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Hong Kong cinema expands its borders once more and brings us a new fast paced action/adventure film, starring the one and only Andy Lau and international known French actor Jean Reno. “The Adventurers” is the latest film by Stephen Fung, and it was known for some time to be a emake of the classic John Woo’s flick “Once a Thief”. The plot is, in spirit, very similar, but it is not a remake in its whole, just an action flick with a similar plot that plays in the same league.

“The Adventurers” is about a thief who has just been released from prison. Then, he brings together a team of professionals to make a final big score which will make them millionaires. The job is simple: steal the important jewel “The Rope of Life”, the last of the three pieces that form the invaluable Gaia necklace.

Hong Kong cinema expands its borders once more and brings us a new fast paced action/adventure film, starring the one and only Andy Lau and international known French actor Jean Reno. “The Adventurers” is the latest film by Stephen Fung, and it was known for some time to be a remake of the classic John Woo’s flick “Once a Thief”. The plot is, in spirit, very similar, but it is not a remake in its whole, just a similar action flick with a similar plot that plays in the same league.

“The Adventurers” will screen at at the 9th International Chinese Film Festival, that will be on 23 February to 28, 2018.

“The Adventurers” is about a thief who has just been released from prison. Then, he brings together a team of professionals to make a final big score which will make them millionaires. The job is simple: steal the important...

"The operation is compromised." Well Go USA has debuted an official Us trailer for the Chinese action heist movie called The Adventurers, from director Stephen Fung. The action-packed film is about three of the world's top thieves, played by Andy Lau, Tony Yang, and Shu Qi, who band together to pull off the "heist of a lifetime." But hot on their trailer is a French detective, played Jean Reno of course, who chases them all over Europe. The full cast Jingchu Zhang, Eric Tsang, Tony Yo-ning Yang, David Bowles, and Yi Sha. This definitely looks slick, kind of like a Hollywood action heist movie with some cool set pieces and locations, but I hope it's actually good. Seems like it's going to be super cheesy, a little too much Hollywood. Here's the official Us trailer (+ international poster) for Stephen Fung's The Adventurers, from YouTube: In this slick, high-stakes action-adventure,...

Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-wai has joined the cast of Edko Films’ Monster Hunt 2, which is currently shooting in Beijing.

Newly announced cast on the film also includes Chinese pop star Li Yuchun (Bodyguards And Assassins) and Taiwanese actor Yo Yang (Cold War 2), who join original cast including Bai Baihe and Jing Boran. Raman Hui is again directing the hybrid live action and CGI film.

Leung is known to international audiences for his roles in films such as the Infernal Affairs series, In The Mood For Love and Lust, Caution. He plays one of the lead characters in Monster Hunt 2, who changes the course of monster king Wuba’s journey

The first Monster Hunt became China’s highest-grossing film at the time of its release in summer 2015, taking $352m (RMB2.43m), only losing the record to Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid over Chinese New Year 2017. Monster Hunt also won awards for best new director, best costume...

The sequel to last year's Chinese blockbuster Monster Hunt is adding a major star. Tony Leung Chiu-wai (above in The Grandmaster) will portray one of the lead characters, according to Patrick Frater at Variety, and will help "change the course of monster king Wuba's journey." Li Yuchun (Bodyguards and Assassins) and Yo Yang (Cold War 2) are also joining the cast. The original comic fantasy was described as "a polished fantasy adventure that blends broad comedy with period hijinks alongside first rate CG character work," in the words of our own James Marsh. You can read his complete review at ScreenDaily. Raman Hui has returned as director, along with the principal original cast, including Bai Baihui and Jing Boran. Filming is now underway in Beijing....

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Elegantly mounted and gorgeously shot, Phantom of the Theatre is a stuffy ghost story from China that fails to be as haunting as its premise. Borrowing elements from Phantom of the Opera, the new film is set in Shanghai in the 1930s. (A musical version of Gaston Leroux's novel opened in Shanghai in 2003.) Rather than an opera house, it's set in a movie house that has been closed for some 13 years, ever since a fire swept through the theatre and killed members of an acrobatic troupe that was performing there. Gu Weibang (Tony Yo-ning Yang) has recently returned from studying filmmaking in France and wants to make his directorial debut with a ghost story. He seeks the attention of a leading actress at...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Five years after director John Woo's two-part epic Red Cliff hit theaters, fans have their first look at the filmmaker's next project with an international trailer and a poster for his two-part drama, The Crossing.

