Mixed bag of goodies awaits moviegoers in 2024

The Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strikes are over, and Hong Kong's film renaissance engine chugs along. Seems like it's back to business as usual for movies, so there's plenty on the horizon to start 2024.

One of the most hotly anticipated films on the Lunar New Year holiday slate is Sunny Chan's Table for Six 2. The original was a local LNY film too until COVID-19 and some quick automated dialogue replacement turned it into the surprise Mid-Autumn Festival hit of 2022. The buzz around the sequel suggests that is on everyone's must-see LNY-releases list. Though star Dayo Wong is absent this time, Stephy Tang and Louis Cheung return as unsure partners, Ivana Wong is back as the goddess of cooking, as is Peter Chan as her flaky beau. Newcomers to the mix include boy band Error's Ho Kai-wa, veteran Tse Kwan-ho, and fast-emerging singer Jeffrey Ngai.

For those more inclined to thrillers, Deliverance from director Kelvin Shum and cinematographer-turned-director Jason Kwan's I Did It My Way both arrive in January. In Deliverance, a woman grows suspicious about the circumstances of her mother's death after a long illness, but grief and stress fog her memory and muddle the real events. Shum demonstrated a knack for atmosphere and building tension in his last film, It Remains, and this time around he gets support from veterans Simon Yam, Carrie Ng and the late Kenneth Tsang. I Did It My Way stars Andy Lau, Eddie Peng, Gordon Lam, Philip Keung and Yam as an intertwined group of cops, informants and drug lords, working against a sliding scale of right, wrong, and divided loyalties in the kind of high-octane crime thriller Hong Kong cinema made its reputation on.

Ning Hao's The Movie Emperor could be summed up as The Player (1992, directed by Robert Altman) for the Chinese film industry, but that's a bit simplistic. Ning, best known for his breakout Crazy Stone, and the stylish, nihilistic No Man's Land, puts his satiric stamp on the story of an almost washed-up Hong Kong movie star, played by Hong Kong movie star Lau in a career-best performance, who goes to rural China to research a prestige role in a "quilted jacket movie". And then his ego gets the better of him. Emperor is sharp as a tack and a must for film buffs. It opens on the Chinese mainland in February, so Hong Kong, or a Hong Kong International Film Festival slot, shouldn't be far behind.

There's plenty of genre fare to look forward to, starting with Denis Villeneuve's strike-delayed Dune: Part Two (March). The action-heavy conclusion to his spectacular adaption of Frank Herbert's seminal novel adds Elvis star Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, and La Seydoux to the already massive cast, led by Timothe Chalamet. If we're lucky we'll see Takashi Yamazaki's reverent and terrifying Godzilla Minus One, a serious, pandemic-inspired entry in the classic Kaiju series before Adam Wingard's anything-but-serious Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire stomping into cinemas in April. A distributor looking for the next big thing from India might roll the dice on Nag Ashwin's Kalki 2898-AD, an Indian spin on, well, Dune, wherein Vishnu returns to Earth in time to save it. Kalki was a San Diego Comic-Con hit last summer, and took the crown for the most-expensive Indian film ever made from S.S. Rajamouli's global phenomenon RRR (which a creative distributor did pick up for a few screenings last year). Megastars Prabhas, Amitabh Bachchan, and Deepika Padukone, who was a sensation in her 2007 debut, Om Shanti Om, headline the project.

Finally, Yorgos Lanthimos's absurdly hilarious Frankenstein-esque feminist fable Poor Things was 2023's best film. It has no confirmed release date for Hong Kong yet, but its impeccable performances and masterful visuals demand a big screen, making it a good bet for the HKIFF. Fingers crossed.