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The Shadow’s Edge (2025)
Larry Yang’s The Shadow’s Edge is a Chinese-Hong Kong remake of Yau Nai-hoi’s 2007 Hong Kong police thriller Eye in the Sky. The newer production therefore not only tells a story about a clash between old investigative methods and modern technology, but also constitutes an attempt to rewrite the traditions of classic Hong Kong police…
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Trapped (2025)
The story of Trapped takes place in 1995, one year before China’s gun-control law came into force. Director and screenwriter Zhang Qi uses this moment as a boundary between an old order governed by violence and a new order of law and state authority. The film depicts the transformation of one into the other through…
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I’m Still Kind of a Daydreamer (2024)
I’m Still Kind of a Daydreamer is Eva Y.C. Chen’s first feature-length project. She served as its director, screenwriter, editor, producer and cinematographer, making the film an entirely personal work. It is an intimate portrait of procrastination, uncertainty about one’s future and the need to have dreams — at times remarkably naturalistic, at times poetic…
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Left-Handed Girl (2025)
Left-Handed Girl is a deeply personal project for Taiwanese filmmaker Tsou Shih-ching, who spent twenty-five years developing it. During that time, she built an international reputation through her long-standing artistic collaboration with Sean Baker. She produced his Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021), and co-directed Take Out with him…
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The Furious (2025)
The Hong Kong film industry periodically reminds itself that the true strength of its action cinema lies in unrestrained physicality. In 1949 Wu Pang offered “real” kung-fu to audiences tired of fantasy films. In 1965 the Shaw Brothers studio, at the instigation of Chang Cheh, launched a trend of introducing previously unseen levels of brutality…
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Wings of Dread (2026)
On 3 July 2026, an action film premiered on Chinese streaming platforms — iQIYI, Youku, Tencent Video, Mango TV, and Bilibili — promoted as a collision between Shaolin-style martial arts and the more brutal Indonesian discipline of pencak silat. The former is represented by actor, choreographer, and director Shi Xiaolong, known internationally as Ashton Chen;…
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Blades of the Guardians (2026)
Wuxia cinema has formed one of the cornerstones of Hong Kong — and earlier, when The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple arrived on screen in 1928, also Shanghai — filmmaking almost from its very beginnings. Even when kung-fu films came to dominate in the 1970s and beyond, wuxia could boast numerous worthwhile entries. At…
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All the Way to the Endless (2024)
Following the international successes of Gan Bi’s artistically oriented films, Chinese independent cinema has found itself in his shadow — as readers of Velarium were able to discover from the review of Binbin Li’s debut production The Night Rain South Township (2023). Another young director, Liang Shi, has taken a similar direction, though his film…
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The Night Rain South Township (2023)
The successes of Bi Gan’s films — Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night — have had a clear influence on young, artistically minded filmmakers from China, especially those interested in the cinema of memory, dreams, and the poetic. Among them is Binbin Li, who in 2023 completed his feature-length narrative debut The Night Rain South Township, which strongly…
