Hong Kong in Film: 2025
Hong Kong cinema didn’t come close to a repeat of its surprising 2024.
Is it just us, or was 2025 the shittiest of shows? Just when we thought it couldn’t possibly get worse than 2020, along came the Dictator Renaissance, fresh attempted genocides and the increasing enshittification of the interwebs, which is so loaded up with filthy AI slop – as in unsustainble and highly polluting thanks to bananas energy demands – bland writing and creepy images it makes you want to unplug. That’s not even factoring in the tragic apartment block fire in the New Territories that cast a pall over the city, rightly so. And just for fun, the new year started with South America: The Dirty War Decades V2.0. Good luck, Venezuela.
On that note let’s take stock of a way less earth-shattering corner of the world in the grand scheme of things: the nine stories that defined the year in Hong Kong cinema. It was a tough one, there’s no denying it, with plenty of bizarre underperformers (Oliver Chan Siu-keun’s criminally underseen Montages of a Modern Motherhood), disappointing big swings (Kung Siu-ping’s Measure in Love) and enigmas (Nick Cheung Ka-fai’s Peg O’ My Heart) – none of which made much cash – and disturbing industry trends. But there were some pleasant surprises, like Louis Koo’s late year minor win, Dickson Leung’s out of nowhere Good Game and Robin Lee’s sleeper hit doc Four Trails. Maybe it’s like Star Trek and the even years will be the good ones. Here’s to 2026!
09. sTill in the ’90s… And Getting Bored
Last year we had words about how Hong Kong cinema was stuck in a 1990s glory days rut, and was relying too much on the “old guard” in its films. More than a few casual viewers in a wholly unscientific survey admitted they wouldn’t be able to identify and/or name a single young star if asked. That bodes poorly for the future, and what’s worse is that falling back on those familiar faces is starting to backfire. Alan Mak Siu-fai’s Under Current, featuring peak ’90s stars Aaron Kwok Fu-shing, Simon Yam Tat-wah, Francis Ng Chun-yu and Alex Fong Chung-sun, stalled at the box office at an anaemic HK$6.3 million. Some of that could be chalked up to the film’s ludicrousness, but normally reliable Herman Yau Lai-to and his Andy Lau Tak-wah headlining A Gilded Game, Larry Yang Zi’s The Shadow’s Edge (a co-pro and, duh) and Juno Mak’s ’90s-heavy Sons of the Neon Night came and went with zero notice. Zzzzz.
08. …Unless it’s Nostalgic
But evidently the 2000s are quite another story. A sequel to the 2001 TVB wuxia series A Step into the Past that starred a pile of ’90s mainstays – Louis Koo Tin-lok, Raymond Lam Fung, Jessica Hsuan Suen-huen – Back to the Past blew the doors off cinemas on opening day with an HK$11 million haul. That total was heaps better than the ones posted by the juggernauts that were Last Dance and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In in recent years, and was the balm theatre operators desperately needed after the postponement of Avatar: Fire and Ash. Hollywood has been leaning on these kind of mothballed properties for legacy sequels a lot in the last few years, so perhaps the industry here is going to take a page from that playbook. We’ll all know more when the final coins on the aptly titled Back to the Past are counted. Forensic Heroes: The Next Generation, anyone?
07. MO’ MOney
“Where is it?” is what scads of budding filmmakers wonder on any given day. Hong Kong certainly isn’t alone in seeing film financing sources turning off the taps these days, but it doesn’t make it any less painful. Still, independent and industry bodies are stepping into the breach where possible, aping the higher profile but slightly fussier First Feature Film Initiative by CreateHK. To whit, the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers’ Keep Rolling Keep Running programme. The scheme supplies filmmakers with funding, practical opportunities, employment opportunties and mentorship for an emerging generation of directors. It’s a sort of circular system that reinvests any proceeds back into local productions and supporting the industry. Lofty goals, indeed. So far Keep Rolling Keep Running has produced Antonio Tam Sin-yeung and Lam Sen’s Valley of the Shadow of Death and Mandrew Kwan Man-hin’s The Remnant. The FHKF closed the second application round in 2023. Let’s see if there’s a round three.
06. REady for Her close-up
After a 2024 dominated by small-ish parts – a fairly anonymous firefighter in Cesium Fallout, the spectre of a dead relative in Table for Six 2, a rando resident in Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In – Fish Liew Chi-yu had her honest to god, double-digit breakout year in 2025. True, the Malaysian-born actor has been around for a while, and she’s been popping up in her share of notable, major roles since the mid-2010s (No. 1 Chung Ying Street, Anita, Limbo), but this year was the one where she said, “Yo, bitchez, check me out.” Okay she didn’t say that, but her work did: Chong Keat Aun’s Pavane For an Infant, Tam Wai-ching’s Someone Like Me and Tracy Choi Ian-sin’s Girlfriends (which screened at BIFF and opens March 5) were the obvious standouts, along side an Anita 4K remaster, 20 episodes of ViuTV’s City of Light and The Remnant. Next up? One time box office champ Jack Ng Wai-lun’s CNY comedy Night King, starring Dayo Wong Chi-wah. Yup, she’s officially big time.
