Every Hong Kong film released in 2023, ranked from worst to best in the year that new directors continued to make history

We rank the 37 Hong Kong films that were released locally in 2023, from greats like A Guilty Conscience and Lost Love to stinkers like Prison Flowers Several stories with controversial messages seem to have dazzled their way past the censors, including Mad Fate and Detectives vs Sleuths Hong Kong cinema is so back, it would now take a particularly biased or ignorant observer to deny the remarkable resurgence that is happening before our eyes.

Following a record-breaking year that saw the city's film industry produce the two highest-grossing local features - sci-fi spectacle Warriors of Future (HK$81 million/US$10 million) and ensemble comedy Table for Six (HK$77 million) - in its entire history, 2023 kicked off in similarly buoyant mood with the Lunar New Year release of A Guilty Conscience .

A crowd-pleasing court drama that represents a case of mainstream filmmaking done absolutely right, the directorial debut of Jack Ng Wai-lun - a co-screenwriter on such previous megahits as Unbeatable , Cold War 2 and Anita - went on to take HK$115 million and become the record-holder by some distance.

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Ng is far from being the only first-time director to have made his mark in this new golden age for debutant filmmakers. Among the top 10 films included in this ranking, seven are a Hong Kong director's first or second feature.

As for the dreaded impact of the national security law on creative activities in Hong Kong that our 2021 review tentatively flagged, let's just say that responses from the city's commercial filmmakers have so far been varied and inventive.

Let me preface the following by pointing out that few, if any, of the filmmakers discussed here have been remotely vocal about Hong Kong's political situation, and thus everything could just be a matter of over-interpretation in this writer's particularly sensitive mind.

How a government initiative has shaped the new Hong Kong cinema That being said, we may be seeing the rise of a new strand of police thrillers where their veteran directors appear to give an utterly over-the-top - sometimes borderline fantastical - front to the morally complex meditation on good and evil at the core of their stories.

So far, Wai Ka-fai's chaotic Detective vs Sleuths , which won him the best director and best screenplay honours at this year's Hong Kong Film Awards , and Soi Cheang Pou-soi's absurdist murder mystery/comedy Mad Fate have both dazzled their way past censors with their enticing packages as innocuous genre thrill rides.

In contrast, the younger filmmakers' approaches to airing their grievances about the state of their home city have been rather more transparent - a prime example being inspirational quotes that are awkwardly force-fed into the characters' mouths.

There has also been a rising trend of film narratives in the past two years about residents/tenants gathering together to safeguard their symbolic "home"; this can be seen in the "Scary Shopping Mall" segment in Let It Ghost , Life Must Go On , Everything Under Control , Over My Dead Body , Yum Investigation , and perhaps a few others.

While these films offer veiled cinematic responses to Hong Kong's situation, they are, in the end, perfectly harmless bits of entertainment that set out to resonate with their target audiences' emotions without saying anything specific, much less controversial.

By comparison, the most daring and imaginative social satire to have emerged in this new Hong Kong is unquestionably Back Home , a stylish folk horror that manages to hide its trenchant political commentaries in plain sight - similar to what Get Out did in the US.

10 years of Hong Kong Oscars entries, and what makes a film a contender Back Home is, you could say, The Emperor's New Clothes of our times: everyone can see the allegories it is flaunting but no one - presumably not even those working for the government censors - dare to point out what the hidden messages actually refer to.

In short, it is a fun and exciting time to be following this city's cinematic output.

Here is our list, ranked from worst to best, of Hong Kong films released in the past 12 months.

37. Prison Flowers New director Lui Mei-fung's Prison Flowers is no more than a thoroughly inane attempt at reviving the women-in-prison subgenre of exploitation movies in Hong Kong. It is such a pale facsimile of 1988's Women's Prison that it makes that film look like a bona fide genre classic.

Lui's film lacks the sadistic action or edgy ambience that spices up most good prison stories, being so incompetently scripted as to make incarceration feel like child's play. Prison Flowers makes so little of the friction between inmates and guards, it might as well be a boarding school drama. Read the full review

36. Death Stranding Directed by Danny Pang Fat from an astonishingly incompetent screenplay he co-wrote, Chinese production Death Stranding paints a convoluted and unrealistic portrait of a city besieged by corruption - before shaking off the crime-fighting nonsense in the last act to reveal the simplistic revenge action thriller at its core.

The film could have been a fun, guilty-pleasure watch if it had at least nailed its car chases and shoot-outs. Alas, they are sub-par by Hong Kong cinema's usual standards and we are left to make do with a lifeless, illogical mess of a story. Read the full review

35. Social Distancing Social Distancing is a supernatural horror movie set in Hong Kong during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite its ludicrously preachy undertone, this second feature by writer-director Gilitte Leung Pik-chi has a smattering of interesting ideas throughout.

