NY Asian Film Festival 2024: 5 Must-See Movies at the Summer’s Wildest Fest

‘All Shall Be Well’ (dir. Ray Yeung)

NYAFF is known — a bit reductively, perhaps — for importing fun genre fare. But as the festival has grown into a major event on the annual film calendar, it’s increasingly started to complement its typical programming with a few sprinkles of prestige. This year’s edition finds NYAFF continuing to pull from a wide variety of more high-profile fests, and with targeted precision. Case in point: Berlinale highlight “All Shall Be Well,” a tender and immensely moving Hong Kong drama about a widowed lesbian whose grief is compounded by the hardships of local law, which never allowed her to legalize the relationship she was in for the last 40 years.

In his rave IndieWire review of Ray Yeung’s film earlier this year, David Opie wrote that “All Shall Be Well” “draws favorable comparisons to ‘A Fantastic Woman,’ as its heroine finds her her world crumbling after her partner’s abrupt death, with the family of the departed controlling the farewell ceremony and setting their sights on the property the two had shared. Beautifully written and performed, the film illustrates Yeung’s keen eye for the nuances of social dynamics, especially regarding matters of wealth and class that many may prefer to skirt around when it comes to family. Much of the low-key film’s power lies in making every key player’s reasoning sympathetic, even when their words or choices are ultimately antagonistic towards the woman left in limbo by the law and fate.”

‘Granny Prostitutes’ (dir. Joel Lamangan)

Whatever you think you’re about to see when you sit down to watch something called “Granny Prostitutes,” Joel Lamangan’s ribald and bawdy Filipino melodrama delivers on that expectation. As funny in its frankness as it is humane in its empathy, this episodic story about a group of aging sex workers hits just about every note on the spectrum of human emotionality — and has a boisterous score to match. 

Dalena (Gloria Diaz) is the heart and soul of this sprawling ensemble. By day, she sells holy tonics by the side of the road and haggles over the rent with the put-upon old lady who owns the boarding home where she lives. By night, she walks the streets with her friends as they do whatever’s required to get by. One funny scene finds Dalena living in the moment as she performs homeopathic remedies on a man who can’t get it up, but these women reserve most of their energy for each other, as they rely on that solidarity to survive in a world that doesn’t seem to care if they live or die. Case in point: the heart-wrenching moment when one of the women begins to bleed profusely due to undiagnosed cervical cancer, only for her client to respond that he isn’t horny anymore. All the doctor can do is tell her that miracles happen every day; by the end of this singular and extremely sentimental ode to the human spirit and the universal dignity that it demands, life will make good on that promise in so many different ways. 

‘Let’s Go Karaoke!’ (dir. Nobuhiro Yamashita)

If the idea of watching a tone-deaf yakuza absolutely butcher the opening theme song from “Neon Genesis Evangelion” sounds like something you might want to see, look no further than “Let’s Go Karaoke!,” a charming-as-hell comedy about a desperate gangster who starts taking singing lessons from a junior high student he overhears at a local choir recital.

The yakuza (Go Ayano as “Crazy Kid”) is afraid of hitting a flat note at his clan’s annual karaoke competition, the loser of which gets a bad tattoo of the boss’ choosing. The boy he forces to help him (Jun Saito) is afraid of losing his spot as his school’s top soprano, which feels inevitable now that his voice has started to change. Will this strange partnership end in an unexpected harmony? Will Crazy Kid ever be convinced to pick a song that doesn’t force him to scream and/or use falsetto? Will his young sensei find a way to be in two places at once when his year-end recital and the yakuza karaoke party are inevitably scheduled at the same time? 

The answers to these questions aren’t particularly hard to guess in advance, but “Linda Linda Linda” director Nobuhiro Yamashita knows how to listen to what his characters are trying to express even when everything about them seems out of tune. And while “Let’s Go Karaoke!” — one of four Yamashita-directed movies due to be released this year! — isn’t quite as spirited or memorable as his other movie about singing teens, this super entertaining Tokyo story finds a similarly life-affirming joy in making the best of things, however discordant that might sound.

‘Pattaya Heat’ (dir. Yang Shupeng)

A sprawling underworld saga that puts a feverish new spin on the kind of post-Tarantino crime ensembles that used to be everywhere (but now feel almost refreshingly nostalgic), Yang Shupeng’s “Pattaya Heat” weaves a wild tapestry of death and double-crosses through Thailand’s most debaucherous city. It starts, of course, with a widowed police sergeant whose gambling addiction has left him in the pocket of Pattaya’s newest kingpin. But it isn’t long before his story begins to overlap with a one-eyed gangster, a fortune-telling femme fatale, the hot-to-trot wife of a pizzeria owner, and — perhaps most importantly — her trigger-happy brother-in-law, fresh out of prison and eager to get into trouble. 

These lost souls quickly become so mixed up in each others’ business that it can be hard to keep track of what’s going on, but it doesn’t matter when the characters are this much fun, and the action — when it finally kicks off in the third act — is so spectacular. Credit belongs to “Oldboy” stunt director Yang Kil-yong, who one-ups the frenzied close-quarters combat from that movie with an elevator stab-fest that moves so fast it almost feels like a special effect. “Pattaya Heat” is a long and crazy ride, but anyone who holds on will undeniably get their money’s worth.

‘Victory’ (dir. Park Beom-su)

Park Beom-su’s “Victory” is the opening night selection of this year’s festival, and it’s hard to imagine a better or more fitting way to kick off a new edition of NYAFF than with a Sergio Leone-tinged scene where two small town South Korean high school girls approach a busy pair of “Dance Dance Revolution” machines and proceed to absolutely smoke the ego-tripping boys who thought they were the fastest guns in Geoje.

A 1999-set period piece about a pair of disaffected lifelong besties (Lee Hye-ri and Park Se-wan) who dream of moving to Seoul, but settle for starting a cheerleading club to support their school’s awful soccer team, “Victory” will be very familiar to fans of “Bring it On” (down to the hilariously exasperating try-out montage), but its lighthearted story of friendship hits a lot harder without all those layers of camp to soften the fall.

Lee and Park are a super charismatic pair, and the energy between them starts to crackle in a whole new way after a transfer student (K-pop star Jo A-Ram) is added into the mix. Nothing is routine about the way these girls learn to move in sync and support each other, and “Victory” eventually achieves the one-of-a kind of high that NYAFF somehow finds a way to deliver every year.