Last Suspect (2023)

A laughable cliche of a high-powered, ultra-successful criminal lawyer - she never loses a case - and a laughable cliche of a loose-wire cop - the sort who shoots first and shows no respect to the station chief - team up in a watchable but patently absurd thriller that grows increasingly ridiculous as it goes on - the lawyer's daughter is kidnapped for an unusual ransom, with the lawyer coerced into reinvestigating and solving a murder before the young man found guilty of the crime is sentenced.

★★☆☆☆

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南方车站的聚会 (Nanfang chezhan de juhui) (The Wild Goose Lake (2019)

This crime drama is a touch overloaded with cinematic flourishes — there is a police hunt in a zoo at night, a scene in a funhouse full of mirrors, luminescent night-bootscooting, disconcerting moments as the camera swings between twins, and loads of noirish shadow-play — but with the style and slinkiness of In The Mood For Love, sharing that classic's bold colour palette and muted sexy tone but applied to a gritty modern-day crime story, it is an utterly capivating thriller about man-on-the-run Zedong Zhou, a small-time crim caught up in big-time crime, and the prostitute who may be helping him...or might she in fact be after the reward for bringing him in?

★★★★☆

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The Abandoned (查無此心) (2022)

This Taiwanese crime flick takes the problem of "runaway workers" (illegal immigrants) in Taiwan (from Thailand and Vietnam, for example) and makes this gritty real issue the context of a run-of-the-mill serial killer thriller, perfectly watchable, except as it reaches its denouement (a "the serial killer wears a birthday party hat and laughs maniacally in his underground lair" denouement) the gritty realism gives way to more and more eye-rolling cliche.

★★★☆☆

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Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (2005)

This melodrama, a Chinese production, has an older Japanese man, an emotionally detached fisherman, travelling to China with a hare-brained scheme to reunite with his dying son - his misguided and really only completely self-serving actions cause enormous trouble to everyone he encounters including Japanese-speaking tour guides, Chinese village leaders and townsfolk, Government officials, prison wardens and staff and prisoners, and they in return go to so much trouble for him - ridiculous amounts of trouble - that you have to wonder in the end if this infuriating, humorous, and emotional story from director Zhang Yimou really means to pull your heartstrings or comment on a cultural difference.

★★★★☆

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Nightfall (大追捕) (2012)

*SPOILER WARNING*

Perhaps this Hong Kong mystery thriller belongs to a greater series, you'll wonder, as an entire team of crime-busters, headed by a shabby Columbo sort, investigate and solve the case of a musician's death without so much as a personality or a name or other distinuguishing feature among them ("Was there an earlier episode?" you'll wonder, and certainly the film has the production values and calibre of acting of a hastily churned out episode of a tv crime series) but the other problems with this mystery thriller is that the mystery is unpleasant, centred on a gross, overacted abusive father-daughter relationship, and obvious - anyone who has read Keigo Higashino will quickly recognise what the mysterious X is that holds all the dreary elements together.  

★★☆☆☆

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Battle of Memories (记忆大师) (2017)

After a medical 'memory removal' operation, a writer starts experiencing the memories of a killer and so, in this sporadically futuristic, initially high concept but in the end decidedly low concept and messy crime mystery from China, it falls to the writer and a pair of badly overacting police officers to work as hard as they can to stretch their invesigations of these murder-memories to movie-length.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Devotion of Suspect X (嫌疑人X的献身) (2017)

The 2017 Chinese film version of Keigo Higashino's bestselling thriller - the one in which a crime-busting physicist and his childhood friend, a maths professor whom we know did it, face off in a Furuhata Ninzaburo...alright, Columbo...style game of cat-and-mouse, is more The Devotion of Suspect Zzzzz, a movie zapped of the book's energy due to the absence of character backstories and Japanese context and further dampened by the exaggerated performances of the two leads: a repugnant Yukawa (here "Tang Chuan"), whose smugness is laid on as thick as his concealer, and a narcotised Ishigami (here "Shi Hong"), whose maths brilliance has been replaced with chronic fatigue.

