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The Chinese Cinema

The Chinese Cinema is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Sean Gilman.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
The Old Woman with the Knife (2025) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted May 15, 2025  Edit critic review
Veteran 2: I, the Executioner (2024) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Sep 28, 2024  Edit critic review
Last Hero in China (1993) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
I Did It My Way (2023) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (1983) Sean Gilman A filmmaker who feels like he’s reinventing cinema with every movie he makes.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Onlookers (2023) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Heroic Trio 2: Executioners (1993) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
The Heroic Trio (1992) Sean Gilman 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).
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Death Notice (2022) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
The Nomad (1982) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
My Heart Is That Eternal Love (1989) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
The Mystery of Chess Boxing (1979) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Beach of the War Gods (1973) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Visible Secret (2001) Sean Gilman The kind of mixture of profoundly unsettling and grossly entertaining that only a filmmaker at the peak of her abilities can accomplish.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
The Mad Monk (1993) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Art College 1994 (2023) Sean Gilman 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.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
The Roundup: Punishment (2024) Sean Gilman The man with the cinder block fists is back, and this time he’s learning what the internet is.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981) Sean Gilman While Sailor Suit and Machine Gun has all the accoutrements of a nasty little grindhouse film, it’s really just a sad movie about father-daughter relationships and coming of age in a world that doesn’t deserve us.
Posted Jun 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Casino Raiders (1989) Sean Gilman Casino Raiders shows signs here or there of greatness, of inspiration, but ultimately it’s as much a limp imitation of its Heroic Bloodshed forebears as Taylor Wong’s Rich and Famous/Tragic Hero duology.
Posted Jun 09, 2024  Edit critic review
Nothing Can't Be Undone By A Hotpot (2024) Sean Gilman it all works surprisingly well, with a new twist or turn to the plot every ten minutes or so and some solid work by the cast (especially Yang Mi (from the Tiny Times series) as the group’s one woman and Yu Qian, as the house owner) keeping things lively.
Posted Jun 09, 2024  Edit critic review
July Rhapsody (2002) Sean Gilman Hui has proven herself in all kinds of genres (ghost stories, romantic melodramas, wuxia epics, etc). What unites her work is her deep and non-judgmental curiosity about human experience, viewed always from a level of dispassionate, academic reserve.
Posted Jun 09, 2024  Edit critic review
The Valiant Ones (1975) Sean Gilman I’m embarrassed to admit that I never before noticed how incredible the action scenes in The Valiant Ones are. Taken as a whole, this is probably Hu’s greatest collection of fights.
Posted Jun 09, 2024  Edit critic review
Beijing Watermelon (1990) Sean Gilman (Despite Obayashi's reputation for weirdness, nothing here) would be out of place in any other international art house film from the 80s or 90s, aside that is from Obayashi’s consummate skill at visual storytelling and deeply humane empathy and idealism.
Posted Jun 09, 2024  Edit critic review
Silent Night (2023) Sean Gilman The gimmick is that the film has no actual dialogue. . . . This allows Woo free reign to tell his story with the kind of swooshing musicality that’s been present in his work from the very beginning.
Posted Dec 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Hidden Blade (2023) Sean Gilman Cheng Er, in both Hidden Blade and The Wasted Times, is not after suspense but rather mystery: the tension (and fun) of the film lies not in anticipating what comes next, but in trying to figure out what is happening and why.
Posted Nov 11, 2023  Edit critic review
In Water (2023) Sean Gilman In Water is one of Hong’s most beautiful movies, as well as possibly one of his bleakest, and completes a kind of trilogy about the joy and agony of making cinema along with Introduction and The Novelist’s Film.
Posted Nov 11, 2023  Edit critic review
Full River Red (2023) Sean Gilman That Zhang Yimou continues to not only survive but thrive, despite decades of falling in and out of favor with power, is as much a wonder as any of the images he captures on film.
Posted Nov 11, 2023  Edit critic review
Mad Fate (2023) Sean Gilman As Fate works toward its inevitable ends through coincidence and chance, so life comes from death, clarity from lunacy, and power to the powerless.
Posted Nov 11, 2023  Edit critic review
The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell (2023) Sean Gilman It’s all big and loud and orange, and if you squint here or there you can see signs of the old Herman Yau.
Posted Nov 11, 2023  Edit critic review
Baby Assassins 2 (2023) Sean Gilman Watching these movies, I wonder why anyone ever bothers to make movies that are not Baby Assassins films.
Posted Nov 11, 2023  Edit critic review
Lethal Panther (1990) Sean Gilman A Godfrey Ho joint that for all its cheapness and incompetence, actually captures something of the apocalyptic melancholy mood that makes John Woo’s heroic bloodshed masterpieces so special.
