Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho returns to zombie cinema with Gianna Jun, a sealed Seoul high-rise, and an outbreak that attacks and adapts. Colony made its world premiere at Cannes before scoring Korea’s biggest local opening of the year.

Peng Fei’s sweeping, idealistic epic, which premiered in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, follows a stubborn Northeast Chinese worker chasing his late father’s dream of flying, from the reform era’s dance halls to one final ascent.

A stage director’s farewell production turns vicious when his movie-star ex muscles into the lead role. Keane T.K. Wong’s screwball debut, mentored by Derek Yee, stars Stephen Fung, Angela Yuen, Myolie Wu, and Chrissie Chau.

A Hong Kong housewife secretly signs up for a pole dancing class and suddenly finds she has stories to keep straight, a body to retrain, and a respectability act that is falling apart. Catherine Chau headlines Joey Wu’s bright, nimble comedy.

Longman Leung’s Cold War blockbuster prequel rewinds to 1994 and old-school Hong Kong cinema, where a tycoon kidnapping unleashes cops, spies, triads, ransom panic, and colonial paranoia in a city changing hands.

The 50th Hong Kong Film Festival’s Closing Film, Philip Yung’s follow-up to the heartbreaking Papa centers on a trans woman who leaves mainland China for Hong Kong’s back alleys, falls in love, and explores the dangerous freedom to remake herself.

Searching for his long-lost chat room crush Zelda, a Hong Kong chef cooks his way through four dates, four Zeldas, and one deliciously awkward reckoning with love, memory, and appetite in Amos Why (Far Far Away, NYAFF 2022) and Frankie Chung’s funny, tender romance.

Ma Li stars in Andrew Lau’s true story of Zang Jianhe, who sold handmade dumplings near Wan Chai Pier and built them into the legendary Wanchai Ferry brand.

Andy Lau’s mahjong master gets both lucky and cursed—and romantically clobbered by a gloriously volatile Gigi Leung—in Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s tile-drunk comedy of bad hands and worse habits. Following the screening, Mahjong Night bundle ticket holders are invited to the Furman Gallery for a spirited game of mahjong!

Game on! Girl power gets a kick in the joystick as Hong Kong’s all-female esports underdogs turn a cha chaan teng diner into a pixel-bright comeback arena.

Three loves, at three ages, in three cities—17 in Macau, 22 in Taiwan, and 34 in Hong Kong—trace a queer filmmaker’s path from first crush to hard-won self-acceptance. Tracy Choi adapts her own story into warm, unguarded cinema.

A tofu-maker’s kid, a battered Toyota AE86, and mountain roads built for trouble. From the directors of Infernal Affairs, the drift-racing cult favorite returns in 20th-anniversary 4K.

Dayo Wong runs East Tsim Sha Tsui’s last great hostess club. Then Sammi Cheng storms in as his ex-wife and the new CEO, with 30 days to save the fading palace. Jack Ng’s hit makes its international premiere in a rougher, seedier Director’s Cut.

Before superhero cinema took over, Andrew Lau’s The Storm Riders gave Hong Kong its own comic-book apocalypse: peak pop idols Ekin Cheng and Aaron Kwok, prophecy, magic swords, heroic hair, and CGI in overdrive.

A Valentine’s Day bus explosion exposes a forbidden love story in Herman Yau’s furious Hong Kong crime tragedy, where social despair turns violently, devastatingly intimate.

Three girls in a dead-end Japanese town dare each other into the kind of get-rich-quick scheme that can only end badly. Takashi Koyama’s acidly funny, teeth-on-edge teen crime story about wanting out of nowhere-Japan stars Sara Minami, Natsuki Deguchi, and Mizuki Yoshida.

A murdered detective opens the way to a nine-year-old kidnapping case in Tetsuya Nakashima’s dark ensemble mystery of family wreckage and buried guilt.

A teenager buried in debt drifts into the shadow economy that destroyed his family, taking a criminal gig in the woods. Then comes the bear. Eisuke Naito’s gruesome, bleakly funny, yamibaito creature feature bites hard.

A missing occult-magazine editor’s collection of urban legends points toward one terrifying place. The director of Noroi turns a viral Japanese web novel into found-document dread at its most unnerving and entertaining.

Sara Minami, Kasumi Arimura, and Haru Kuroki play three desperate women who stumble into gold smuggling in Singapore and find out that crime, fast cash, and freedom travel well together.

The Sex Pistols hit, Tokyo calls, and a countryside photographer finds himself inside Japan’s punk explosion. Tomorowo Taguchi and writer Kankuro Kudo resurrect the Tokyo Rockers as scrappy DIY legends.

