Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  A Guilty Conscience 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 21 Jan 2023 2

  The best HK film I have seen in recent years - I like it more than the warm, educational To my 19 Years Old Self. Very dramatic, packed with punch and cheekiness. Dayo Wong is often box office poison. But he's great in here. Also great cinematography (lots of panorama shots). It's like the HK cinema we used to enjoy.

  The film director Jack Ng has written scripts for many veteran filmmakers, and he's an actor himself. So he is…

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  Fight Back to School 1991

  ★★★★ Rewatched 21 Apr 2020 22

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Hong Kong cinema when it was still carefully crafted. Chow's films intertextual references (like the maze here echoing Chow's fave kungfu star Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon) and allegorical cues (like the communist graffiti on the walls of the abandoned building during the opening sequences) are brilliant.

  Part of 2020 Stephen Chow's marathon. Very good one but not his best.

  I want to write a book on Hong Kong comedy.

Recent reviews

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  Aftersun 2022

  ★★★½ Watched 31 May 2023 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Quite a strong debut, but in terms of representing girlhood (coming-of-age) and queerness (on the part of the dad and the girl), Céline Sciamma did it miles better. The rich colours are lovely and warm, like the dad-daughter relationship. I'm sure the memory representation is heartfelt and is a semi-biographical recount of the film director Charlotte Wells. But the vast gaps of memory (which is realistic), probably signifying pain and trauma, bother me, not thematically but technically. Definitely, this's more…

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  Victim 1999

  ★★★½ Watched 27 May 2023

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Watched as part of Sean Lau retrospective at MCL cinematic chain in HK.

  I am allergic to horror but the perverted Ringo Lam and blood-thirty Soi Cheang actually made Sean Lau a murderer forced by the financial crisis. And like what I told my pal who kindly watched the film with me and teased me for covering my eyes with palms, leaking a few gaps watching the scariest scenes of this flick most of the time, when a person is…

Popular reviews

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  Running Out of Time 1999

  ★★★★ Watched 25 May 2023 8

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Watched as part of Sean Lau retrospective at MCL cinematic chain in HK.

  The first thing I attended to in this film is that the locale of the gunfights in the beginning of this film looks similar to the gunfights in The Mission and in PTU. A HK local, veteran film critic, Kei Fu confirms that it was in East Kowloon Kwun Tong's Hung To Road: (Chinese only)

  zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E9%B4%BB%E5%9C%96%E9%81%93

  The locale in The Mission is not exactly in Hung To…

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  The God of Cookery 1996

  ★★★★★ Watched 28 May 2021 33

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Rewatching the God of Cookery, I was amazed by its ingenuity. Yet this time I was both saddened and relieved that the iconic landmark Tai Pak Floating Restaurant's nearly mythical interior has been well-preserved by this film amply, as it has been closed on 1st March, 2020 until further notice. After watching this film, I also recalled how Stephen Chow's comedies have a similar "formula" as Michael Hui - just add a bit of mo lei tau (nonsensical humour). Both…