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The bizarre, new China-produced science fiction, martial arts, time travel, comedy feature, "Escape From The 21st Century”, written and directed by Yang Li, stars Ruoyun Zhang, Chuxi Zhong, Yang Song, Chenhao Li, Xiaoliang Wu, Yanmanzi Zhu and Zhengrong Wen, opening June 9, 2025 in theaters:

“…three friends discover they have the power to travel back and forth 20 years with a sneeze.

“However, the future is not as good as they hoped…

“..and they need to take on the responsibility of saving the world….”

Click the images to enlarge…...

Distribution company Cineverse has announced the wacky Chinese sci-fi film Escape From The 21st Century will be released in select US theaters next month. Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, three teenagers discovered they had the power to travel back and forth through time by sneezing. This accidental act teleports them to 2019, where they discover their world — Planet K — has been conquered by a brutal dictator. When they return, they try to warn everyone, but find no one will listen. It turns out saving the future will be entirely up to them, and their physical abilities — assuming they can find a trainer who doesn’t think they’re complete losers. Escape From The 21st Century stars Ruoyun Zhang, Chuxi Zhong, Yang Song, Chenhao Li, Xiaoliang Wu, Yanmanzi Zhu, and Zhengrong Wen. It was written and directed by Li Yang and produced by: Hu Lizhou (Scity Films) and Wang Hongwei.

If you miss Escape from the 21st Century‘s one-night-only theatrical release on June 9, you’ll be able to stream the Chinese genre-bender exclusively on Fandor beginning June 27.

The frenetic amalgam of sci-fi, action, adventure, suspense, coming of age, and comedy is written and directed by Yang Li.

It follows three friends who discover they have the power to travel back and forth 20 years into the future with a sneeze. However, the future is not as good as they hoped, and they need to take on the responsibility of saving the world.

Ruoyun Zhang, Chuxi Zhong, Yang Song, Chenhao Li, Xiaoliang Wu, Yanmanzi Zhu, and Zhengrong Wen star.

I wrote in my review out of Buff, “Maximalist in every sense of the word, Escape from the 21st Century plays like a hyperactive blend of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Kung Fury, and Stand by Me.

A frenetic amalgam of sci-fi, action, adventure, suspense, coming of age, and comedy, Escape from the 21st Century opens in select theaters on June 9 via Cineverse.

It follows three friends who discover they have the power to travel back and forth 20 years into the future with a sneeze. However, the future is not as good as they hoped, and they need to take on the responsibility of saving the world.

Written and directed by Yang Li, the Chinese genre-bender stars Ruoyun Zhang, Chuxi Zhong, Yang Song, Chenhao Li, Xiaoliang Wu, Yanmanzi Zhu, and Zhengrong Wen.

The festival favorite was selected to play at Toronto International Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, Sitges, Beyond Fest, and Boston Underground Film Festival, among others.

I wrote in my review out of Buff, “Maximalist in every sense of the word, Escape from the 21st Century plays like a hyperactive blend of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,...

Stars: Qixuan Kang, Zhuozhao Li, Yichen Chen, Yang Song, Ruoyun Zhang, Elane Zhong | Written and Directed by Yang Li

Sometimes you just want to watch something a little different and this movie was most definitely that.

Escape from the 21st Century is the cinematic equivalent of chugging a Red Bull while playing Street Fighter II, and accidentally sneezing into a time portal, while wearing a hoodie that says “Carpe Diem” in Comic Sans. Directed by Yang Li, this sci-fi comedy is a messed up dream scenario that feels like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World crashed into Everything Everywhere All at Once, with a side of Turbo Kid plated up with some Kung Fu Hustle and a sprinkle of “What did I just watch?” It’s bat shit insane, and it’s the most fun you will have with a movie this nuts, this year!

Set on Planet K, the story follows three teens,...

Three school friends discover their adult selves in this fast and flashy adventure debut from director Li Yang

“When you grow up, your heart dies,” is a famous line of dialogue from The Breakfast Club. In this barmy coming-of-age sci-fi a trio of teenagers find out that adulthood really does suck after sneezing themselves 20 years into the future. The movie is a directed by young Chinese film-maker Li Yang on a maximalist scale; it’s noisy and flashy, like a John Hughes movie made for TikTok – every scene sped up or slowed down, stylised with a comic-book animation or pinging with gamer special effects.

