Film Review: Crossing a Dawn 今晚正好 (2026) - China
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There is a particular hour of the night in a big city when the neon still glows but the crowds have thinned, and two people who met only hours earlier can suddenly feel as if they have known each other for years. Zhao Badou’s *Crossing a Dawn* understands that hour. It is a film about a one-night encounter in Beijing that begins with a botched online date and ends, somewhere near dawn, with two people who have said more true things to each other than they intended. It is light on its feet, adult in its appetites, and unexpectedly tender.
Xu Qiu (Ma Sichun) is a designer in her mid-thirties, sharp, self-possessed, and a little bruised by the usual Beijing math of rent, ambition, and relationships that don’t quite stick. Chen Yuzhou (Chen Haosen) is a younger writer, looser in his posture, slower to declare himself. They meet because a dating-app profile was not what it claimed to be. Instead of parting in mutual embarrassment, they fall into a provisional pact: no promises past sunrise, no performance of forever. They walk. They talk. They test each other with jokes and silences and, eventually, with the kind of physical frankness that most contemporary Chinese romances still treat as radioactive.
Ma Sichun is the film’s center of gravity. She has the rare ability to look both amused and slightly wounded at the same time, and she uses it to make Xu Qiu feel like a real adult rather than a cinematic type. There is a scene in which she explains, almost casually, the gap between the life she projects and the one she actually lives; it is quiet, unshowy, and more revealing than any of the film’s more overtly intimate moments. Chen Haosen matches her with a gentle, slightly self-mocking energy. He never tries to out-charm her. The chemistry is not the explosive kind; it is the more interesting kind that accumulates in small negotiations—how close to stand, when to stop joking, whether the next story will be true.
Zhao Badou, still in his late twenties when he made the film, directs with a confidence that is more surprising than the material. He keeps the camera mostly at street level and lets Beijing’s night do a lot of the atmospheric work. The film is talky, deliberately so. It wants to be a Chinese cousin of *Before Sunrise*, and at its best it earns the comparison: the dialogue has the rhythm of people who are still deciding how much of themselves to risk. At its weaker moments the lines lean a little hard toward aphorism, and a couple of the encounters feel arranged rather than discovered. These are the growing pains of a first feature, not fatal flaws. The film recovers each time by returning to the faces of its two leads and the simple fact that neither of them is entirely sure what they want the night to become.
What I liked most is the film’s refusal to punish its characters for wanting both the body and the conversation. It treats desire as ordinary rather than as a moral problem, and then lets sincerity arrive almost by accident. In an era when so many screen romances are either antiseptic or punitive, that feels like a modest but real liberation. The movie knows that most adults already understand the difference between a night and a life; it simply asks whether the night can still matter.
*Crossing a Dawn* will not rearrange anyone’s view of cinema. It is a small, well-observed urban romance that believes two people talking honestly in the dark is still worth watching. On that modest but human scale, it succeeds. Ma Sichun, especially, makes you glad you stayed until morning. (Neo, 2026)