The 35th edition of the festival should have something for everyone, reports Elizabeth Kerr.

You can go to the cinema this weekend and pick up a ticket to Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, starring Keira Knightley and her underbite, and watch a quasi-science fiction film hidden inside a Remains of the Day-type tragic romance for the twenty something set. Or, if you have an adventurous mind - and occasionally a strong stomach - you can comb through this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival catalogue and see what sparks your interest. It's a mixed bag this year but as with any edition of Asia's oldest film event, there are some hidden gems in the pack.

With the market segment of the festival closed, and the really high profile films already screened for industry in town for that, the next two weeks is for playing catch-up. If you've heard a lot about a film in the wind, it could be here, and with Hong Kong's distribution patterns such as they are, in some cases this will be your only chance to see something you've heard rumblings about. And no, it's not the same on TV.

Like Li Yu's Buddha Mountain (Taiwan) a coming-of-age drama of sorts about three friends and the surrogate mother they adopt after bypassing university and striking out on their own. Fan Bingbing, Chen Po Lin, and Fei Long are the "kids" of the story, and Sylvia Chang (fabulous, as usual) is the grieving retired opera singer Yue Qin, whom they board with. Yue Qin finds their recklessness frustrating and they think she's simply a rigid, eccentric widow. But living with, and really listening to, each other creates a familial bond that transcends their differences. All four performances are strong, and despite a bit of misguided romantic tension, it's a satisfying, bittersweet drama. Another trio, this time of high school boys whose relationship is crumbling, are the focus of Bleak Night (Yoon Sung-hyun, South Korea), one part mystery and one part brutal portrait of young men trying to learn how to handle their maturing, masculine emotions.

More bitter and less sweet is Hong Kong filmmaker Lo Wing-cheong's Punished, featuring Richie Ren and Anthony Wong as two ambiguous sides of the same coin. Bodyguard and all around "fixer" Chor (Ren) goes about tracking down and eliminating the men that kidnap, ransom, and murder property tycoon Wong's (Wong) bratty daughter. Who the punished and punisher is forms the core of the morality tale, though local audiences are likely to find vindication - or a least a semblance of fantasy justice - in seeing a ruthless property developer suffering. Is it pointless to say Wong is really good as a man learning how far is too far?

Speaking of how far, Jos Padilha follows up his polarizing Golden Bear winning Elite Squad with Elite Squad 2 - The Enemy Within (Brazil). Stepping away from the streets Padilha focuses on the institutional corruption laying waste to modern Rio - and he does it with his signature aesthetic: kinetic, gritty and urban.

Also from Hong Kong is a digitally restored lost semi-classic from Yonfan, made before he turned into an eroticist fixated on all things beautiful. 1988's Last Romance isn't really a romance. It's a nuanced and quietly affecting portrait of female friendship starring Maggie Cheung and Cherie Chung at their 80s-era best, and the film looks as gorgeous as they do in its refurbished form. And if it's strong female characters you want, the Oscar-nominated Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, USA) features a standout performance by newcomer Jennifer Lawrence (who deserved to win ahead of Natalie Portman) as a young woman in the Ozarks looking after her siblings as well as her drug-dealing deadbeat father. Bone has enough tension to keep it from wallowing in miserablism and it's one of the best American indies of 2010.

If you're a fan of the Korean revenge thriller, then you'll need to score a ticket to The Man from Nowhere (Lee Jeong-boom) and/or I Saw the Devil (Kim Jee-woon). One-time matinee idol Won Bin stars in Nowhere, about a mysterious pawnshop owner who's drawn into a drug war, when his only real friend, a 10-year-old girl, is kidnapped. Won finally looks to have grown into a leading man, and when he goes on his avenging rampage it's like nothing you've ever seen before. That is until Devil, also starring a former matinee idol, Lee Byung-hun (JSA), as a secret service agent whose wife is murdered by Choi Min-sik (Oldboy). Rumor has it Devil had people fleeing auditoriums in Toronto, and that's easy to see why. Creatively violent, stylish, and truly twisted, it's not for everyone, but if Park Chan-wook's work is up your alley, don't miss it. Absolutely not for the faint of heart.

For those among us who prefer some realism in their cinema, two American documentaries are worth checking out. Years ago, Errol Morris reignited the documentary as a viable film form with The Thin Blue Line, and his latest is Tabloid, an exploration of the de facto birth of reality television as we know it. Chronicling the breathless enthusiasm with which the British media documented the sordid affair and feud between a beauty pageant queen and a Mormon missionary in the 1970s. The sad attention grab fueled the whole ordeal, something we see so often now in shows like Big Brother. At the other end of the spectrum is Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, a detailed examination of the 2088 banking crisis and why it was bound to happen. Like he did in No End in Sight, Ferguson manages to balance fury with fact, and create the year's must-see film. Rounding out the best of the documentary sections is Wang Bing's Man With No Name (China), an unfussy anthropological look at an unnamed man living outside traditional society in one of the mainland's sparest regions. Elegantly shot and thought-provoking without ever uttering a word, Wang demonstrates why he's the country's pre-eminent documentarian.

Lastly, getting as far away from reality as possible are the pop-punk, candy colored genre mash-up Milocrorze - A Love Story (Ishibashi Yoshimasa, Japan) - which really defies description - and a wholly original French spin on the monster movie, The Pack (Franck Richard). And if that, or any of these, hold no interest for you there's about 200 more where they came from.

The Hong Kong International Film Festival runs through April 5. www.hkiff.org.hk.

(HK Edition 03/26/2011 page4)