Stories about the alienating effects of communications technology are a fixture of our times. Yet while Leung tantalises us with some well-intentioned reminders of that theme, her story is very badly written: the film sets out to be a thriller with satirical aspirations, but emerges as a forgettable mess. Read the full review

34. Say I Do to Me The best thing that can be said about Kiwi Chow Kwun-wai's latest film is that it's nice to see him working again. In recent years, the director of the acclaimed Beyond the Dream has put his career on the line with two politically contentious efforts: Ten Years and Revolution of Our Times .

A romantic comedy in name only, this high-concept folly proves neither intellectually stimulating nor funny. The relationship farce the movie centres around is so insufferably twee, and the performances so annoyingly infantile, that the film is at times a challenge to sit through. Read the full review

33. Cyber Heist Cyber Heist is a fairly watchable, action-driven crime thriller that is rendered laughable by its ill-advised central conceit of visualising the internet using the most cringingly antiquated imagery imaginable.

The film goes big on elaborate CGI sequences that distantly recall the clunky understanding of computer technologies that characterised all those internet-themed Hollywood movies from the mid-1990s. Quite how the director, Wong Hing-fan ( I'm Livin' It ), decided it's a good idea to dumb down his big-budget feature in such a way is the real mystery here. Read the full review

32. Twelve Days Twenty-three years after her debut, Twelve Nights, saw romance blossom and fizzle out between a pair of fickle lovers, writer-director Aubrey Lam Oi-wah returns with another relationship drama in 12 chapters - this time focusing on the disintegration of a marriage almost as soon as it begins.

Twelve Days is a one-sided ordeal about what it means for a woman to have picked an awful human being for a husband. It will intrigue viewers not for its story, but as a challenge to find any redeeming qualities in the male lead played by Edward Ma Chi-wai. Read the full review

31. One Night at School There are plenty of outrageous moments and not enough funny ones in One Night at School . The second film directed by Sunny Lau Yung is a madcap comedy in which three unrelated groups of characters converge in an abandoned school for a surprisingly unexciting night of misadventures.

The hip young cast is a welcome distraction and a couple of the infantile gags do inspire a giggle, but the film never quite figures out what it wants to achieve: it is neither transgressive enough to attract a late-night cult following nor family-friendly enough to pull in rising Cantopop star Michael Cheung Tin-fu's legion of younger fans. Read the full review

30. Tales from the Occult: Ultimate Malevolence Hong Kong horror anthology series Tales from the Occult is back with its third instalment, comprising a trio of short films, each written and directed by a different filmmaker. All are atmospheric but oddly paced psychological dramas that involve murder in their stories.

None of Tales from the Occult: Ultimate Malevolence 's three stories are exactly awful. But after the clarity and excitement provided by its two predecessors, this relatively underwhelming offering does feel like the beginning of the end. Read the full review

29. Everything Under Control This is a genre-blending exercise that starts out as a heist thriller with flashes of gangster-movie parody, before morphing into a rural mystery that may or may not involve an unsolved murder and elements of supernatural horror; it even has some random martial arts action thrown in for good measure.

In fact, this Lunar New Year offering by Ying Chi-wen ( Life Must Go On ) is a bit of a mess. The new director is far more capable of instilling manic, goofy energy into proceedings than he is telling a consistently engaging story. Read the full review

28. Lonely Eighteen A sentimental women-led drama set around the fickle entertainment industry of 1980s and '90s Hong Kong, Lonely Eighteen charts the contrasting fortunes of a pair of young actresses to sporadically engaging - if ultimately inconsequential - effect.

Notably, the film is based partly on the real-life experiences of producer and co-star Irene Wan Pik-ha. While ostensibly sincere in its re-enactment of Wan's career and family life, the film is narratively distracted and never reaches the emotional catharsis that its present-day scenes are meant to inspire. Read the full review

27. One More Chance One More Chance is an unabashedly old-fashioned melodrama that lives or dies with the audience's goodwill toward Chow Yun-fat . The cinema legend rolls back the years, summoning all his playfulness to portray a pathological gambler on the path to self-discovery and redemption.

Marking the solo directing debut of veteran cinematographer Anthony Pun Yiu-ming, One More Chance is a rare attempt at a heart-warming drama not just for Chow, but also writer Felix Chong Man-keung. The film's bland efforts to evoke nostalgic sentiment in its audience are a slight disappointment. Read the full review

26. Tales from the Occult: Body and Soul This second instalment of horror anthology series Tales from the Occult arrives after 2022's eclectic trio of ghost stories - this time, taking on the slasher movie genre. All three short films here, each about 30 minutes long, revolve around serial killers and traumatised female protagonists looking to turn the tables on them.

