LITTLE Q (2019) review

Far from an exploration of Maggie Q’s childhood, Law Wing Cheong’s Little Q is an adaptation of the Japanese novel The Life of Quill, the Seeing-Eye Dog, by Ryohei Akimoto and Kengo Ishiguro, itself based on a true story and already brought to the small and big screens in Japan. Here, Simon Yam plays Lee Bo Ting, a renowned chef who after going blind has become perpetually angry and despondent. His sister (Gigi Leung) encourages him to get a guide dog, and a resourceful golden retriever by the name of Little Q is chosen for the task. Proud to a fault, Lee doesn’t want to rely on a dog, but soon Little Q starts melting his defenses, and a beautiful friendship is born.

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THE MONKEY KING 3 (2018) review

Though Monkey King films – and fantasy films in general – have been produced with remarkable regularity in China in the past six years, few have managed to spawn a franchise, let alone a trilogy. And if we don’t count Jeff Lau’s belated – and dire – A Chinese Odyssey Part III, then Soi Cheang’s The Monkey King 3 bears the distinction of completing the first artistically unified (Soi directed all three films) big screen Chinese fantasy trilogy based on Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West. After a dodgy franchise starter in 2014 that benefited from Donnie Yen’s impressively athletic dedication to portraying a young monkey but sank under the weight of its interminable and poorly-rendered power battles, and a sequel in 2016 that was a marked improvement and was made memorable by Gong Li’s powerhouse White Bone Demon, here comes the third installment, with all the key cast members returning, except for Kelly Chen, who has been replaced in her customary cameo as Guanyin the Goddess of Mercy by Liu Tao – not that too many people will notice.

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