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Tornado Girl 恋上疯狂女 (2017) - Japan   Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)     What I enjoyed about the off beat romantic coming of age Japanese comedy “Tornado Girl” is the sense of urgency, love and quirkiness about it that makes it click. It helps when you have the stunning Kiko Mizuhara playing the living in the moment PR girl combining well with the highly likeable Satoshi Tsumabuki. It is the kind of film where you don’t so much bother on how much sense we are making, but rather what happens on-screen. Director Hitoshi Ohne created...

Walking Past the Future 路過未來 (2017) - China   Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)     Director Li Ruijin fifth film remains his most accessible to date and commercially casted A-List actress Yang Zishan in an against type and best career performance. Filmed largely in the southern city of Shenzhen, famously on the border with Hong Kong, we see a sad and bleak story about the struggling working class that becomes impacted with the slow down of the Chinese economy. It’s refreshing to see a film show the real struggle of many in China, rather than...

Dot 2 Dot 點對點 (2014) – Hong Kong [2014 HKIFF] Director: Amos WhyScreenplay: Amos WhyStarring: Moses Chan Ho, Meng Tingyi, Susan Shaw Yin-yin, Lam Tze-chung Reviewed by: Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia) Initial Thoughts: It’s a sentimental feeling when a film takes you back to your childhood, depicting what Hong Kong used to be like and how we used to value heritage and traditional over vast commercialism. Directed/Produced and Written by Amos WHY, “Dot 2 Dot” gives us that allowance and time to reminiscent about what had been changed, inquire our past connections and understanding what we truly value.   In-depth Analysis: “Dot 2...

River of Exploding Durians 榴莲忘返 (2014) – Malaysia [2015 HKAFF] Reviewed by: Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia) Director: 杨毅恒 Edmund Yeo Cast: 朱芷莹 Zhu Zhi-ying, 高圣 Shern Koe, 刘倩妏 Daphne Low, 梁祖仪 Joey Leong I have always been interested in Edmund Yeo’s works and his transition from shorts to feature length film is by no means a simple journey. The film is narratively constructed to reflect several layers of mirrors, Edmund’s own childhood, first love and reflections on politics and the wider world around him through the male lead character, while the characters in the film themselves crosses parallel paths. The...

Aqérat 阿奇洛 (We, the Dead) (2017) – Malaysia [HKAFF 2018] Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia) Edmund Yeo’s continuation of his promising directorial feature debut in 2014’s “River of the Exploding Durians” comes in “Aqerat”, a difficult film to sit through, but nonetheless, also his most ambitious to date. Tackling the political and universal human rights based the true events on the discovery of mass graves in northern Malaysia of over two hundred Rohingya refugees, buried by Malaysian human traffickers, the film become layers of dream-like sequence and often providing damning of humans losing humanity and eventually mortality. Yeo...