While Tales from the Occult: Body and Soul is fun to watch, it is neither profound nor imaginative enough to leave an impression. Read the full review

25. Bursting Point Hong Kong cinema fans who like their crime thrillers brutal and over the top are in for a treat with Bursting Point , which marks celebrated action film director Dante Lam Chiu-yin's return to local filmmaking after almost a decade of churning out patriotic mega-blockbusters in mainland China.

Lam has always displayed a readiness to depict the sickening reality of death in his films. Bursting Point does not have a convincing enough story at its core to transform it into a cathartic experience, but the film is so determined to make every casualty count that it may well inspire a strange admiration in the viewers who do not look away. Read the full review

24. Death Notice Herman Yau Lai-to's Death Notice is closer to his 2018 thriller The Leakers in its smaller scale, its workmanlike execution and its chaotically thrilling tone than any of his recent blockbusters: Shock Wave 1 and 2 , and The White Storm 2 and 3 .

Yau's affinity for frenetic genre entertainment proves a nice fit for this ambitiously twisty whodunit. The myriad illogical decisions made by characters along the way are casually glossed over by the densely plotted and furiously paced narrative. Death Notice also fumbles its last-minute reveals in such an unimaginative way that the whole experience feels a little empty. Read the full review

23. It Remains This supernatural horror movie is technically the second directing effort of Kelvin Shum Ka-yin, whose feature debut, Deliverance , has yet to open in cinemas in his home city. Both films suggest Shum is a director far more adept at creating strikingly stylised imagery than telling a coherent story that makes logical sense.

While the story is more than a little cliched, Shum transcends this by creating an atmosphere of sustained spookiness, as well as some of the most beautifully staged images and montages seen in Hong Kong horror cinema in many a long year. Read the full review

22. Yum Investigation Ostensibly a pop-idol vehicle for Error, a four-member boy band created by the same talent-making agency at ViuTV that is behind Cantopop sensation Mirror, this fantasy comedy drama makes wonderful use of the quartet's goofy charisma to keep us entertained - while trying to say so much more about Hong Kong.

Yum Investigation 's story may be a little light on substance, but its knowing talk of dreams and fighting for one's home should easily resonate with Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong cinema-goers who have lived through the social unrest of the past few years. Read the full review

21. Band Four Home is where the musical instruments are for the main characters of Band Four , an amiable Hong Kong music drama that is far more comfortable coasting on the natural charisma of its fresh-faced performers than telling its contrived story of a dysfunctional family of talented musicians.

In spite of its loose narrative, Band Four is quite a pleasant watch with its humorous snippets of the everyday lives of its four likeable protagonists.

First-time director Mo Lai Yan-chi's story may be fanciful in multiple ways, but the emotions she evokes with this music-driven film do mostly feel genuine. Read the full review

20. The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell With 2019's The White Storm 2: Drug Lords and this new sequel, director Herman Yau looks like he has settled into a nice groove with his action blockbusters - even if both films make a mockery of the theme of brotherhood that was key to Benny Chan Muk-sing's first film in the series.

The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell , which culminates in an incendiary climax that will no doubt satisfy viewers who enjoy seeing things blown up, proves far more interesting when viewed as an epic about the drug trade set in an exotic foreign milieu than as an undercover-police drama that traces the limits of deception. Read the full review

19. The Sunny Side of the Street A series of misfortunes that befall a South Asian refugee family provides the unlikely backdrop for an actorly exercise for Anthony Wong Chau-sang in The Sunny Side of the Street . The film is the absorbing, if somewhat contrived, first feature of Hong Kong-based Malaysian writer-director Lau Kok-rui.

It had a wonderful opportunity to address a meaningful subject through a bond between two people from very different refugee generations. It is a shame that instead we are given a tale of personal redemption that feels unconvincing at best and disingenuous at worst. Read the full review

18. A Light Never Goes Out Directed by first-time filmmaker Anastasia Tsang Hin-ling, A Light Never Goes Out is a gentle and relatively lightweight study of loss and recovery that is anchored by a riveting performance from screen icon Sylvia Chang Ai-chia.

Next to its laboured human drama, the film leaves a far more lasting impression as a love letter to Hong Kong's tradition of neon sign making, which is fading fast amid the growing popularity of LED lights, as well as new laws that regard many iconic billboards as illegal structures and have seen many of them torn down. Read the full review

17. The Brotherhood of Rebel Notwithstanding a confusing Chinese title that misrepresents it as a sequel to 2012's Triad , The Brotherhood of Rebel tells an unrelated story with a different director (Terry Ng Ka-wai, Pretty Heart ).

