- Grande dude of the French cinema, Alain Delon, will star in Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To‘s next film, reports CriEnglish. This seems particularly fitting to me, as Delon’s hard-boiled turns in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville greatly inspired HK New Wave actors such as Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung. Last year’s Election 2 may well be To’s masterpiece, see it at all costs!
- Speaking of Election 2, it won the Best Film award from the Hong Kong Critics Society this past week, and To also walked away with Best Director for another excellent picture, Exiled. Other notable prizes went to Best Actor Jet Li for his role in Fearless and Best Actress Gong Li for her role in Curse of the Golden Flower.
- With the increasing popularity of Asian film, it’s about time that a pan-Asian film award was created – this year will mark the first iteration of the Asian Film Awards! Organized by the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the extremely diverse lineup features an admirable race for Best Picture, with the aforementioned Curse of the Golden Flower and Exiled representing HK, The Host representing South Korea, Opera Jawa representing Indonesia, and Still Life representing mainland China.
- Fortune Star releases have been at the top of my list for the past two years, following a tried-and-true formula: take hard to find Hong Kong classics such as Bullet in the Head, Police Story and All About Ah Long, painstakingly digitally remaster them in high def, freshly translate the subtitles, and pack in dozens of extras. This week sees the release of a true masterpiece, long name-checked by Quentin Tarantino and out-of-print for more than a decade thanks to the gross incompetence of Miramax – Peking Opera Blues.
- Watch the trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s latest, Retribution, courtesy of Twitch. The film marks Kurosawa’s 8th pairing with Japanese everyman Koji Yakusho, starring as a detective who comes to suspect he may be investigating himself.
- And, if this humble 007 fan might stretch the semantics of “Asian Film”, Casino Royale opened in China yesterday, the first time in the 45-year history of filmic Bond that one of the character’s outings has seen official release! The BBC has the full story.