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Streaming Sleepers: Netflix Clocks In Ricky Ko’s TIME, Hands A Light To Chan Kin Long’s HAND ROLLED CIGARETTE

Not all the titles Netflix premieres on its platform gets a fair promo or even a spot on the Coming Soon list, which is a shame. With that said, Ricky Ko’s dark comedy crime thriller, Time, and Chan Kin Long’s celebrated feature debut, Hand Rolled Cigarette, would fair nicely as discoveries for just about anyone stumbling upon them. Still, I guess I’m happy to stan these titles for a bit with a post here. Both have been on the streamer for a while already, so I at least hope folks out there are still catching on. They each screened last year for the twentieth edition of the New York Asian Film Festival, and so I was able to lend my fair share of thoughts which you can catch here as well as here. Ko’s Time centers on an aging trio of ex-gangland enforcers who manage to rediscover themselves once more […]

NYAFF XX Review: Ricky Ko’s TIME, A Quaint, Ebullient Killers’ Fable

Lee B. Golden III

Playing like a vingette out of the 1970s, the intro to Ricky Ko’s directorial debut, Time, dives right into the 60s as we meet younger versions of our killer-for-hire trio, Chau, Fung and driver, Chung. A robust music score accompanies and enlivening opening action scene that falls short of mimicking classic 70s cinema, but still does its own thing in invoking a proper flashback to help pave the way for our characters, including Chau as he whips out his legendary karambit, corners an underworld boss and has his way with him. Fast forward to present day and the young, spritely killers Chau and Fung once were, are very much far from their heyday glory: Chau (Patrick Tse) is forced to contend with modern technology when he’s fired from the restaurant he worked as a noodle chef for not being expedient enough; Fung is now a grandmother working as a cabaret […]