The Chinese Cinema

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Sep 18, 2026 One of the singular achievements of this movie year. Go to Full Review The Wasted Times (2016) 33% 78%

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Mar 24, 2026 Bushido is as gorgeous as the rules regimenting its society are cruel and onerous. Go to Full Review Bushido (2024) 91% - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Mar 24, 2026 The film’s first major set piece, set in a large kitchen, is a masterpiece of the form, with Liu taking on a dozen or more bad guys while manipulating her environment with audacity and panache. Go to Full Review The Forbidden City (2025) 90% - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Feb 26, 2026 The film is a throwback, an epic wuxia in a tradition as old as Chinese cinema itself, one that, while not exactly rare nowadays, is rarely executed with as much style or grace. Go to Full Review Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert (2026) 94% - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema May 15, 2025 Lee excels in the non-fight scenes, especially floating around in the background of shots, dressed in an overcoat with a cap pulled low over her eyes, like if Kaji's Sasori tossed aside her big black sombrero and adopted a gray tweed bucket hat. Go to Full Review The Old Woman with the Knife (2025) 93% - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Sep 28, 2024 Hwang’s performance is a bit more subdued this time around, while the action is less fun and more brutal.... This shift in tone is entirely appropriate. . . I, the Executioner feels very much like a work or self-examination, if not self-accusation. Go to Full Review Veteran 2: I, the Executioner (2024) 100% - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Through it all, Li's Wong stands as the embodiment of honor, dignity and rectitude. Until, quite to his surprise, he finds himself in a Wong Jing movie, where everything is given a devious twist, ranging from slight exaggeration to the seriously demented. Go to Full Review Last Hero in China (1993) 67% 72%

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 I love old Milkyway Image movies as much as anyone, of course. But this obsession with the stars of the past, with old men way past the age when they could plausibly be working undercover in drug gangs, is doing nothing for Hong Kong cinema. Go to Full Review I Did It My Way (2023) 20% - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 A filmmaker who feels like he’s reinventing cinema with every movie he makes. Go to Full Review The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (1983) - - - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 The most wonderful thing about this are the subtitles. They are quite simply the most beautiful and poetic captions I’ve ever seen. Scene after scene plays out like a little haiku, adding an undeniably sardonic and wistful edge to this very playful film. Go to Full Review Onlookers (2023) 79% - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 A film that has all the trappings of an anti-communist, Handover-anxiety dystopia, but the real enemy all along turns out to be corporate capital. Go to Full Review Heroic Trio 2: Executioners (1993) 90% 46%

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 The Heroic Trio holds up well, making for a highly entertaining generic exercised anchored by the performances of its three stars (plus Anthony Wong, who steals every scene he’s in). Go to Full Review The Heroic Trio (1992) 81% 66%

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 No Hongkonger navigates the system as well as Yau, and with Death Notice he’s slipped his most directly anti-authority film in quite awhile past the powers that be. Possibly because the film’s plot is too dense for any clock-punching bureaucrat to parse. Go to Full Review Death Notice (2022) - - - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Tam wasn’t alone in turning slice-of-life stories of Hong Kong’s youth into stories of sliced-up-lives. They respond to their world not with anger or cruelty, but by looking cool and falling in love. But violence will come for them anyway. Go to Full Review The Nomad (1982) - - - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 A true romance, a tragedy about people finding themselves in traps where the only way out is to sacrifice their body for the person they love, which in turn only leads to more violence and more heartbreaking dilemmas. Call it Romantic Bloodshed. Go to Full Review My Heart Is That Eternal Love (1989) - - - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 What’s remarkable about The Mystery of Chess Boxing is that even in its most debased form, and with the obvious deficiencies in its storytelling, it remains one of the more transcendent of martial arts movies. Go to Full Review The Mystery of Chess Boxing (1979) - - 78%

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 Wang Yu filters Seven Samurai through Kurosawa's successors: its Hollywood remake and the Spaghetti Westerns he inspired. Above all, he twists the template to his own ends, virulently nationalistic and patriarchal, and gloriously violent. Go to Full Review Beach of the War Gods (1973) - - - -

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 The kind of mixture of profoundly unsettling and grossly entertaining that only a filmmaker at the peak of her abilities can accomplish. Go to Full Review Visible Secret (2001) - - 32%

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 All the evidence one would really need to know that To and Chow’s collaborations were not happy experiences is to simply watch The Mad Monk, a film by a remarkable collection of great artists that is simply just not very good nor very much fun to watch. Go to Full Review The Mad Monk (1993) - - 51%

Sean Gilman The Chinese Cinema Jun 10, 2024 If Art College 1994 proves anything, it’s that mid-90s students were slackers the world over. Or at least the ones worth hanging out with were. Go to Full Review Art College 1994 (2023) 90% - -