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It's been a LONG time since I last watched PTU, but I don't recall it as being sluggish. I remember I enjoyed it as kind of a (very loose) comic take on Kurosawa's Stray Dog.

Michael Kerpan wrote:It's been a LONG time since I last watched PTU, but I don't recall it as being sluggish. I remember I enjoyed it as kind of a (very loose) comic take on Kurosawa's Stray Dog.

Agreed. I remember loving the knowing way all the pieces were being organized together. To has this way of making his narratives feel like you and he are playing a game together, which always makes them feel like more than what they present on the surface. They’re self-aware enough to feel playful and open, even when, as in PTU, the story is about a net slowly tightening. It’s a quality I have trouble articulating, but it’s what makes his films so much more exciting than the competition.

Two mainland films I'd rec:

Blind Shaft (2003) a gritty Chinese film about the harsh lives of itinerant coal miners, surviving in the rural countryside, a pretty vicious little story. It did well enough that they made a sequel of sorts (a film in the same basic vein) called Blind Mountain, about bride stealing in the rural mountains, I believe).

Up the Yangtze (2007) a Canadian-Chinese documentary quite well done and revealing of life in China. It's a slow builds as we get to know the two main youngsters and understand their circumstances, choices and adaptability. One of the few authentic representations I've encountered of young people and the striving which is modern China.

Frank Djeng said at SDCC that the title he's been teasing lately on social media, is Master of the Flying Guillotine. It's coming next year.

HK Films I Saw At the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival


Bullet in the Head (John Woo, 1990)

A masterpiece of HK filmmaking, without question. But this is a punishing movie. It goes on and on, with scene after scene of unrelieved brutality. And when there is a reprieve from the brutality, it’s for high energy melodrama. The movie never relaxes its pitch; it wears you out after a while. It’s not an enjoyable movie to watch, but it does astonish you. This is such an uneasy combination of old school Hollywood, musicals especially, and the grimness and nihilism of 70s American cinema. How Woo managed to marry these things, I don’t know. But this is a movie that can ape both West Side Story and The Deer Hunter while remaining a cohesive experience. The movie grips you by the throat and commands your admiration. An incredible experience. The new restoration looked fantastic as well.


The Battle Wizard (Pao Hsueh-Li, 1977)

Of a piece with late Shaw wizard phantasmagorias like Holy Flame of the Martial World and Buddha's Palm. Wild, non-sequitor imagination all through, from giant extend-o legs, to fire-breathing wizards, to lazer beams, to chain-looped hook hands, to giant rubber snakes. It's more rickety than those later Shaws, and little of it counts as good. But it's a wild, colourful movie, and I enjoyed it. The biggest surprise, tho', was seeing Lin Chen-Chi outside of Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind. She's such an elemental force in Tsui's movie that it's jarring to see her as a conventional actress playing a role in a movie.


Stuntman (Albert & Herbert Leung, 2024)

A nostalgic love song to 80s and 90s Hong Kong action and the stuntmen who brought it to life. A long retired action director and choreographer, played by longtime stuntman and action director, Stephen Tung, is brought back by an old friend to direct the action in a new movie. His old school approach clashes with the new safety-first attitudes of modern Chinese filmmaking. The real pleasure of the movie is its insiders view of action filmmaking in the golden era of HK film, the way the filmmakers would enter a new space, size up all the different possibilities, and then start improvising magic. But then there's the tortuous way they would abuse the stuntmen over and over until they got those magical shots of action. Behind every amazing kick is a director screaming: 'More power! Again! More power!' through take after take as some poor stuntguy gets whacked harder and harder. One of the best scenes is the very beginning, where the film creates its own segment from an 80s HK film, and nails the look, feel, and rhythm of that time so perfectly you could almost be fooled into thinking it's borrowed from a real movie. It makes a wonderful contrast with the more modern rhythms of the rest of the movie (one of the movie's plot points is the superior sense for rhythm in action that the OG guys have). Unfortunately, what's anchoring all this nostalgia is an eye-rolling melodrama full of stock characters and manipulative story beats. As a movie, it's weak. As a bit of fan service, it's of interest.


