamber and The Golden Lotus, to start with). Hitherto, the only filmed version of Journey to the Westthat I had seen (other than Stephen Chow’s not-exactly-canonical Chinese Odyssey films) was the much-beloved Monkey! TV … (read more)
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Fong Sai Yuk 2 (1993)
The original Fong Sai Yuk is a highly entertaining film. It features breathtaking action, interesting plotlines, and a lot of chemistry between Sai-Yuk Fong (Jet Li) and Mrs Fong, i.e. his mother (legendary actress Josephine Siao). Combining all these elements successfully is not an easy task, and it is therefore perhaps not surprising that the sequel doesn’t quite deliver the same kind of magic as the first film.
Fong Sai Yuk 2 picks up where the first movie left off. … (read more)
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Exploitations from the Far East (DVD box set) (1975)
As they did with their Wuxia box set, Siren Visual have put together a set of five films from the Shaw Brothers with similar themes, packaging them up in rather a nice-looking box set with new artwork and menus on all the discs. This one’s rather less high-minded than the tales of chivalry and heroism in the last one, though — it’s a box of Shaws’ less salubrious fare from the late 70s and early 80s, when they moved … (read more)
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The Wuxia Stories: Heroes of Ancient China (DVD box set) (1970)
Now that Siren have a large catalogue of releases from the celebrated Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong, they’ve started boxing them up into box sets, all the better to tempt you with. Wuxia Stories is the first one, showcasing five films from Shaws’ prolific swordplay director Chu Yuen and one from Cheng Kang, father of action director Ching Siu Tung.
For those readers who aren’t aware of it, wuxia refers to a particular genre of Chinese film and literature, … (read more)
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Brothers (2007)
The past twelve months have seen the release of three excellent crime films from Cantonese film-makers: Johnnie To’s Leone flavoured, Macau-based flick Exiled; Derek Yee’s drug trade expose Protege; and Brothers, which opened this week at Melbourne’s Chinatown cinema. Directed by Derek Chiu who is more known for his work with Peter Chan’s UFO company, helming quality dramas such as Ah Fai The Dumb. With Brothers, Chiu has created a very canny crime movie: a … (read more)
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Confession of Pain (2006)
The word ‘confession’ carries a great deal of weight in Western culture; in religion, it goes hand in hand with the concept of sin; in the secular world, it’s generally accompanied by legal action. It comes in as many shapes and forms as there are people to make it – from Okay, yeah I ate the last piece of cake to I’m having an affair with your boss and worse. It can ruin lives and relationships, damage trust, hurt others … (read more)
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