A character-driven movie that largely forgoes the genre's usual resort to hero worship, it instead revolves around several flawed and broken individuals whose fortunes just keep getting worse.

Ng is again showing his deft directing touch in an assignment that doesn't look especially promising at first glance - as he did with his feature debut Pretty Heart . Read the full review

16. To My Nineteen-year-old Self A commission by Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting's alma mater, Ying Wa Girls' School, this documentary is a captivating coming-of-age drama for which she trained her camera on a small group of students from the elite secondary school for a decade as they lived through the joys and sorrows of adolescence against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Hong Kong.

Yet the utter lack of subtlety in Cheung's narration, combined with her indifference to drawing deeper insights from her material, means this sprawling film cannot be called great. The director's perceived entitlement to her student subjects' stories also leaves a bitter aftertaste. Read the full review

15. Sakra Donnie Yen Ji-dan and his martial arts crew put their expertise in hard-hitting action to great use in this respectable adaptation of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils , a beloved 1960s wuxia novel by literary giant Louis Cha Leung-yung.

Some of the book's most famous scenes are brought to particularly bloody life. But, like many previous adaptations that have tried to distil the epic scope of Cha's novels into a neatly packaged movie, Sakra comes up short when it tries to meaningfully weave in the great number of characters from the original story. Read the full review

14. Shadows In the psychological thriller Shadows , a supernaturally gifted psychiatrist who can look into her patients' subconscious minds encounters a senior rival who may be turning his patients into murderers.

The first feature film directed by Singaporean filmmaker Glenn Chan Chi-man, this is a stylistically accomplished, if narratively suspect, film. It would probably work better as an open-ended psychodrama than the crime mystery it purports to be.

Shadows is at its most effective when it follows Stephy Tang Lai-yan's protagonist into visually inventive dream sequences reconstructed from her patients' traumatic memories. Read the full review

13. Elegies In a match made in literary heaven, Ann Hui On-wah - one of Hong Kong cinema's most intellectual filmmakers - is the director behind Elegies , a feature-length documentary about the city's contemporary poetry scene, the art of writing, its financial pressure and the Hong Kong that has been described in poems.

The film is as much an elegy for poets Huang Canran and Liu Waitong's personal pasts in Hong Kong as it is for a city that has since become unrecognisable even for some of its most intimate observers. Read the full review

12. Everyphone Everywhere The impact that digital communication technologies have on the everyday life of an average Hong Kong person in the pandemic era gave director Amos Why ( Far Far Away ) and his co-writers the concept for Everyphone Everywhere , a refreshingly laid-back comedy drama.

What could easily have been another boring cautionary tale about mobile phone use has instead been turned on its head. Playful in tone and light as a breeze in its treatment of the subject of scamming, Everyphone Everywhere comes across as a very spontaneous look at human connections in which little appears definitive. Read the full review

11. Stand Up Story A young man learns to savour the moments he shares with his intellectually disabled father while navigating an unlikely career path to become a stand-up comedian in Stand Up Story , a warm and gentle tale of surviving hardship.

It is hard not to be won over by the consistently heartfelt performances of Ben Yuen Fu-wah and Ng Siu-hin as the bickering father and son.

While the story's key message - that tragedy in life can just as well become a source of laughter - may be a little on the nose, Au Cheuk-man's bittersweet film is undoubtedly a worthy addition to the increasingly long line of socially conscious human dramas to have come out of Hong Kong cinema in recent years. Read the full review

10. Mad Fate Part grisly murder mystery, part pitch-black absurdist comedy feverishly musing on destiny and free will, Soi Cheang Pou-soi's follow-up to his award-winning black-and-white crime thriller Limbo sees the director again mining his flair for genre experiments in this nightmarish roller coaster ride.

While coincidences in stories typically signal laziness on the part of the writers, the screenplay here intentionally floods the film with such a constant parade of coincidences that it ends up playing like a most bizarre contemplation on human agency. Read the full review

9. Where the Wind Blows The latest film by Port of Call director Philip Yung Tsz-kwong is an artistically accomplished, genre-bending epic - a period biopic stapled to a crime thriller and decorated with a healthy sprinkling of history.

However, its relative lack of narrative momentum, the repeated detours from the protagonists' larger-than-life criminal careers, and their sometimes indecipherable motivations all combine to render it more of a visual feast for an art-house-inclined audience than the entertaining caper that mainstream viewers might have hoped for instead. Read the full review

8. Over My Dead Body Can you build an entire feature-length movie around one laughably stupid pun? In this wacky comedy drama, director Ho Cheuk-tin ( The Sparring Partner ) has arguably displayed just enough raw talent and confidence to pull off the unusual feat.