Posted Oct 12, 2022  Edit critic review
Lethal Panther 2 (1993) Sean Gilman Lethal Panther 2 is after something much more tangible (than the first film): the visceral thrill of guns firing, explosions exploding, cars flipping, and stunt people flying through the air in improbable and exceedingly dangerous ways.
Posted Oct 12, 2022  Edit critic review
Running Out of Time 2 (2001) Sean Gilman Running Out of Time 2 strips away everything that made the first film popular. Instead, the focus is entirely on small moments and big sequences.
Posted Oct 12, 2022  Edit critic review
Running Out of Time (1999) Sean Gilman An extremely slick caper heist film about a man who is dying of cancer who steals a bunch of money and a jewel from a Triad gang and along the way leads a detective to solve the case by leaving an ingenious series of clues.
Posted Oct 12, 2022  Edit critic review
A New Old Play (2021) Sean Gilman Occupying something of a middle ground between Hou's The Puppetmaster and Chen's Farewell My Concubine as a history of 20th century China as seen through the eyes of a theatrical performer, A New Old Play is an unusual kind of epic.
Posted Oct 12, 2022  Edit critic review
Baby Assassins (2021) Sean Gilman A low-fi Japanese slacker buddy comedy that features only a couple of action scenes, but ones which are breathlessly physical and inventive while eschewing both major stars and computerized explosions.
Posted Oct 12, 2022  Edit critic review
Wolf Pack (2022) Sean Gilman Another bit of high tech Chinese agitprop, packed with fancy guns and machines and the dried husks of a pair of once-promising Hong Kong stars
Posted Oct 12, 2022  Edit critic review
The Novelist's Film (2022) Sean Gilman These films [are] an organic extension of the concerns and approaches of the Late Hong period. Together, they sum up not just the most recent films, but hearken back as well to Early and Middle Hongs with all the wisdom, irritability, and serenity of age.
Posted Aug 15, 2022  Edit critic review
Detective vs. Sleuths (2022) Sean Gilman Hong Kong as a vision of hell. . . haunted by the ghosts not of victims, but of murderers.
Posted Aug 13, 2022  Edit critic review
Inside the Red Brick Wall (2020) Sean Gilman Joins Chan Tze-woon's Yellowing and Evans Chan's We Have Boots as essential documents of the recent Hong Kong protest movements.
Posted Nov 20, 2021  Edit critic review
In Front of Your Face (2021) Sean Gilman In Front of Your Face doesn't seem to play any games: it's quite straightforwardly about homecoming and mortality and faith.
Posted Nov 20, 2021  Edit critic review
Cloudy Mountain (2021) Sean Gilman Latest in a series of disaster films that double as propaganda pieces that praise the resourcefulness of the Chinese people and bureaucracy (not necessarily in that order).
Posted Nov 20, 2021  Edit critic review
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) Sean Gilman Three chance encounters leading to some kind of acting leading to a wide range of emotional experiences: bittersweet, tragic, infuriating, despairing, inspirational.
Posted Nov 20, 2021  Edit critic review
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020) Sean Gilman Playful and light-hearted, the kind of movie that looks like it was as much fun to make as it is to watch.
Posted Nov 20, 2021  Edit critic review
Raging Fire (2021) Sean Gilman Throwback to an earlier era of Hong Kong cop movie, where vehicle stunts and emotional outbursts abound, but the plot is undercooked and everyone looks a little old and tired.
Posted Aug 12, 2021  Edit critic review
Geuk jang jeon (Tale of Cinema) (2005) Sean Gilman Tale of Cinema compounds the self-obsession of the Hongian hero by conflating it with the act of both making and receiving cinema itself.
Posted Jun 11, 2021  Edit critic review
The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) Sean Gilman Hong Sangsoo's second feature is more recognizably his work than his debut... funnier than The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, and its men are less violent and less pathetic.
Posted Jun 11, 2021  Edit critic review
Crazy Samurai: 400 vs 1 (2020) Sean Gilman An experimental action film more admirable for its tenacity and the stamina of its star, Tak Sakaguchi, than its choreographic pyrotechnics.
Posted Mar 03, 2021  Edit critic review
A Writer's Odyssey (2021) Sean Gilman A solid action movie (with) an ingenious set-up rife with allegorical potential and the kind of sneaky politics one hopes to find as a sign of life in a mass-market product.
Posted Mar 03, 2021  Edit critic review
Shock Wave 2 (2020) Sean Gilman Herman Yau returns, and adds to the original's retro charm a convoluted allegory about protest, the police, and the former colony's relation with Mainland China.
Posted Feb 23, 2021  Edit critic review
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