Tag: nightclub

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We’re Nothing
at All
(Ngo Mun
Bat Si Sam Mo,
我們不是什麼)

Director – Herman Yau – 2026 – China, Hong Kong – Cert. 18 – 128m

*****

A seasoned forensics expert pieces together the story behind a bus bombing as the lives and motives of those responsible is revealed in interweaving serial flashbacks – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, May 29th

A police procedural but not exactly a thriller. This starts off with an unforgettable sequence as, below us, a bus silently weaves its way through streets. And then, without warning, explodes. You’d be forgiven for thinking that, after this bravura opening, you’re in for yet another Hong Kong cops and robbers action movie. And yet, while this is undeniably a police procedural, and contains enough gore and grisly bits to earn it a BBFC 18 certificate, it’s far from your standard HK action outing. Given that Herman Yau’s previous work has included a thriller about a cannibal serial killer The Eight Immortals Restaurant – the Untold Story aka Bunman – the Untold Story (1993) and cops and robbers bomber thriller Shock Wave (2017), this is something of a surprise.

Rather, it’s a drama. If you will, a police forensics drama. The matter of fact, real time nature of the opening sequence introduces no characters whatsoever.… Read the rest

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Resurrection
(Kuangye Shidai,
狂野时代,
lit. Wild Times)

Director – Bi Gan – 2025 – China – Cert. 15 – 160m

****

An authority figure pursues a Deliriant – a man who escapes the authorities and his own social responsibilities by dreaming – through a period of a hundred years – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 13th

This opens with a long series of intertitles about people discovering that the secret to eternal life is to stop dreaming. Rebels who refuse to do this are known as Deliriants, and they cause all manner of disruption to wider society. Then, the celluloid image catches fire…

revealing people watching stupified from the cinema stalls only to be rushed out by a truncheon-wielding policeman as music plays in the manner of a silent film. A lady photographer (Shu Qi from The Assassin, Hou Hsaio-hsien, 2015; The Transporter, Louis LeTerrier, Corey Yuen, 2002; Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsaio-Hsien, 2001) appears to take a picture of the unseen projector (where we, the audience, are sitting).

The intertitles continue. One Deliriant (Jackson Yee from The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge, Tsui Hark, 2022; The Battle at Lake Changjin, Chen Kaige, Dante Lam, Tsui Hark, 2021) has been forgotten because he’s hiding in an ancient, distant past – that is film.… Read the rest

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The Bride!

Director – Maggie Gyllenhaal – 2026 – US – Cert. 15 – 126m

**

In 1930s Chicago, Frankenstein’s monster seeks love and companionship, so a dead girl, possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley, is reanimated as his Bride – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 6th

Stuck for eons in a black and white limbo, having died of brain cancer after writing the novel Frankenstein – perhaps the novel was part of a brain tumour – and feeling that she’d not managed to say within it what she needed to say, the departed spirit of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley from Hamnet, Chloe Zhao, 2025; The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021; Misbehaviour, Phillippa Lowthorpe, 2020) observes the world of the living, in colour, and enters it to take possession of a living woman in 1930s Chicago through whom she intends to say what still needs to be said. She picks the fearless and vivacious Ida (Buckley again) in the orbit of ruthless gangster Lupino (Zlatko Burić from Superman, James Gunn, 2025; Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund, 2022; Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refn, 1996).

Being fed one oyster too many in a nightclub, Ida wilfully throws up over one of Lupino’s men.… Read the rest

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Invisibles
(Invisibles)

Director – Junna Chif – 2025 – Canada – 94m

****1/2

A sex worker turned exotic dancer starts providing sexual services to disabled people – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

“Blow jobs are real jobs – and real jobs suck” reads a slogan held by three boisterous young women on a protest march. In a nightclub, we watch one of them perform a burlesque striptease to rapturous applause from the audience, seated in male and female blocks. ‘Ella’ (Nadia Essadiqi from Incendies, Denis Villeneueve, 2010) later gets an email from the disabled brother of a friend stating he is now “ready for full sexual intercourse”.

She decides to meet the challenge, so the sender turns up in a van with his carer Marco (Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles) who hoists him onto the bed, then departs for an hour leaving a contact number. Floyd (Floyd Lapierre-Poupart) can’t move much and has club hands and feet, and their initial encounter proves less than successful, resulting in his premature ejaculation. You sense that the whole exercise is way outside both their comfort zones. In the tense exchange that follows with Marco, he emphasises that the correct term is “people with a disability, Miss” and she retorts with, “sex workers, Sir.”… Read the rest

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Street Wanderers
(Los Caminantes
de la Calle)

Director – Juan Martin Hsu – 2025 – Argentina, Peru – 90m

*****

Argentinian cops and robbers procedural is set largely in the world of Mendoza’s immigrant Chinese community – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

2010. Mendoza, Argentina. The family-run, Chinese restaurant of Dageng (Kon Yam Pin) receives telephone threats for protection money. When they don’t pay up within 24 hours, a motorbike with two riders pulls up on at their door which opens onto the main street and fires four shots. So Dageng’s son (Willy Kon Chin Yi) delivers a rucksack containing $50 000 to the gang. But later, the riders complain there was only $30 000 and demand another $20 000.

Lots of similarly threatening phone calls overlap on the soundtrack as we see numerous yellow cables plugged into a telecoms hub, recalling similar motifs in movies as diverse as Three Colours Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953).