As a no-holds-barred attempt to make fun of Hong Kong's pervasively negative social climate in recent years, Ho's diverting effort strikes a particularly cynical chord that is rarely attempted in other local commercial productions.

This is a silly, harmless and even slightly hopeful feature that may nevertheless touch a few raw political nerves. Read the full review

7. The Goldfinger Marketed as the reunion of Infernal Affairs co-stars Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau Tak-wah , this period epic, written and directed by Felix Chong ( Project Gutenberg ), pushes the limit of how far a mesmerising charade of larger-than-life criminals can play out without getting to the substance of their characters.

Leung has a field day hamming it up as the charismatic con man Henry Ching, who arrived in Hong Kong in the 1970s and swiftly built up his own international conglomerate via an extraordinary series of investment gambles, fraud and corruption.

This is a visually engrossing tale of corporate sleaze that brings a bygone era lavishly back to life. Read the full review

6. Ready or Rot Ready or Rot is not just a vast improvement on 2021's Ready or Knot but is also one of the best-scripted Hong Kong romantic dramas in recent memory, peppered as it is with mature insights into relationships and cheeky words of wisdom about life's capricious turns - very much the opposite of what the original offered.

While this spirited sequel is again built around an ensemble cast, Michelle Wai Sze-nga and Elaine Jin Yan-ling easily rise above the rest of their peers with their eye-catching performances. One could make a case that the two actresses have brought the film more emotional potency than its screenplay perhaps warrants. Read the full review

5. Back Home A daring effort for what it's worth, Back Home is an eerie occult horror that works even better as a thinly veiled, caustic parody of Hong Kong's social and political environment of recent times. There are few precedents of its calibre in the city's cinema and there probably won't be many more to follow.

With this dimly lit and progressively dreamlike story, first-time writer-director Nate Tse Ka-ki (officially credited as Nate Ki) has served up a chilling brew of Chinese superstitions and group psychopathology, with some Lynchian touches of sideshow creepiness thrown in for good measure. Read the full review

4. In Broad Daylight A series of atrocious abuse allegations against the staff of a Hong Kong residential care centre for the disabled form the narrative basis of In Broad Daylight , a clear-eyed drama, based on a true story, about the pursuit of justice through investigative journalism and the heavy price this sometimes entails.

While it appears at first to be taking the methodical approach of most great films about journalists and focusing on the thrills of exposing a scandal, the screenplay co-scripted by director Lawrence Kan Kwan-chun gradually reveals its full ambition by raising more questions than anyone can answer.

Kan's true-life tale is a must-see for any viewer with a social conscience. Read the full review

3. Lost Love Sammi Cheng Sau-man gives one of the best performances of her acting career in Lost Love , playing a grieving mother who buries her sorrow by taking in a procession of foster children with often touching, sometimes heartbreaking results.

Cheng expectedly won the best actress prize at this year's Hong Kong Film Awards.

Ka Sing-fung, the film's debutant director and co-screenwriter, calls to mind the work of Hirokazu Koreeda with the naturalistic performances he has extracted from his child actors. In its own magical way, the film plays like the waking dream of a mother processing her grief in the only way she knows how - with love. Read the full review

2. Time Still Turns the Pages A Hong Kong schoolboy's year-long contemplation of whether to end his own life, and the impact this episode has in the following decades, form the dual narrative of Time Still Turns the Pages , a deeply poignant tale of emotional torture, regret and redemption via open, honest communication.

First-time writer-director Nick Cheuk Yik-him was prompted to tackle the subject by a spate of youth suicides that made Hong Kong news headlines in 2015, but this is not a conventional film about a social problem.

Instead, his film is a delicate little gem that can break your heart in multiple, sometimes rather unexpected, ways. Read the full review

1. A Guilty Conscience A thoroughly engrossing court drama that represents Hong Kong mainstream commercial filmmaking at its very finest, the directorial debut of long-time screenwriter Jack Ng, who also wrote the screenplay, features a rollicking turn by Dayo Wong Tze-wah as a barrister who relocates his moral compass to help a single mother framed for a killing.

While A Guilty Conscience occasionally risks spoiling its realistic premise with dramatic twists and show-stopping speeches that might be more at home in a historical story like Justice Pao , Ng has come up with an utterly entertaining movie that intrigues from the very first scene and never lets up until the end. Read the full review

For our ranking of every Hong Kong film released in 2022, read here .

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