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Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
LifestyleEntertainment

Every Hong Kong film released in 2023, ranked from worst to best in the year that new directors continued to make history

  • We rank the 37 Hong Kong films that were released locally in 2023, from greats like A Guilty Conscience and Lost Love to stinkers like Prison Flowers
  • Several stories with controversial messages seem to have dazzled their way past the censors, including Mad Fate and Detectives vs Sleuths

Reading Time:15 minutes
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Dayo Wong Tze-wah in a still from “A Guilty Conscience”, which took in HK$115 million to become the highest-grossing local film in Hong Kong cinema history. But where does it come in our ranking of all 37 Hong Kong films released locally in 2023?
Edmund Lee

Hong Kong cinema is so back, it would now take a particularly biased or ignorant observer to deny the remarkable resurgence that is happening before our eyes.

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Following a record-breaking year that saw the city’s film industry produce the two highest-grossing local features – sci-fi spectacle Warriors of Future (HK$81 million/US$10 million) and ensemble comedy Table for Six (HK$77 million) – in its entire history, 2023 kicked off in similarly buoyant mood with the Lunar New Year release of A Guilty Conscience.
A crowd-pleasing court drama that represents a case of mainstream filmmaking done absolutely right, the directorial debut of Jack Ng Wai-lun – a co-screenwriter on such previous megahits as Unbeatable, Cold War 2 and Anita – went on to take HK$115 million and become the record-holder by some distance.

Ng is far from being the only first-time director to have made his mark in this new golden age for debutant filmmakers. Among the top 10 films included in this ranking, seven are a Hong Kong director’s first or second feature.

The cast of “A Guilty Conscience” after the film’s box office passed the HK$100 million mark in Hong Kong, in February 2023.
The cast of “A Guilty Conscience” after the film’s box office passed the HK$100 million mark in Hong Kong, in February 2023.
As for the dreaded impact of the national security law on creative activities in Hong Kong that our 2021 review tentatively flagged, let’s just say that responses from the city’s commercial filmmakers have so far been varied and inventive.
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Let me preface the following by pointing out that few, if any, of the filmmakers discussed here have been remotely vocal about Hong Kong’s political situation, and thus everything could just be a matter of over-interpretation in this writer’s particularly sensitive mind.

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