A Chinese Ghost Story III (Ching Siu-Tung, 1991)

Technically a sequel, in that the movie announces it takes place 100 years after the first, but in essence a remake. Joey Wong is back as the titular ghost, Jackie Cheung as his helpful rogue from the second, and Lau Siu-Ming as the tree demon, but Leslie Cheung's tax collector has been replaced by Tony Leung Chiu-Wai's apprentice monk, and Wu Ma's exorcist by Lau Shun's head monk. Otherwise, exact same movie, with the returning cast members playing the same roles but different characters. I was unenthused the first time I saw this, the novelty having worn thin and the movie seeming threadbare and out of ideas. But seeing it on the big screen, with an enthusiastic audience, brought the movie to life. Firstly, it's gorgeous to look at. The cinematography is delicate and artful, and the framings capture every swish and flutter of Joey Wong's outfits so perfectly. The dust, grit, and fog, the blue backlights, the purple horizons--just stunning. And Shout's new restoration is a marvel. I couldn't believe how much better it looked than the old 35mm prints of I and II that I saw the previous two years. Secondly, the humour really worked. I found myself laughing consistently along with the audience, something I didn't do for the other two movies. Tony Leung gives a terrific comic performance. This is also a very erotic, even kinky movie, and the film has no qualms about mixing the humour, sexiness, and horror all together into complex tonal set pieces. I had a blast.

I rarely have anything intelligent to say about the films I watch, but because this list project has been such a great motivator for me to learn more about Hong Kong cinema, I thought I would at least try to contribute with a few scattered thoughts.

Come Drink with Me - King Hu - 1966: My sole previous experience with King Hu was watching a VHS-quality rip of A Touch of Zen on a 15-inch laptop some ten years ago (an experience that, perhaps unsurprisingly, left no lasting impression), so this film was quite a revelation. Action films with female protagonists are always interesting and everything here involving Cheng Pei-pei's character was great. I was less convinced by the way her story falls into the background as the film progresses, but having followed this up with Dragon Inn, A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan, and The Valiant Ones, I have come to accept that the endings of Hu's films follow their own logic which remains rather mysterious to me. I am very much looking forward to revisiting this film with the upcoming 4k UHD release from 88 Films.

Running on Karma - Johnnie To & Wai Ka-Fai - 2003: Andy Lau plays a bodybuilding stripper-monk-martial arts master with supernatural powers in an action thriller which, according to Wikipedia, is "ultimately a Buddhist parable about the nature of karma". This seems to me like a good example of a film that will be dismissed as incoherent nonsense by some while being lauded as a work of genius by others. (As evidence of the latter, I note that the critic Sean Gilman included this film on their ballot for the 2022 Sight & Sound ranking of the greatest films of all time.) Having effectively no knowledge of Buddhist notions of karma, I did not even try to understand what was happening and simply went along for the rather enjoyable ride.

Yes, Madam! - Corey Yuen - 1985: Continuing with more female action protagonists, this was the film that catapulted Michelle Yeoh into stardom. Her every on-screen moment is captivating, and there is some magic to her performance here that she couldn't quite replicate in Royal Warriors, Magnificent Warriors, Police Story 3: Super Cop, and the two Heroic Trio films, even if most of those films remain enjoyable in their own ways. If this film has a flaw, it is that the filmmakers clearly felt the need to hedge their bets (female-led action comedy films being an unproven commodity at the time) by filling much of the running time with people other than Michelle Yeoh.

Infernal Affairs - Andrew Lau & Alan Mak - 2002: Call me a heretic, but I prefer Scorsese's version. I've read many comments saying that The Departed is too long and that the way Infernal Affairs jumps straight into the action is great, but I think the story works much better when we have the time to grow with these characters and to get to know them before things really kick off.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn - Tsai Ming-liang - 2003: I already liked this film a lot, but seeing it again after having watched Dragon Inn made me appreciate it even more. The scenes with Miao Tien and Shih Chun watching their own film have an emotional impact that had completely passed me by the first time.

