Weiting Liu

If nothing really matters, why don’t we all just be kind? Writer-director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as Daniels) throw this existential question into the maximalist multiverse chaos of their sci-fi action dramedy Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film’s advocate for kindness amidst the zeitgeist generations’ omnipresent nihilism is heartfelt and hard-earned – and not without diving deep first into the dark, sticky terrains of our morals and minds.

In late January at Sundance, I attended the world premiere of writer-director Jianjie Lin’s debut feature Brief History of a Family (Jia ting jian shi, 2024), the Chinese contender of the festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

“Moving on is an American idea.” Discussing the passing of her grandpa, Katy’s (Awkwafina) Chinese immigrant family is bantering with her about her Westernised perspective on life and death. Amid its audiovisual bombardments, cultural mishmashes and genre hodgepodges, Marvel’s first Asian superhero film, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, is anchored by this incisive, all-encompassing line about legacy, grief and identity.

In 2018, a photo revealing the huge gender pay gap in a junior surfing competition goes viral on social media. This documentary goes back to Bondi Beach in the 1980s — when pioneering female surfers had it even worse, yet blazed a trail for the next generations of girls to follow.

Craig’s humane rendition of the God-and-Margaret fable gets back to the basics and continues to matter against waves of regressive policymaking.

Derek Tsang Kwok-cheung’s cause célèbre-turned-success story combines hard-hitting drama with woozy romance.

A fiery crowd-pleaser premiering at this year’s SXSW, Eva Longoria’s feature directorial debut Flamin’ Hot adds even more spice to the heated rags-to-riches story of Richard Montañez, a janitor-turned-executive at PepsiCo.

With the premiers of Bottoms and I Used to Be Funny at this year’s SXSW, Rachel Sennott has taken the festival by storm with her comedic ingenuity and dramatic versatility.

Paired with The Novelist’s Film which premiered earlier this year, Hong Sang-soo’s latest Walk Up is another boutique noir that explores his recurrent themes of artistic frustration and creative stagnation.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong New Wave auteur Stanley Kwan’s queer classic Lan Yu, which premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and proceeded to take top honours at the Hong Kong Film Awards and Taiwan Golden Horse Awards. Due to the film’s explicit depiction of homosexuality, it has never been released theatrically in mainland China, achieving its cult status thanks to online piracy.

This intimate documentary, shot during lockdown in Wuhan, measures the human cost of the coronavirus pandemic.

The New-York-based Chinese film organisation CineCina has teamed up with Smart Cinema USA – a streaming platform introducing Chinese box office films to North American audiences – to launch the first CineCina iFest on the SmartCinema USA mobile app.

On a Sunday evening back in July I was at Rooftop Films' New York City premiere of director Ben Mullinkosson's documentary feature The Last Year of Darkness. (The film first came out at this year's CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, Denmark.) Its opening shot of a rumbling subway tunnel transported us from the Brooklyn rooftop to the underground of Chengdu, China—my hometown city that I left for Los Angeles at the age of 18.

On a Sunday afternoon back in early October, I paid a studio visit to photographer and artist Jarod Lew at Yale University in Connecticut. At the time, he had just finished printing a fresh batch of photographs for his current MFA project at Yale School of Art. He showed me some of these new prints inspired by Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, and asked about my thoughts on them as a Chinese film critic.

“Olivia and daughter Addy exert clear-cut boundaries and avoid the gendered pitfall of having to ‘fix’ the man in their lives.”

Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.