The plot is based on the true story of a steamer ship dubbed Taiping, which sunk between China and Taiwan during the Chinese Revolution in 1949, claiming the lives of over 1,500 people. The story follows a number of intertwining love stories, including a couple played by Chinese superstars Ziyi Zhang and Takeshi Kaneshiro. Take a look at the first footage below, along with the first three photos and a poster, then read on for more information.

The Crossing doesn't have a domestic release date set at this time, but the drama is set to debut on December 2, 2014 in China, with The Crossing 2 set for release in May 2015. It isn't known if the two-part project...

Plenty of movies here in the States have of course been inspired by allegedly true paranormal events, from The Amityville Horror to The Conjuring.

A sure sign of the success of such films is when the haunted houses at the center of them become tourist attractions in the wake of their release, which is something that's going on big time over in China this weekend.

As reported by The New York Times, this past Thursday night marked the theatrical release of a film called The House That Never Dies (Jingcheng No. 81), which quickly became a smash hit at the Chinese box office. The 3D horror flick has already pulled in $25.7 million, putting it third on the domestic charts.

Like the aforementioned films before it, The House That Never Dies was based on the real-life legend of a mansion in Beijing known as Chaonei No. 81. According to stories, the house was...

Well now we know, as there’s a new trailer out for The House That Never Dies, a spiffy new Chinese horror film directed by Raymond Yip. The plot is apparently based on a “true” story regarding a haunted mansion, Chaonei No. 81, which is located on No.81 Chaoyangmen Street in Beijing. Add a top notch cast (including Francis Ng , Ruby Lin , Tony Yang, Li Ching and Monica Mok) plus the great visuals into the pot, and all in all its looking rather good. The House That Never Dies opens in Hk and China next month. Synopsis: The Chaonei No. 81 was a three-story French Baroque-style house which was built in the 1800s by Qing officials. Legend says that the house became haunted after the end of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, when the wife of a Kuomintang official who once lived there committed suicide. It is believed that her spirit still haunts the house.

Well now we know, as there’s a new trailer out for The House That Never Dies, a spiffy new Chinese horror film directed by Raymond Yip. The plot is apparently based on a “true” story regarding a haunted mansion, Chaonei No. 81, which is located on No.81 Chaoyangmen Street in Beijing. Add a top notch cast (including Francis Ng , Ruby Lin , Tony Yang, Li Ching and Monica Mok) plus the great visuals into the pot, and all in all its looking rather good. The House That Never Dies opens in Hk and China next month. Synopsis: The Chaonei No. 81 was a three-story French Baroque-style house which was built in the 1800s by Qing officials. Legend says that the house became haunted after the end of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, when the wife of a Kuomintang official who once lived there committed suicide. It is believed that her spirit still haunts the house.

Cash prizes handed out at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Netpac award and Fpp awards.

The 2013 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival held its traditional Night Market Party awards ceremony with Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Thai film Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy taking the best Asian film prize awarded by the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (Netpac) last night (Nov 21).

Based on around 400 tweets from a high school girl in Thailand, Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy won the award “for its freshness, originality and clarity in molding a structural concept into a cinematic portrait of youth and transcending it with poetry and humor.”

Project market awards

The Golden Horse Film Project Promotion (Fpp) also handed out a raft of awards with Sung Hsin-Yin’s debut animation project On Happiness Road taking the Grand Prize of $33,800 or Nt$1m in cash (pictured).

Sung was also named the 2013 Taipei Film Festival’s Best Animation award winner...

Taiwan’s Golden Horse Film Project Promotion (Fpp) has unveiled this year’s selection of 25 films chosen from a record 117 submissions.

The organization stated “these projects reflect the active and engaged state of Chinese-language film industry in all corners of the world, including: Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, UK, France, Us, Australia, and New Zealand.”