Fist of Fury - Lo Wei - 1972: Of the three Bruce Lee films I watched, this is the only one that was even slightly enjoyable. The Big Boss is bogged down by a deadly first 45 minutes where Lee's character refuses to fight because he promised his mother he wouldn't, and The Way of the Dragon is bogged down by Lee's inexperience as a director. When it comes to non-wuxia Hong Kong martial arts cinema, I strongly prefer the stunts + comedy formula that Jackie Chan and others settled on in the 1980s.

Running on Karma was a very important milestone on my journey towards Buddhism.

A Terra-Cotta Warrior (Ching Siu-Tung, 1989)

A Tsui Hark/Ching Siu-Tung collaboration starring Gong Li and Zhang Yimou? Seems essential. It’s an epic romantic fantasy whose plot is similar to the Yuen Biao action film Iceman Cometh from the same year. Here, an immortal terra cotta warrior awakens in 1930s China to find his beloved’s doppelganger is an actress in the Chinese film industry during the Japanese occupation. History, fantasy, romance, and filmic art collide in this tonally bizarre, overripe movie. It’s hard to know what to make of this one. The heady fantasy of the first half becomes goofy comedy in the second, but a goofy comedy about WWII. While the first half has a coherent plot, the second half is a loose grab bag of shenanigans, which is pretty odd given the first half is a solid wuxia fantasy. There is a comparison to be made between the historical fantasy of the early section and the fantasy of the melodrama in the film they’re making in the modern-day sections, but nothing is really made of it. Nothing’s really made of anything. The film limps along, never amounting to much. Even the action, Ching’s wheelhouse, is lame. This feels like a great idea that unraveled during filming without the filmmakers quite noticing. You wish Chen Kaige or Zhang himself had made the movie.


Dr. Wai in the Scripture with No Words (Ching Siu-Tung, 1996)

Jet Li stars as a writer of Indiana-Jones-style serial adventures whose troubled marriage to Rosamund Kwan has left him with writer’s block. So his two plucky assistants, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Charlie Yeung, help him complete his latest serial. This serves as the frame story for the adventures of Dr. Wai, also played by Li, as he tries to recover a magical box and ancient scroll in Japanese occupied China. The plot and character motivations of the adventure story often change radically depending on whether Li, Kaneshiro and Yeung, or Kwan is writing it, their perspective on the events of the frame story shaping their view of the adventure material. So the adventure story isn’t coherent, but does supply a fanciful commentary on the events of the real world. A fire during production destroyed a number of sets that budget constraints couldn’t allow to be rebuilt. The frame story was invented to cover for this, and it proves serendipitous. The adventure story on its own is goofy in a way that makes it seem frivolous, with lots of childish exaggeration. Jet Li fights sumo wrestlers, a giant rat, and a mutated skeleton guy, for example. There are giant flaming swords, huge mechanical tanks shaped as oxes, and people turning into tiny iron balls. Overall there’s this breezy, low-stakes tone that makes everything feel contrived, enough so that it’s hard to believe it was created without the frame in mind, there’s so little reason to invest in it. The frame does the necessary work of anchoring you in an emotional reality and giving the adventure a reason for its endless fakery. It’s a weird, not totally satisfying Jet Li adventure, but a much better one, I suspect, than it would’ve been without the fire.


Witch From Nepal (Ching Siu-Tung, 1986)

A creaky, uneventful movie whose pace and mise-en-scene reminded me of Italian exploitation films from the 70s, not the fire and energy of golden age Hong Kong filmmaking. The filming is cumbersome and lifeless. It’s especially bizarre coming off the cocaine frenzy that was Ching’s Duel to the Death. Given Ching’s usual style and the subject matter (witchcraft and ancient curses from Nepal), I expected a gonzo CAT III like The Seventh Curse, not this dull fantasy romance that seems to borrow its style from Lucio Fulci’s Manhattan Baby. There isn’t any story. Dick Wei is some ancient bad guy and Chow Yun-Fat becomes the mystical protector after a Nepali witch gives him magical powers so he can fight Dick Wei at the end. That’s it. There’s just nothing going on in this movie. Like, I’ve just told you everything we learn about Dick Wei’s bad guy. His entire role in the movie is just to run around Hong Kong in slow motion so the movie can cut away to him on occasion to remind you he exists. I swear all his scenes were shot by the second unit. There are a few moments towards the end where the movie threatens to become interesting—but then it’s all over as soon as it starts. One of the big action set pieces is Chow going up and down in an elevator. A lame movie from a usually exciting director. Dick Wei’s death scene was pretty cool, tho’.


