Hong Kong cinema defined cool for a generation, with John Woo's bullet-ballets and the Shaw Brothers' martial arts epics setting a template that Hollywood has spent decades trying to copy. Come Drink with Me and A Better Tomorrow show both ends of that spectrum beautifully. Have a browse through Macca's reviews below.
Rating: 2.0★
Work through enough of Jackie Chan's vast filmography, as I have been steadily doing, and you start to notice two careers running side by side: the astonishing Hong Kong run that built his name, and the patchier Western-facing vehicles that followed once Hollywood came calling. The Medallion
Rating: 3.5★
On paper, Blade Runner is exactly my sort of thing. A rain-soaked cyberpunk future, a moral puzzle at its heart, a premise that asks what it even means to be human. Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick imagines a world where bio-engineered humans called
Rating: 3.0★
There is something genuinely endearing about a film that wears its influences so openly. Armour of God is, quite plainly, Jackie Chan's answer to Indiana Jones: the hero is a globe-trotting treasure hunter nicknamed the Asian Hawk, and the whole thing cheerfully lifts the "ancient relics
Rating: 2.5★
Every so often a film comes along that dares you to describe it with a straight face. The Boxer's Omen is firmly one of them. Try explaining it to someone at a party and watch their expression shift from polite interest to genuine concern for your wellbeing. A
Rating: 3.5★
Seventy million dollars. For sixteen minutes. Let that sink in for a moment. The Audition, Martin Scorsese's 2015 short film, was reportedly bankrolled by Macau casino groups to that frankly staggering sum, and when you first hear that figure, your brain does a little somersault. But then the
Rating: 3.5★
Jackie Chan is genuinely one of the most underrated actors working in cinema, and I'll keep saying it until more people actually believe me. We get so caught up in the sheer, unadulterated spectacle of his physical comedy that we forget he's actually a brilliant, expressive
Rating: 2.5★
The reputation arrives before the film does. You hear "Bloodsport" and you picture Van Damme in his prime, doing the splits between two chairs, Bolo Yeung thumping his own chest like a man possessed, and a tournament so brutal and underground it makes the UFC look like a
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment in A Chinese Ghost Story where you sit back, squint at the screen and think, "What the hell am I actually watching?" And then you grin. Because whatever it is, it's brilliant. Tony Ching Siu-Tung's 1987 cult classic
Rating: 3.5★
There are films you see at the right moment in your life that hit like a thunderclap, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was exactly that for me. I was a wide-eyed teenager picking up what felt like a "decent" rental, and what I got was something closer
Genre Action
★★★½ — A Better Tomorrow (1986)
Genre Action
★★★ — Hand of Death (1976)
Genre Action
★★½ — Come Drink with Me (1966)
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free