The prosecutor’s office is monitoring phone calls, but faces challenges. One such is that the calls are in Cantonese so require an interpreter to turn them into intelligible Spanish. Another is illustrated when the current interpreter quits, terrified what might happen to her family if word about the nature of her work gets out.… Read the rest

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The Silent Virgin
(La Virgen Silenciosa)

Director – Xavi Sala – 2025 – Mexico – 127m

*****

A legal secretary frustrated in her job embarks on a relationship with another woman, but her possessive mother does not approve – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This certainly knows how to grab your attention at the start. An icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) hangs on the wall. On the bed, a grown woman pleasures herself until… The earth moves! Everything is shaking, and she quickly recovers her composure as her middle-aged mother runs in to get her out of the house as the earthquake alarm goes off.

After, they eat at the meal table, and her mother (Mercedes Hernández from New Order, Michel Franco, 2020) asks Vale (“Va-lay”; Zamira Franco also from New Order), who she’ll later address as Valeria, to pick up prescriptions while she’s out and makes sure she doesn’t forget her packed lunch. Then it’s train, bus and the walk past colourful stalls to work. Vale’s office with about half a dozen or so people seems to be piled high with paperwork. They are dealing with the cases of people being arrested.… Read the rest

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3670
(3670)

Director – Park Joon-ho – 2025 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

A gay man who has defected from North to South Korea must get to grips with Seoul’s gay scene and his own sexual and religious identity – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runs in cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

Sexually active, gay Seoul resident Cheol-jun (Cho You-hyun) grapples with the fact that his partners don’t stick around after physical interaction. Cheol-jun has recently escaped from North to South Korea. He works at a local store counter and attends a class to help defectors adapt to their new way of life. After class, rather than hang out with fellow defectors such as Hak-min (Jeon Du-sik), who is trying to pair him off with pretty class girl Ji-ye (Choi Yun-seol), he follows phone directions to a mixer, a club night to help gay men make friends.

Numbers are assigned. Asked why he is dressed so formally – is he from North Korea, or something – he responds candidly, “I am.” After drinking “love shots” – two men drink with arms intertwined – guests are invited to write “love notes” to the number they fancy.… Read the rest

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Mongrel
(Baiyi Cang Gou,
白衣蒼狗)

Director – Chiang Wei-liang – 2024 – Taiwan, Singapore, France – Cert. 15 – 128m

****1/2

An immigrant caregiver is caught between the demands of his exhausted, needy clients on the one hand and his profit-oriented gangster taskmasters on the other – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 23rd

This gets straight in there with a taboo-breaking shot of a human bottom covered in excrement, something familiar to anyone who has worked as a carer for an incontinent person but a bit of a shock to the rest of us. A hand bearing a cloth comes into shot and wipes the excrement off. When we eventually see the carer’s head, he is wearing earphones as he does the work. All his male client is doing is wordlessly moaning. We watch the carer lift the man, reassuring him, and deposit him in an offscreen chair. An elderly woman dozes on the sofa. He wipes her brow with a fresh towel. She takes it from him and wipes her face. He tells her he’s fed and bathed Hui (i.e. the son, played by Kuo Shu-wei who has cerebral palsy).

The carer goes outside in the rain. In the cab of his truck, his boss asks, what the hell took you so long?… Read the rest

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Twilight of the Warriors
Walled in
(Jiu Long Cheng
Zhai·Wei Cheng,
九龙城寨之围城)

Director – Soi Cheang – 2023 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 126m

*****

A refugee steals money from a Hong Kong triad then hides out in Kowloon Walled City, a place as dangerous as the triads pursuing him – out on Zavvi-exclusive Limited 4K UHD + Blu-ray Special Edition from Monday, November 11th

Never entered by those outside, an uneasy peace has reigned in Kowloon Walled City a.k.a. the City of Darkness since Cyclone defeated ‘Dragon Head’ Liu and his warlord partner Jim. It’s Hong Kong in the 1980s, when refugees were flooding into the territory. In a nightclub where women dance to Cantopop, one such refugee (Raymond Lam) wins a fist fight competition then is conned by gang boss (Sammo Hung) into paying for a shoddily made fake ID card, which he refuses to accept when he calls to collect it two weeks later. Leaving the ensuing argument, he snatches a bag from the villain’s drug warehouse and runs hell for leather into the Walled City, where the gangsters won’t follow.

Inside, he discovers to his horror that he’s snatched not a bag of banknotes as he supposed but a bag of drugs. Trying to sell it, he finds himself fighting local gangsters, who don’t want him selling drugs on their turf.… Read the rest

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Nowhere to Hide
(Injeong Sajeong
Bol Geot Eobtda,
인정사정 볼 것 없다)

Director – Lee Myung-se – 1999 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 100m, 113m

***1/2

A cop determinedly pursues a gangland killer in a city where, since he committed the murder for which he is bing hunted, it always appears to be heavily raining – plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank

Effectively a four-hander – an impulsive detective, his partner on the force, a ruthless killer gangster and his long-suffering girlfriend. Like a slobbish, South Korean version of Chow Yun-fat without the charm, Park Joong-Hung is the Oriental action movie homage-named Inspector Woo, who before the titles have rolled has pursued a black-clad gang into an underground train for a machete fight, shot in stylish, bleached black and white for no apparent reason.

The ground is covered in Autumn leaves, recalling The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970). The downtown location of public stairway 40 Steps has a schoolgirl look up and see it begin to rain, the torrential downpour continuing for the two months and more of the remainder of the narrative. A man leaves his car to ascend the steps; halfway up, he approaches another man (Song Young-chang) and kills him, even as the victim stretches out his hand in a futile attempt to keep his murderer’s knife at bay.… Read the rest