Starry is the Night (Ann Hui, 1988)

Brigitte Lin (who’s brilliant here) is an overworked 40-year-old social worker who begins a love affair with an 18-year-old client. That affair kicks off a series of memories of her affair with her married college professor two decades prior. The movie mixes together memories with contemporary events in a stylish way, with associational imagery compelling time shifts. This does lend the movie a disjointed feel, but an appropriate one, with Lin’s internal world feeling fragmented and undigested. More intriguing is Hui’s use of politics: she pairs the two strands with the political events dominating the times. The historical section increasingly intersects with the violent pro-democracy protests in 1967 HK, while the contemporary section has Lin involved in the campaign of a reformist political candidate. The relationship between the main plot and the political themes is oblique, but the political sections give a kind of overarching commentary on Lin’s relationships: her early idealism and naivity shadowed by violent outbursts and authoritarian crack downs, while her later torrid relationship is shadowed by self-defeating attempts to change things by playing a rigged game. This is a reductionist description: quite a lot of subtle commentary is going on in the way the personal and the political align in ever more revealing ways that Hui, with her admirable trust in the audience, chooses not to spell out. It’s the best part of the movie, the use of parallel narrative strands to build larger thematic units. Less successful is the film’s late use of cliched coincidence out of the hoariest melodrama. Up til then the movie had been playing things realistically, so the moment feels contrived and manipulative, putting too emphatic a point on things where elsewhere it trusted the audience to make connections between past and present, personal and political, etc. More uncomfortable, tho’, is that the movie never acknowledges the obvious ethical problem with the two relationships. The ethical dimension of the early relationship only comes up in terms of the professor’s adultery, whereas Lin’s relationship with the boy is framed as a feminist battle against the social strictures that being a professional and a woman place on her. While the film doesn’t need to make a judgement on its characters’ actions, that it doesn’t even raise the obvious ethical issue just makes the movie feel as tho’ it’s missing something. Hui would address the same situation in July Rhapsody, again using two age-gap relationships across time to comment on each other, with much more success. Given the autobiographical slant of so many of Hui’s films, the fact that she twice returned to the subject of a professor in the 60s pursuing a relationship with a young student, and that she gives Brigitte Lin her birth date and characteristic haircut, I can’t help wondering if these films are Hui’s way of working through something similar from her own past. The emotion in Starry is the Night still feels raw and undigested—strong enough to compel associations with bombs and explosions, to produce fraught stories of bruising oneself against social chains. July Rhapsody on the other hand shows an artists who’s achieved some kind of distance on the events, who can look back with more wisdom and clarity, even generosity, than was possible in her early 40s despite being two decades out from the original events. Starry is the Night is a weaker film for Hui, but a fascinating one for what it shows of Hui’s development as an artist, especially when paired with its thematic cousin, July Rhapsody. Even minor Hui’s are full of riches.


The Spooky Bunch (Ann Hui, 1980)

A charming supernatural comedy no doubt inspired by the success of Sammo’s Spooky Encouters the same year, tho’ gently comic and romantic where Sammo was loud and crass. A traveling opera troupe arrives in a small town and encounters a host of spirits connected to a war-time curse. The movie’s a bit hard to follow, not helped by the fact that the copy I watched was an abysmal VHS rip whose burnt-in subs were often too washed out to read. While the material’s fine, it’s the style that interested me. It’s shot cinema verite style, especially in the performance sections where the handheld camera roves through a parade or amidst the backstage bustle. It’s a very New Wave style, but also a departure from the Argento/Carpenter influenced camera work and discontinuous editing style of Hui’s debut, The Secret. I enjoyed the thing’s messy energy—it bristles with life in all its chaos and unpredictability. But I’m surprised it made the HK Film Archive’s 100 Must-See HK Films over Song of the Exile and Ordinary Heroes. The movie’s pretty lightweight and, unusual for Hui, not interested in delving into its characters.


