This week’s movies offers quite a lot of diversity and not only within the film crew but also concerning the stories. The Cutthroat Island director Renny Harlin continues his film career in China with a thriller taking place during Christmas eve. Sounds familiar? With little resemblance to Die Hard 2 his new movie Bodies at […]
An UFO lands in a mountain area close to a skiing resort. The resort is almost abandoned due to the arrival of the summer. A caretaker of the resort has guests at his place but very soon the summer paradise becomes a hunting ground for the alien monster that arrived with the UFO but egoistic […]
Some time ago I wrote about the film Shanghai Fortress on Instagram (sinoscifi). With the premier of Frant Gwos “The Wandering Earth” a trailer for the film was also shown before the film. At this moment “The Wandering Earth” has made more than 3,5 billion yuan and its only a matter of time before it […]
The Spring Festival (also called the Lunar New Year and sometimes the Chinese New Year), has for some years now been a period when Chinese films got to dominate the box-office without the interference of foreign films (though not completely free from foreigners). Not only does Chinese films dominate because of the more obvious reason […]
I Morten Tyldums Passengers blandas intergalaktisk nybyggarromantik med en inte helt oproblematisk hyllning till tvåsamheten. I det hypertekniska rymdskeppet Avalon färdas Jim Preston och Aurora Lane, samt cirka 5000 passagerare till, mot den privatägda planeten Homestead II där de ska börja sitt nya liv. I en resa som ska ta 120 år vaknar Jim och […]
Any cinema goer who is slightly familiar with Blade Runner and Alien will quickly see that director Li Wei (李伟) and Zhang Nan (张楠) has taken many of the film themes from these two science fiction classics. Lacking in both suspense, fear and angst of solitude and isolation, and a believable desolate dystopian world The […]
Original title: 《黄金打劫案》 English title: Guns and Roses Director: Ning Hao (宁浩) Starring: Lei Jiayin (雷佳音), Tao Hong (陶虹), Yamasaki Keiichi (山崎敬一), Fan Wei (范伟). The local street thug Xiao Dongbei (小东北) suddenly becomes entwined in a great heist after receiving detailed plans for the route of an armored transport carrying 8 tons of gold. With […]
Do you remember the film about the model worker Guo Mingyi (郭明义)? He got about 21 million followers on Chinese social media Weibo where he spreads love, empathy and communist rhetoric in a way that Lei Feng would have admired. You don’t remember that movie? It made a modest 20 million RMB on the box-office […]
This is my first attempt to have a weekly update of Chinese films that has recently premiered in China. I’m already a bit late with this one but in the future I will try to post an update on Chinese film premiers every Friday. The post excludes foreign films so therefore there isn’t any information […]
Spoilers?: Of course, we’re talking about Blade Runner The Silver Winged Killer (or The Silver Wing Killer) is the Chinese name for Ridley Scott’s futuristic neo-noir Blade Runner where the measure of eye movements holds the key for a replicant continuing living or being retired. The kind of retirement you’re not looking forward to. Anyhow, […]
Galaxens mest dysfunktionella (stjärn)familj är tillbaka och i uppföljaren har det militaristiska och fredsföraktande Kree-folket bytats ut som antagonist mot den interna familjekonflikten där själva idén om vad en familj är hotar stora delar av universum. James Gunns nostalgivurm fortsätter vara en central del i serien men mycket känns redan igen då filmen anspelar på […]
Ett företag som jobbar med att utveckla produkter för den amerikanska militären skickar iväg en av sina forskare på ett uppdrag för att undersöka en avvikelse i en av deras optiska utrustningar. Väl på plats visar det sig att en oidentifierad varelse dödar deras soldater och lämnar oförklarliga spår efter sig. Även om berättelsen i […]
The vast universe of fantasy in Chinese literature has always been a source for the film industry to make new intriguing movies. Whether it’s a daring interpretation of a old classic, like Stephen Chows Journey to the West movies, or a more traditional approach, like in the tv-series Pilgrimages to the West from 1986, Chinese […]
Making a film about Lei Feng in post-Mao times must seem like a very daring project seeing that the trivial and mundane life of the worlds most famous PLA-soldier would pale in comparison with action filled flicks such as The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Tsui Hark, 2014) and Operation Mekong (Dante Lam, 2016). A creative […]
The Ice people (冰族) and the Fire people(火族) are bitter rivals and a war between the two deity like clans (神族) is imminent. The future king of the Ice people Ka Suo (卡索) and the prince of the Fire people Xin Jue (忻绝) are the catalyst to the conflict though Ka Suo wishes nothing more […]
As the Great Leap Forward were in its inception phase the first science fiction film, now available to watch, was released in China. The Ming Tombs Reservoir (Jin Shan/金山, 十三陵水库畅想曲) seemed like a suitable movie to start off the Great Leap Forward campaign with its utopian imagining – in the last 20 minutes of the […]
Xu Zheng is lost once again and this time he’s still trying to find his way through the thick layer of preconceptions which also is a dominant theme in his latest film Lost in Hong Kong. Xu Lai (played by Xu Zheng/徐峥) is a 30-something bra designer. A decade after graduating from university Xu Lai still […]
When it was announced that Liu Cixins novel Three Body was gonna be made in to film scifi-fans around the world were excited about the news. For a short while some Chinese fans also discussed the idea of Christopher Nolan being the director of the film mostly because of Interstellar recent success in mainland China. […]
The police force is always a source for constant mockery and satire. Not only because it’s one of the few institutions in a modern society which can exercise violence as a mean for carrying out their work but also because the ambiguous nature of being a police, corrupted or not, is potential good comedy anywhere […]
Zheng Kaisi (played by Li Yifeng) suffers from some sort of mental delusion which is being activated whenever he feels strong emotions. When activated he sees himself as a clown and all threats around him turn into ferocious monsters. On top of this Zheng is working a job with a low wage and has medical […]
