Romance & melodrama

4 stories

Sixth ToneChinaDivorcés Starring in TV Romances? China’s Internet Isn’t So Sure “Against the Current,” the country’s current top TV drama, features a high-ranking Ming dynasty divorcé who marries his former maid, part of a trend of shows featuring divorced men.

10.14

SCMP FilmHong KongDisney+ K-drama The Remarried Empress: Shin Min-a reigns in lavish royal romance fantasy Lead cast: Shin Min-a, Ju Ji-hoon, Lee Jong-suk, Lee Se-young Shin Min-a is, for all intents and purposes, Korea’s first Disney Princess as she plays the titular royal in the lavish new K-drama The…

10.14

SCMP FilmHong KongDisney+ K-drama Between Steps: Kim So-hyun, Choo Young-woo in Ahn Pan-seok’s final romance Lead cast: Kim So-hyun, Choo Young-woo Latest Nielsen rating: 2.36 per cent Kim So-hyun (My Lovely Liar) and Choo Young-woo (The Tale of Lady Ok) share the screen in this university-set slice-of-life…

10.10

Cinema EscapistAsiaReview: Teochew Hit “Dear You” Is Great Melodrama, But Doesn’t Fix China’s Soft Power Deficits

08.28

Our mark is 銀幕, ginmaku — the silver screen, and the same two characters in Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

I came to Tokyo at twenty-three for a summer job at a Shibuya mini-theatre and the job never quite ended. Fifteen years of festivals later I still think the only review that counts is the one the room gives you: where the laugh lands, the moment three hundred people stop moving at once, whether anybody stays for the credits.

Cinepuuulse follows Asian cinema — Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand — across about a hundred and twenty sources. A good number of them are Spanish, French and Portuguese, because those countries programme this work seriously and write about it better than most of the English-language trade. Genre and art-house get the same seat here. I am not ranking them, and nothing is scored out of ten.

Each story is a headline, a short excerpt, one still and a link to the outlet that did the reporting. We never republish the piece, and the still belongs to its studio or its photographer. A Korean trade paper appears in Korean, a French review in French. We point at the work; we do not put words in anyone's mouth.

— Daren Wise, Tokyo