Nine sponsoring companies offer post-production service awards and this year, a number of them will be increasing their awards to equal the symbolic amount of Nt$500,000 (Us$16,900) to celebrate the Golden Horse Film Festival’s 50th anniversary.

The Fpp’s Grand Prize is a cash award of Nt$1m (Us$33,800). France’s Centre National du Cinéma (Cnc) also offers the €10,000 Cnc Award to support projects with high potential for international co-production.

The 2013 Golden Horse Fpp runs Nov 19-21 with meetings and workshops. They will announce the winners of the various prizes on the last day’s closing ceremony...

The Puchon International Film Festival (PiFan)’s Network of Asian Fantastic Films (Naff) has announced this year’s It Project line-up of 21 selections from 13 countries.

These include Greek filmmaker Costas Zapas’ Frankenstein: A Death Odyssey and Kei Ishikawa’s comic fantasy Baby, a Japan-Poland co-production.

Scroll down for full list

“Making the selection was a challenge this year with 141 project submissions - more than a 60% increase on last year,” says Naff managing director Thomas Nam.

Korean projects include Two Weddings And A Funeral director Kim Jho Gwang-soo’s period piece Secret Detective & Vampire; 2011 PiFan Audience Award winner Ji Ha Jean’s Re: Make; and Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine director Nam Ki-woong’s Capsule.

Director Dain Said is teaming with producer Nandita Solomon again on Malaysian mystery Interchange. Their previous film, Bunohan, sold to Universal Pictures for several territories including UK, France, and Australia before premiering at Toronto.

Other Asian projects include Paul Spurrier’s Thai...

“Love on Credit” is a Mainland Chinese romantic comedy with a financial theme, directed by Taiwanese helmer Leste Chen, previously responsible for “Eternal Summer” and horror “The Heirloom”. The film is basically a vehicle for Taiwanese model turned actress Lin Chi Ling (“Red Cliff”), with her playing identical twin sisters wrestling with love, life and money. Vying for the sisters’ hearts are three eligible actors in Aloys Chen (“Rest on Your Shoulder”), Liao Fan (“Ocean Flame”), and Tony Yang (“In Case of Love”). Lin Chi Ling plays Xiaohong, a ruthless, money chasing woman who is on the verge of ending a 10 year affair with his boss after it becomes clear that he is unlikely to leave his wife. She also plays the far more innocent Xiaoqing, whose long term relationship with boyfriend Jiang Cheng (Liao Fan) runs into trouble after he is tricked by a friend into giving away their life savings.

A real classic of bloodshed cinema - producers John Woo and Terence Chang’s Blood Brothers comes to R2 DVD. Set in 1930s Shanghai, replete with warlords, politicians, wealthy industrialists, courtesans and gangsters. Three innocent young brothers, Kang (Liu Ye, Curse of the Golden Flower ), Fung (Daniel Wu, Around the World in 80 Days ) and Xiao Hu (Tony Yang), arrive in this seeming paradise in search of a better life. Enticed by the rich and powerful world of organized crime, the three brothers start down a path of no return: they are hired to do the bidding for one of the cities largest mob syndicate. When Fung begins an affair with the mob boss girlfriend, beauty Lulu (Shu Qi, Transporter), and life takes a difficult turn for all three brothers when the forbidden love affair is exposed. Friends turn against friends, brother against brother. The days of innocence have passed; the...

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- CMC Magnetics, the Taipei-based technology conglomerate, theatrical distributor and home entertainment distributor, announced Thursday that it will spend $70 million to step into producing Chinese-language movies. The three-movie slate includes John Woo's historical drama Red Cliff, to be co-produced with Columbia Tristar's Asian production unit and Japan's Rentrak Entertainment. CMC president Bob Wong also announced he plans to establish an artist managing department, signing up Tony Yang, Golden Horse winner and lead actor of local 2004 hit Formula 17. Such moves into production follow on from CMC's expansion in the entertainment sector -- last November, the company acquired a 30% share of cinema chain Warner Village, Taiwan's largest.