Film picks: Lost Love, Riceboy Sleeps, Tetris

Lost Love (PG)

92 minutes, now showing, 4 stars

Sammi Cheng was named Best Actress by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society and is the favourite heading into the Hong Kong Film Awards on Sunday for her performance as grieving Mei, who turns to fostering children after the death of her son. There will be joy, but also further heartbreak.

Debut director Ka Sing Fung, a former journalist, provides a rare look inside Hong Kong’s foster care system.

Fostering means much more than supplementary income for Mei and her husband (Alan Luk), who works odd jobs. She gets to be a mother again, and she certainly deserves sympathy in her efforts to reconcile her selfish needs with those of her wards.

The episodic narrative is structured around each arrival in the couple’s working-class New Territories home. All eventually leave, either returned to their families or adopted by another, hence continuing Mei’s cycle of loss along her bittersweet journey of loving and letting go.

Riceboy Sleeps (NC16)

117 minutes, now showing at The Projector, 3 stars

This film bears fair comparison to the Academy Award-winning Minari (2020) and comes with its own clutch of citations, including the Toronto Film Festival top prize, the Toronto Film Critics Association’s best Canadian film and the Busan Film Festival’s Audience Award.

A widow (Choi Seung-yoon) leaves 1990s South Korea with her young son for the suburbs of Canada, enduring racism in her search for a better life.

Celebrated dancer Choi plays So-young as a slip of a woman with quiet resolve, pulling long hours at a factory job, and a fierce devotion to her son Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang), who is cruelly bullied on the playground for being the lone Asian kid – a “riceboy”, pejoratively.

The excellent performances never allow for melodrama. A greater degree of emotional heat might have made this a more impactful experience but, as it is, Korean-Canadian writer-director Anthony Shim’s study of displacement – he also appears as So-young’s manager and suitor – is an intimately observed semi-autobiography that ends with a trip back to South Korea.

Tetris (M18)

117 minutes, streaming on Apple TV+, 4 stars

This movie has the elements making the biopic Air (in cinemas now) a fun watch – juicy details, a driving story and well-defined characters.

Air celebrates the deal that made Nike a sportswear giant; Tetris is based on the true story of the businessman who put the game of the title in the hands of millions. The difference between the two stories is that Tetris never takes itself seriously.

It is a drama, one that dares to take an exaggerated, cartoonish approach to its storytelling. The cheekiness sometimes feels forced, but the affection for its characters is genuine and its love of 1990s-era video games is infectious.

It is 1988 and Dutch video game publisher Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) has seen the future in a certain falling brick game. Chasing the distribution rights for it will take him into the Soviet Union, where savvy dealmakers hope to beat the capitalists at their own game.