The year is 1999 on a planet that looks a lot like Earth. Three 18-year-old school friends acquire the power to travel forward 20 years in time after falling into a lake polluted by toxic chemicals. High-school heartthrob Chengyong (Yang Song) is appalled to discover as an adult...

Many films have been made that drew their inspiration and aesthetics from video games, manga and anime, but few as successfully, as exciting and as exhilarating as “Escape from the 21st Century”. Li Yang‘s madcap sci-fi adventure is a visual feast boasting excellent visual effects despite its low budget, a convincing mix of live footage and 2D animation and a rousing spectacle that can only honor its many inspirations.

Escape from the 21st Century is available from Signature Entertainment

It is almost impossible to describe the story while doing justice to the film’s nonsensical sense of fun. On distant planet K in 1999, a trio of teenagers are exposed to a toxic chemical that gives them the ability to travel through time to the year 2019 and back… by simply sneezing. In the future, they inhabit the bodies of their future selves and are soon confronted by the challenges, surprises...

The China-produced live-action science fiction comedy feature, “Escape From The 21st Century”, directed by Yang Li, starring Ruoyun Zhang, Elane Zhong, Yang Song, Xiaoling Wu and Yanmanzi Zhu, wil be released February 24, 2025 as Video On Demand:

“…what if a sneeze could transport your 18-year-old soul into your 20-years-older self? What if, by chance, this led to saving the world?

“Three middle-aged individuals with the soul of 18-year-old high school students embark on a world-altering journey 20 years into the future, creating a bizarre adventure story…”

Click the images to enlarge…

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"They are losers. But still want to save the world." Signature Ent. in the UK has unveiled the official UK trailer for the Chinese sci-fi action adventure indie time travel comedy thriller called Escape from the 21st Century. This opened in China last year and played at TIFF & Fantastic Fest & Sitges - critics have been calling it "incredibly fun and a blast of raw energy" similar to Scott Pilgrim vs the World. The story follows three friends who discover they have the power to travel back & forth 20 years with a sneeze. But the future is not as good as they hoped, and they need to take on the responsibility of saving the world. It's a po-dunk indie made on a small budget, with ambitious ideas and funky vibes. Starring Ruoyun Zhang, Elane Zhong, Yang Song, Xiaoling Wu, Yanmanzi Zhu. From a review: "The film is simply too entertaining to be denied,...

Chinese sci-fi adventure Escape From The 21st Century has set key deals after a festival run around the world.

Amsterdam- and Beijing-based Fortissimo has sold Li Yang’s film to North America (Cineverse), UK-Ireland (Signature Entertainment), Germany (Atlas Film), Taiwan (Flash Forward Entertainment) and Spain (Youplanet).

Escape From The 21st Century tells the story of three friends who gain the power to travel back and forth 20 years with a sneeze. Zhang Ruoyun, Elane Zhong and Song Yang lead the cast, with the film produced by Hu Lizhou for Scity Films.

It is Li’s feature debut, after shorts including Lee’s Adventures and Bad Future.

The changing landscape of the new media frontier is reckless, reactionary, and thrives on the manipulation of truth and the exploitation of unsuspecting individuals to maximize likes, shares, comments, and subscriptions. Discourses become fabricated, and the struggle to control the flow of information fragments an increasingly polarized world; here is a landscape where videos and photographs become spun to fit agendas, footage lifted out of context and prescribed a narrative designed for nefarious purposes. Now more than ever, society can no longer take what it sees at face value, and what is dispensed as fact can no longer exist outside the realm of scrutiny. This is nothing new of course, but within the opening twenty minutes of Xin Yukun's latest film ‘Trending Topic', a film he began crafting after realizing how long he was spending on social media apps, this world emerges from beyond the veil to expose the ugliness riddling inside this explosive industry.

The “Best is Yet to Come” is based on the life of Han Fudong, a young journalist who exposed the fact that the social stigma against people suffering from hepatitis B in China was actually indoctrinated in the system. Considering that the sickness is endemic in China, and that in 2003 around 100 million people had it, the story resulted in a scandal which also made its author a kind of a star reporter in the country. The movie however, focuses more on his story up to that point.