At an exclusive golf club outside Manila, a teenage tee girl enters a paradise of perfect lawns and polite humiliations. Rafael Manuel’s debut, winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, is a savage satire of capitalism, building suspense from poisonous details.

In 1948 Jeju, a young mother searches the forests beneath Hallasan for her missing child as soldiers are ruthlessly crushing opposition to the country’s partition. Ha Myung-mi turns historical terror into a tense, elemental survival drama.

A widow tries to close her life down, but when a piano and a Korean adoptee conductor turn up, they begin reopening it with unexpected results. Kim Hye-ok and Justin H. Min (The Umbrella Academy, After Yang) star in Kim Jin-yu’s elegant drama.

Chung Ji-young’s intense, searching drama, which had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale, links a teenager ashamed of his name and his mother (Yeom Hye-ran) to the buried trauma of the 1948 Jeju massacre.

Ten years on, the Korean blockbuster that conquered the world returns in 4K. Yeon Sang-ho’s breakout transforms a zombie outbreak aboard a bullet train into one of the great modern action-horror rides.

A young boxer delivers lunchboxes, endures her father’s live-in betrayal, and keeps swinging in Lee Yi-shan’s bruising debut, where Taiwanese family drama steps into the ring.

Joseph Chang stars as a grieving husband searching for the truth behind his pregnant wife’s suicide in Shen Ko-shang’s fiction debut, winner of Best Film and Best Actor at the Pingyao International Film Festival and seven-time Golden Horse Award nominee.

A broke director reopens a haunted theater, revives the Taiwanese opera his father abandoned, and falls for its leading lady—who’s been dead for 18 years. Chen Ta-pu packs supernatural comedy and backstage romance into a ghost story with laughter and tears.

Three estranged friends, once bound by a shared dream of acting, reunite by chance for one night in Taipei in Kuo Cheng-chui’s warm, melancholy drama about friendship and words left unspoken.

Bullet benders! Black magic! Stolen Japanese gold! Four badass Tigers raise hell in Kongkiat Komesiri’s sexy, go-for-broke Thai spaghetti Western.

A lost white dog searches for home across 10 years and three human lives he changes in this moving three-director story of love and loyalty from GDH, the studio behind How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies.

A demon returns to Thailand’s oldest and largest Catholic community, takes hold of a former priest, and forces Church exorcism and Isan folk ritual into one terrifying confrontation.

When lightning revives an old woman, a grieving young man sees a way to reach the afterlife in Thiti Srinuan’s funny, eerie, and unexpectedly moving box-office smash, a return to the beloved Thibaan Universe that’s open to first-timers.

From Song Lang director Leon Le, this hushed, beautifully composed chamber drama set in 1985 Saigon centers on a romance between a young translator and a widowed cook from the defeated South.

In NYAFF’s first cine-concert, Tony Bui shapes scenes from across Vietnamese film history into the arc of a single life, set to a live original score from conductor Trần Nhật Minh and violinist Bùi Công Duy. Followed by a discussion and audience Q&A.

Taxi driver Hùng needs money. The internet needs a hero. One staged rescue later, Hùng is trapped inside the lie that may save his daughter’s life. Vietnamese box-office king Thái Hòa stars in Võ Thạch Thảo’s debut.

Two young Chinese expats and aspiring filmmakers drift apart when the pandemic strands her in Los Angeles and leaves him chasing his first feature in New York. Writer-director Yan Kunao, who also plays the lead, finds dry comedy in no-budget filmmaking and diaspora limbo.

The great Joan Chen stars in Xiaodan He’s landmark queer drama as a Chinese immigrant wife and mother in Montreal whose affair with a younger Québécoise woman turns one summer into a secret, sensual awakening.

This program of short films includes Jen Nee Lim’s Buah (Fruit), Yijian Shan’s Si Shui (Still Water), Xinhui Ma’s Flamingo in the Garden, Arvin Belarmino and Kyla Romero’s Agapito, Linjie Sheng’s A Dream Like a Dream, Sari Arambulo’s Cookie, Love, and Soojeong Son’s Cecilia Is Only Eight Years Old.

This program of short films includes Benny Wang’s Apes, Cami Kwan’s Paper Daughter, Yating Hsu’s Girl Talk, Ning Qian’s Buddha the Betrayer, Daphne Zelle’s Where Belly Goes, Diana Bang and Andrea Bang’s One Last Walk, and Imanuel Bolaman’s Autosave.

This program of short films includes Altay Ulan Yang’s Hyena, Anatole Sloan’s Our Child, Shen Chieh Tsang’s No Place Like Home, Hao Zhou’s Correct Me If I’m Wrong, Zéré Turlykhanova’s Coffin Therapy, and Surya Balakrishnan’s The Housekeeper.