At The Movies: Train thriller 96 Minutes is on the right track, All Of You a struggling romance

96 Minutes (NC16)

118 minutes, opens on Sept 25

★★★☆☆

The story: Bomb disposal expert Song Kang-ren (Austin Lin) is travelling from Taipei to Kaohsiung with his police detective fiancee (Vivian Sung) when alerted to an explosive on their southbound bullet train. He has just 96 minutes until final destination to disarm the threat – and confront a guilty secret from his past.

Taiwanese cinema has been the home of art-house auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien and teen romcoms.

The thriller 96 Minutes is the industry’s US$5 million (S$6.4 million) declaration of intent to crash the blockbuster disaster epic market, a creditable one by director Hung Tzu-hsuan (The Scoundrels, 2018). Already, it is 2025’s third top-grossing local film in Taiwan.

A railway set was constructed on a sound stage for packing in the hundreds of panicky passengers. The real-time countdown has started: The bomb is rigged to blow up if the train stops, and defusing it will only trigger another.

Yes, there is another on board. The mysterious criminal mastermind wants payback for Kang-ren’s failure to save the victims of a downtown double bombing tragedy three years earlier.

The story examines the impossible, even selfish, choices front liners are often forced into.

This retelling of Japanese film-maker Junya Sato’s The Bullet Train (1975) – also the inspiration for the Hollywood hit Speed (1994) – should have been 96 minutes long, without the half-hour of tearful confessions brought on by earnest plot twists.

It is certainly an intense infusion of drama and action that has the flawed hero racing in and out of flashbacks, as well as between carriages, to locate the device and redeem himself.

Sung and Lee Lee-zen are both capable support, the latter playing Kang-ren’s former captain, and every suspicious suitcase – which would be all the suitcases – ratchets up the tension.

Hot take: This high-octane locomotive thriller is on track to be a multiplex success.

All Of You (M18)

98 minutes, premieres on Apple TV+ on Sept 26

★★☆☆☆

The story: Wonder who your soulmate is? Great Britain of the near future has a test for that. Long-time college best friends Simon (Brett Goldstein) and Laura (Imogen Poots) realise they are in love too late, after she has married her scientifically certified match (Steven Cree) and started a family.

Emmy-winning actor Goldstein (Ted Lasso, 2020 to present) co-wrote British romance All Of You with English director William Bridges and stars opposite Poots as a couple with such chemistry, they must surely belong together.

Simon and Laura do indeed enter into a torrid affair, when they can no longer deny their unspoken feelings for each other.

She is by then a mother to a preteen daughter, and he is a journalist who has spent half the movie gazing achingly at her from afar as the months skipped forward unmarked into years.

Time is elliptical in their decades-spanning love story. It stops only to rejoin them on their trysts in various idyllic locales outside London, so that you are locked inside their intimate stolen moments of hot sex and cosy in-jokes.

Simon tells Laura she is like a drug he cannot quit. She is mercurial and self-absorbed, walking out mid-spat, yet always returning to him, conflicted over cheating on a nice bloke of a husband she says she will never leave.

But why not? Because she will not accept the test might be wrong, and the clinic offers no refund?

Her actions are exasperating, while the test itself is ultimately inconsequential beyond setting up the central question of whether destiny is ever predetermined.

Whatever its high concept, this is simply another tale of star-crossed lovers trapped in the messy unpredictability of life.

Hot take: Just stick with Tinder.