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Film Review: My Heavenly City 我的天堂城市 (2023) Taiwan 🇹🇼 Reviewed by Andrew Chan(Film Critics Circle of Australia 🇦🇺)   The most beautiful aspect of this lovely little gem of a film is the core emotional focus of human journeys in different stages of their lives and how they grow in face of adversity, love, relationships, life decisions, mental illness and those around them. The lovely wrap around these three intertwined stories just happened that it revolves around New York City, a city that director Sen-I Yu lived within. In a way, it also portray the struggles of the recent immigration...

Film Review: Meg 2: The Trench 巨齒鯊2：海溝深淵 (2023) - China USA 🇨🇳 🇺🇸 Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia 🇦🇺)   A rare success combination of two cinematic box office global powerhouse for China and Hollywood, comes the sequel of the commercially successful “The Meg” (2018) in the form of bigger and more mega sharks in  director Ben Wheatley’s “Meg 2: The Trench”. The film series is entirely an adaptation of the science fiction horror by Steven Alten. By the looks of things, with over 7 books and continuing in the series, we are all in for...

The Brotherhood of Rebel 紮職2 (2023) Hong Kong 🇭🇰 Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia 🇦🇺 )   Over a decade after the mindless entertainment gangster flick “Triad”, comes the unrelated sequel in the form of “Brotherhood of Rebel”. With an entirely different cast, crew and director, this film flairs far better in its execution as well as its character driven focus making this better than a typical genre gangster film. We all loved “Young and Dangerous” series and talented director Terry Ng (made the rewarding “Pretty Heart”) goes into full speed with plenty of exciting action...

Film Review: Lost in the Stars 消失的她 (2023) China 🇨🇳 Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia 🇦🇺)   Based on adaptation from Alexey Korenev's 1990 Soviet comedy film A Trap for Lonely Man and French playwright Robert Thomas' 1960 play Trap for a Lonely Man (Piege Pour un Homme Seul), it forms the core of director Cui Rui’s “Lost in the Stars”. Alfred Hitchcock once wanted to adapted this play and the result is one filled with Hitchcock style scenarios including femme fatale, missing people, twists and turns and human conditions. There is a lot of genuine...

Film Review: No More Bets 孤注一掷 (2023) China 🇨🇳 Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia 🇦🇺)   With the impending JPEX fraud and the South-East Asian kidnapped “workers”, it’s probably timely to witness “No More Bets” a film that tackles both of these themes and concerns making this more than just a public message. In fact the best parts of the film is when there is no law enforcement, where the criminals and the forced workers (from all walks life) interacts, somehow manage to build an elaborated online scam that follows any traditional fraud we have all...