★★☆☆☆

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The Great Wall (长城) (2017)

The poster teases, "What were they trying to keep out [by building the Great Wall of China]?" but the intrigue ends very early on in this Matt Damon-helmed fantasy action when the gnashing dog beasts, the Tao Tei, are revealed and then shown over and over and over again, with every subsequent shot of a dog beast leaping forward into a 'mouth spear' further deadening your interest, and nor is your interest likely to be kindled by scenes of political friction between Damon's European mercenary (in China in search of gunpowder) and Jing Tian's Commander Lin - back and forth, back and forth they go: are they allies or are they enemies? - for these scenes exist simply to break up the monotony of the monster wave attacks...and myriad weapons (fiery cannonballs, bungee ropes, big scissors and bedsheets fashioned into wonky balloons) also fail to recapture the wonder of that teaser question.

★★☆☆☆

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Detective Dee and the Four Heavenly Kings (狄仁杰之四大天王) (2018)

Like 2013s Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon, this third Tsui Hark-directed Detective Dee movie is a prequel to 2010s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame and again involves the titular character, Di Renjie (an actual Tang Dynasty historical figure embellished with Sherlockian powers of deduction) investigating a gong'an crime - a crime steeped in the supernatural that ultimately looks like threatening the life of the Emperor - and it is clearly meant to be a bigger and better blockbuster than the previous movies and boy does it feature some spectacularly realised bad guys, but ultimately this wuxia costume drama ends up suffering 'the curse of the third movie' with the drive to be bigger and better coming at the expense of a sensible ending.

★★★☆☆

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Happy Together (春光乍洩) (Chung gwong cha sit) (1997)

A passionate but dysfunctional relationship plays out in Argentina in Wong Kar-wai's utterly captivating 1997 love story that, with Tony Leung in the lead, with the prominence of a hypnotic soundtrack, with its foreign setting like a timeless other world, and with its whispered secrets (here, whispered into a cassette player, not a hole in a wall at Angkor Wat), feels as much a part of the director's other romantic works, Days of Being Wild, In The Mood For Love, and 2046, which are considered a loose trilogy but for some reason not a tetralogy.

★★★★★

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Cock and Bull (追凶者也) (2016)

Unless it is all cock and bull, it might help to be familiar with the true case of murder in China's Yunnan Province upon which this "Chinese Fargo" is based because a mostly young Chinese cinema audience responded positively to this movie while I was bewildered and bored by its disjointed story which starts being told from the perspective of a father falsely accused of murder, switches to the perspective of a bike-thieving bystander, then finally tells the long and unremarkable story of a bungling assassin-for-hire.

★☆☆☆☆

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Connected (保持通话) (2008)

This is almost a scene-by-scene Chinese remake of Cellular, the unexpected 2004 Hollywood hit about an everyman literally called upon to be a hero when a captive woman manages to contact him with a random call; this version is suspenseful fun with a likeable hero but stretches things well past the point of no return when the bad guys start nonsensically refraining from simply killing everyone who knows their secret.

★★★☆☆

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Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (狄仁杰之通天帝国) (2010)

It may disappoint Western audiences hoping for the big budget magic realism of Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, etc, but despite its not quite so sumptuous staging, Detective Dee is a solidly entertaining mystery adventure, like a Chinese-Hong Kong Young Sherlock Holmes with its intriguing mystery of people bursting into flames in ancient China, a mystery investigated by historically real but embellished Tang Dynasty official Renjie 'Detective Dee' Di.

★★★★☆

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Hero (2002)

This is a poetic fairytale rendering of the formative days and profound political influence of Emperor Qin's reign over ancient China with Jet Li starring as the hero set to play an important role in the Emperor's plans for a unified country.

★★★★★

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