“The Best is Yet to Come” is screening at Asian Pop Up Cinema

In that fashion, it begins by showing Han Dong, the protagonist, a high school dropout, trying to get an interview at a newspaper in a job fair, but being completely neglected due to his lack of credentials and experience. The life of both him and his girlfriend, Xiao Zhu, is...

In adman Juan Cabral’s first feature, the lives of two men on opposite sides of the world are mysteriously intertwined

The celebrated commercials director Juan Cabral makes his feature debut with this distinctive and defiantly uncommercial drama – which could not be further from the mainstream if you doubled the running time and dubbed the whole thing in Finnish. It’s a beautifully composed, enigmatic movie with a high-concept plot about two men on either side of the planet who are mysteriously connected by midlife despair and existential emptiness.

Cabral has no fear of resisting dramatic scenarios, leisurely toggling between the two men’s parallel lives; as one wakes up the other drifts off to sleep. In Vancouver, Boyd Holbrook plays Kaden, a professional ski jumper who at 35 refuses to face up to the cold reality that he has reached pensionable age on the slopes. When he meets an ex-girlfriend for coffee,...

Genre influenced festival fare from China keeps on impressing, and Wrath of Silence may be the best, and most commercially friendly of recent efforts yet. This is the kind of film that grips you, and long after seeing it, parts flick into your head. This kind of powerful filmmaking needs to be awarded and seen. Wrath of Silence starts almost immediately with nods to auteur work the likes of Fargo; in the opening credits the camera pans slowly forward and the music crescendos before we are violently introduced to the fated mute patriarch Zhang Baomin (Yang Song). He must leave his job and return to the wilds of the mining frontier land his family resides in. His son, who has taken over some of his...

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

Author: Competitions

To celebrate the release of acclaimed martial arts movie The Final Master from Cine Asia, we have an awesome kung fu DVD double bill up for grabs including Ip Man and Young Bruce Lee, to get you in the mood for action.

Don’t miss The Final Master making its long-awaited arrival in the UK! In 1930’s China, Wing Chun master Chen She (Fan Liao, Assembly, Chinese Zodiac), arrives in Tianjin, a city famous for martial arts. With plans to open his own kung fu school, he must first train a student to defeat eight of the city’s masters, legitimising himself as a teacher. But when he is caught up in local politics and an underworld power struggle, Chen finds himself at odds with dangerous people and will fight to protect what he holds most dear.

Written and directed by Xu Haofeng (The Grandmaster) and co-starring Jia Song (Shock Wave Tunnel,...

Adapting a script based on the life of the last Wing Chun master’s quest to pass down his art in pre-wwii China, Xu Haofeng (the writer of “The Grandmaster) decided to use an original style of narrative in order to separate his film from the plethora of similar productions coming out of Hong Kong at the moment. Let us find out if he succeeded.

“The Final Master” is part of the Asian selection at Fantasia International Film Festival

Wing Chun grandmaster Chen is the last practitioner of the art after his master died. As he tries to keep Wing Chun alive, he also tries to fulfill his master’s dream, to open a dojo in Tianjin, the “capital” of the martial worlds in the 1930’s Shanghai. In his mission, he has the help of Master Zheng, a board member of the Tianjin Martial Art’s Committee, who is considered...

Stars: Yang Song, Yu Chenghui, Yuanyuan Zhao, Ma Jun, Xu Fujing, Ma Ke, Zhexin Liu, Yao Weiping, Ou Keqin, Li Guisheng, Bing Bo | Written and Directed by Haofeng Xu

Haofeng Xu, writer of the still-to-be-released (at least in the UK) The Grandmaster, makes his directorial debut with The Sword Identity, a Chinese martial arts film adapted from his own novel.

During the Ming dynasty, four fighting schools exist in the city of Guancheng and anyone who wishes to set up a new establishment must prove their worth in battle. When Liang Henlu (Yang Song) tries to form a fifth school so he can pass on his master’s teachings, the martial arts masters mistake his sword for a forbidden Japanese weapon and believe him to be a pirate. After witnessing the power of the sword in combat, however, they begin to realise it could be the legendary weapon that was...