Princess Fragrance (Ann Hui, 1987)

Actually the second part of Hui’s big wuxia, The Romance of Book and Sword, an adaptation of a Louis Cha novel (I’m really going to have to read one of his books at some point—but they’re just so long!). I couldn’t find the first part anywhere, but somebody uploaded the second to youtube, and I didn’t know if it’d still be around if or when I ever found the first one. So I settled for watching the second half of a movie. Set in the deserts and forests of northwestern China among the muslim Uyghurs, the leader of the Red Lotus society, dedicated to fighting the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, helps the locals fend off the Manchu troops intent on conquering them while also carrying on a romance with the titular princess, whose fragrance comes from her childhood habit of eating flowers. An old fashioned martial epic in the King Hu vein, much different in style than what Tsui Hark/Ching Siu-Tung would popularize a few years later. It’s grander in scale, allows its narrative more breathing room, and is free of the wild fantasy that would come to define this subgenre. Hui focuses instead on political conspiracies and interpersonal drama, with a minimum of flying. But the style is also slower and clunkier, and the acting is wooden (the cast of mainland actors have none of the charisma or talent of their HK colleagues). The film’s major asset is the cinematography and location shooting, which even in the substandard copy I saw looked wonderful. It also has a sense of brutality and fatalism that contrasts sharply with so many later wuxias, which tended to aim at the grand and tragic. I can’t really judge only half a movie, but I enjoyed what I saw and hope the full thing gets a proper release someday.

FYI Arrow's Shawscope vol. 2 & 3 boxes are on sale for 50% off ($100 + tax for 10 discs) at Barnes & Noble right now with free shipping.

Hey guys, I’m here to announce that to due to a couple notable influences, from the amount of late submissions from the Czech and/or Slovak Project I got to my own planned hiatus from this forum for a couple months, I’ve decided to extend the deadline for this project by a couple months. The voting period will now take place from December 18th-24th will Orphan Rescues occurring from December 25th-31st. Please be safe, discuss kindly and enjoy the films you have yet to see.
Sincerely,
TechnicolorAcid

I’m sure that they’re saving the John Woo titles for Christmas, but God, the wait is killing me. Bummer about CGS not being 4K when there’s clearly a master, that’s kind of BS. Hats off to them for putting so many of these up for streaming through. I’d never even SEEN a lot of them.

Finch wrote: Fri Jul 25, 2025 10:13 pm Frank Djeng said at SDCC that the title he's been teasing lately on social media, is Master of the Flying Guillotine. It's coming next year.

One of my favourites, and the reason I became a Tangerine Dream fan!

The Chinese Ghost Story films may not have been in good enough shape to warrant a UHD, even after getting scanned and restored in 4K.

TechnicolorAcid wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 4:39 am The voting period will now take place from December 18th-24th will Orphan Rescues occurring from December 25th-31st. Please be safe, discuss kindly and enjoy the films you have yet to see.
Sincerely,
TechnicolorAcid

Thanks! I had just picked up Shawscope vols. 2 & 3 in the B&N sale and realized there's no way I'll be able to get to them plus 1996 films, let alone check out any other non-Shaw releases before the end of the month. I was going to ask for an extension, so this works out really well for me.

Hey everyone, real quick reminder that voting will officially start in a week’s time so if you want to catch up on some of the suggestions in this thread or some of the titles in your watchlist, then now’s the perfect time to do so.

Thanks for the prompt to finally get to The Butterfly Murders, though unfortunately I found the film underwhelming. It's a wild ride and I'd recommend it for its sheer bravado, but I think there are just too many ingredients and the overstimulation, especially when it comes to plot, drags the film down. I'll admit to giving up on that front early on so the giallo and gothic elements didn't really pay off beyond their surface-level pleasures. And that's what this ultimately is: a shallow work of style over substance. Which is fine by me, and Tsui Hark would go on to excel at amplifying style throughout his career in ways that aren't quite as exhausting. Strong for a first feature, though.

