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Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a column devoted to exploring contemporary Chinese-language cinema primarily as it is revealed to us at North American multiplexes.Twenty minutes into The White Storm 2, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Andy Lau, is shown a detention facility for drug addicts in Manila. Looking strikingly like the horrifying conditions under which the United States is housing refugees at its borders, Lau nods approvingly as a Filipino police officer describes the anti-drug war led by his nation’s president, Rodrigo Duterte. It’s a striking bit of propaganda, or at least it would be in the hands of a director other than Herman Yau, among the most out-spoken and consistent opponents of authoritarianism in mainstream Chinese language cinema, albeit one who has maintained his position in the mainstream by temporizing his activism within certain generic smokescreens. In this case, he’s taken an ostensibly conservative scenario,...

Prolific director Herman Yau’s contribution to this year’s Lunar New Year releases, “A Home With a View”, is an adaptation of a stage play by comedian Cheung Tat-ming. In the best of the Lunar New Year traditions, “A Home With a View” is about family and getting together but maybe not in the way you would expect.

“Home With a View” screened at Udine Far East Film Festival

The Lo family is a typical Hong Kong family, in a lively and crowded neighborhood. The father Wai-man (Francis Ng) has spent all the money he could possibly put together, including the pension of his own disabled father (Cheung Tat-ming) to buy a flat with a 20-year mortgage in a noisy tower block. As anybody living in cities knows, buying a flat is a big achievement but life doesn’t get any easy after the purchase; possibly even worst! The...