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In the early 1990s, the performance of the Chinese men’s table tennis team was at a historic all-time low. As the head coach during that time of crisis, Cai Zhenhua was entrusted with the challenging task of forming a new team. Led by the so-called “Five Great Generals”, players Ma Wenge, Wang Tao, Ding Song, Liu Guoliang as well as Kong Linghui, and after a period of arduous training, the team finally prevailed at the 1995 World Table Tennis Championships in Tianjin to return to the pinnacle of the sport.

This movie is based on real-life historical events, and pays tribute to the spirit of unity, perseverance and hard work in Chinese table tennis.

(Source: Translated from Douban)

This sports movie is another collaboration between actor-director Deng Chao (Shadow) and screenwriter Yu Baimei – both were also co-directors for the 2019 movie Looking Up. Cast members include Deng’s wife Sun Li...

Lame humor and incoherent plotting are among the shortcomings of “The Rookies,” an initially engaging but increasingly tedious Chinese action-comedy-thriller that not even kick-ass movie queen Milla Jovovich can breathe much life into. Undemanding genre fans might go for this Budapest-set hodge-podge about rookie secret agents tackling a deranged billionaire, but there’s not much here for anyone else. After flopping in Chinese cinemas way back in July 2019 it seems very strange for “The Rookies” to be receiving limited U.S. theatrical release on April 16, 2021.

Working six years after his impressive action spectacular “Firestorm,” writer-director Alan Yuen hasn’t lost his knack for well-staged mayhem and destruction. But along with co-writers Lei Xu and Kong Yun-cheung, Yuen falls short of the mark when injecting comedy into the mix. that extinguishes suspense and makes it hard for audiences to care about such silly, one-dimensional characters.

Things at least kick off on an exciting note,...

I should have known better considering I’ve seen two Alan Yuen films before: a directorial effort in Firestorm that forgets its unwavering severity in the third act to deliver farcical chaos and a screenwriting effort in Monster Hunt wherein the lead is a pregnant man with the salvation of monster-kind cooking in his belly. I should have known the American trailer for his latest work The Rookies was manipulated beyond its desire to pretend Milla Jovovich was its star. While that was obviously not the case (a common ruse studios use to shield audiences from realizing they are walking into a foreign language film—although this one being fully dubbed was a surprise), the Chinese James Bond aesthetic did at least seem real.

If I had gone back to remember those previous films, however, I would have at least been prepared for how wrong that assumption proves. Because while...

In 2004, directors Xuan Liang and Chun Zhang created a Flash animation for an online contest. From there they expanded it into a feature length film steeped in Chinese supernatural legend. And despite some funding snags over its twelve-year production schedule, Big Fish & Begonia turned its approximately five million-dollar budget (in today’s Us dollars) into just shy of one hundred million at the Chinese box office. Now it makes its way to America two years later for a limited release, another stellar example of the nation’s growing animation industry. With its beautiful aesthetic and distinctive tale of life, death, and love, the film should find a welcome audience.

The story takes place in a magical world that exists beneath the human world in an alternate, spiritual reality. Its inhabitants are mostly humanoid in appearance, their supernatural powers attuned to the natural forces of the world. Known as “Others,...