Alright the voting period has officially started, although I should advise that this list is not just strictly about Hong Kong cinema (although it easily could’ve been) but spans across all of the regions of China and China itself. Meaning your list can include filmmakers as diverse as Edward Yang & Hou Hsiao-Hsien to John Woo & Stephen Chow. Remember, your vote counts!

I didn't get to watch much since this was first proposed. So much has been released recently or will be soon and I was more focused on the 90s lists that I haven't tackled any of my new acquisitions in this category from the past year, so I'll only be ably to cobble together a quick list right now.

Watched Mad Detective and got very little out of it. I've now seen ten Johnnie To films and my conclusion is he's a director whose work I generally like just "fine" but haven't loved anything yet, which seems to put me at-odds with.. everyone?

That's fair--there's little in a To film you haven't seen elsewhere. For me it's less the what than the how. There's this cheeky, prankish quality, this sense of gamesmanship that I like. Like he's inviting you to watch him meticulously set up all these pieces, place them just right, and all so you can watch them spring together in a great conflagration, while also taking moments here and there to tease you, or throw in something unexpected to surprise you. It's a bit of a high wire act, or bit of plate spinning, or what have you. There's an extravagance, watching him add one more unstable element, and then one more, to whatever he's making. He's playing a game with the audience, but he's inviting you to join that game rather than just working on you from above. There's something so charming and warm about that quality, and it elevates his gangster tales into something more than what they're outwardly about. If that's not a quality that moves you or brings you in, then probably his movies will strike you as well made versions of the same old thing with a few strange creative choices along the way.

I don't know that I could persuade a naysayer, because I don't know what I could point out to convince them. There are some things, I guess, like how The Mission's important sections lie past the story's natural end point, so that the bulk of the movie, the parts that normally are important in a gangster film, are revealed to be preamble to something more interesting and even moving. Reminds me of Nikolai Leskov. Or how Exiled takes something simple like indecision and draws that out into a cosmic experience of chance or fate or predestination or...something, anyway, except will. Or how Vengeance becomes a story of not nice people finding endless occasions to be nice to each other, so that a brutal, violent tale involves a lot of people who'd rather be in a different movie altogether, a friendlier one. So the characters just take whatever small moments they can to be gentle and understanding before violence has to happen again. Very weird.

So, yeah, I like To's self-aware gamesmanship with genre, and his weird avenues that open up his gangster tales to emotions they don't often contain. They're charming and creative films.

I had seen the Heroic Trio a while ago but it failed to impress me (and I forgot most of it). For this project, I tried to start both Election & PTU for this project, but both failed to engage within first 15 and it was probably shortly before bedtime & so I just shut them off.

I also tried to tackle some of Sammo Kam-Bo Hung's directorial efforts with a similar reaction. While I found some of his humor a bit more entertaining than To's action, overall I wasn't as impressed in those films he's directed in comparison to the films he's worked on in other capacities.

The Heroic Trio films are more Ching Siu-Tung joints. To didn’t get out of director-for-hire status until post handover, I believe.

I prefer To’s romcoms if that accounts for anything to the curious.

Mr Sausage -- Love your take on To's films. I t really is the HOW that matters in these films much more than the WHAT. The combination of the playfulness with the material accompanied by the require that one pay constant, close attention in order to properly enjoy them makes his best work incredibly appealing. Did you ever get a chance to watch Wu Yen yet? One of his most playful films, and aimed at a mass audience -- yet lots of embedded seriousness.

knives -- While I like many of To's romcoms, I don't find them to be the best facet of his work overall. For me, the humor (sometimes very black) tends to work better in his more serious works.

Lowry_Sam -- Heroic Trio (and sequel) were interesting to me primarily because of the great female cast. But even this was insufficient to produce anything resembling "love" for these films. I love PTU, however. As to Election, it borders on too violent for me (though I admire it nonetheless). Election 2 really was rather "too much" for me.

To be fair, I've liked almost everything I've seen of To's, but just can't fall in love with his work like (seemingly) everyone else. Throw Down and Sparrow have come the closest