05. Back from the Brink
Yes, it looked like it was dead and buried early in the year, but the Johnnie To Kei-fung shepherded 19th Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival managed to happen despite what To called, “all kinds of challenges” and “having weathered ups and downs recently” (ya think?) in his catalogue introduction note. Nonetheless happening under the radar in December instead of June, emerging and established artists Demon Wong, Yen Hao-hsuan, Bobby Yu Shuk-pui, Cindy Lee, Ho Ka-ho, Miki Tanaka, Michał Toczek, Damian Walshe-Howling, Tung Yeung, and award winners Erica Kwok Chung-yee (28, pictured, which took the Fresh Wave Award), director Kingston Chow Kin-kan (Mixed ‘N’ Match), screenwriters Au King-hei and Yiu King-hei (We Miss, We Meet, We Move On), DOP David Chueng Ho-tak (A Day in Kwun Tong), Special Mention Canice Tam Kai-yin (Last Dream) and Audience Award winner Kristen Ko Sze-yeuk (Homecoming and Going) were among the 23 short filmmakers showcased this year. As the saying goes, filmmakers gonna filmmake.
04. No Dongs, Pt. III
For the third year running, sexuality has gotten Hong Kong’s ratings board clutching their pearls. A Cat III was slapped on Tam Wai-ching’s sophomore feature Someone Like Me in November. The film about a woman with cerebral palsy looking to have at least one sexual experience before her mother (!) forces her (!!) to have a hysterectomy (!!!) stars Fish Liew (of course), Carlos Chan Ka-lok and, evidently, a little too much of Chan’s bare, “gyrating” butt. The sequence depicting a consensual exchange that centred female pleasure was the sticking point for the board, who supposedly told Tam she’d get a IIB if she snipped a couple of seconds of Chan gettin’ jiggy. To the board’s credit, Bring Her Back wisely got a Cat III and protected some of us from that scene (if you know, you know). To Tam’s credit she said “No, thanks,” and left a crucial scene whole that made the film more affecting and made its point. But we’re all still hung up on this shit in 2025? Wait ’til the ratings board gets a gander at Crave’s Heated Rivalry when it lands on HBO Max (if it hasn’t already). Get the fainting couch and smelling salts ready.
03. Going, going, gone
And speaking of desperately needed balms. Hong Kong’s cinema landscape was hit with another series of tremors in 2025, as cinema owners and operators continued the disturbing trend of movie house closures that really picked up in 2024. Now also dead: Golden Harvest’s glorious Grand Ocean in TST, Whampoa and MegaBox locations, The Grand Kornhill and Newport’s Mongkok venue. The Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers’ Tin Kai-man wasn’t entirely hopeless, however, telling The Standard high rents (surprise!) were at the root of the closures, and that savvier operators would find ways to make it work. Case in point: Diamond Hill’s Plaza Hollywood MCL cinema was slated to shut down, but wound up rebranding as a CineArt House. Hopefully 2026 will rain cash down on the city’s 50-odd (down from 62 in 2023) remaining theatres on the strength of enormous releases like Avatar: Fire and Ash and Night King around the new year and CNY, and Steven Spielberg’s alien invasion thriller Disclosure Day, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Joe and Anthony Russo’s Avengers: Doomsday and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three later on.
02. From High to Low, Low, Low
Evidently 2025 was one of those years when Hong Kong’s film industry was once again circling the drain. They come around every 36 months or so, so no big deal really. But this one was grim. Box office totals were down 15% overall, and nothing over the past 12 months hit the highs of Last Dance. That said, 2025 was precarious everywhere until late in the year: Japan would be in a middling position were it not for a few blockbuster anime releases. India bounced back on the strength of the likes of Dhurandhar and Chhaava. China managed to bounce back after a drab ’24 thanks to Ne Zha 2, which accounts for 30% of its totals. Australia, North America and the UK surged on late-year entries like Zootopia 2 and, duh, Avatar: Fire and Ash. Locally, Tommy Ng Kai-chung’s animated fantasy Another World won the year with just over HK$15 million in returns, a far cry from last year’s HK$115. Adam Wong’s comedy-drama The Way We Talk, about three deaf friends navigating the hearing world, started the year decently enough as an under-the-radar minor hit, finishing its run with HK$13.5 million, and Joe Chan Wai-koon’s surprise Golden Boy tallied roughly HK$10 million. It should be noted that Hong Kong’s local Top Ten combined only beat Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle by about HK$14 million. Yikes.
01. Busted
Juno Mak’s long, long, long-awaited (alleged) HK$400 million pseudo-science fiction thriller Sons of the Neon Night finally arrived and promptly announced itself as Hong Kong’s Heaven’s Gate. Mak’s follow-up to his revisionist geungsih debut Rigor Mortis, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Louis Koo, Lau Ching-wan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Gao Yuanyuan and Richie Jen among scads of other familiar faces, famously started development roughly a decade ago, and faced one delay after another (including COVID) and more rumours than can be itemised here. Following a world premiere at Cannes where it utterly baffled most audiences the film finally landed in local theatres in October with next to zero advance press, no interviews – the latest rumour had Mak hiding out in Europe – and no starry launch. Sons is exaclty what you think it is: an ultra-stylised, narratively garbled feature length music video that, given its rumoured six or seven-hour initial cut, would probably make a great TV mini-series. Bottom line the film’s biggest sin was simply not living up to its massive ambitions – that or not being inept enough to comfortably sit alongside Bad Classics Troll 2 or The Room.