This post got held up in my drafts and was meant to be longer as I caught up on Fantasia and Fantasia-adjacent movies hitting theaters but sometime in August I just slowed to a crawl and I'm not sure why - probably a matter of seeing a lot of movies in the theater this year (it's not out of the question that I'll hit 450) and just not really being able to stay up late afterward. Between meds and being in my mid-50s, to "see movie at 7pm up, past midnight writing, again the next day" loop isn't a thing anymore, and with no commute, I don't have that nice 90 minutes on transit to open the chromebook and go without being distracted by the internet.
It was a fairly busy crowd for All Wishes Come True! when I saw it in August, with extra shows put on, one of those situations where I think AMC looks at the initial ticket sales and goes "oh, when you say it was popular in China, you mean that it not only sold a fair number of tickets in a country of 1.4 billion people, but it's got good word of mouth and they're telling their friends in Chinatown!", and it did hang around for a few weeks after.
That was kind of expected; I'm a bit more surprised to see Hot Spot hanging around for a second week, albeit at times best described as "will the T still be running that late, given the half hour of trailers AMC plays?" Still, the crowd I saw it with Tuesday night was small but into it; things don't stick around like they used to, but I wouldn't be shocked if this is one that occasionally gets discovered when it rotates into a streaming services offerings down the road.
Bâxiân! (All Wishes Come True!)
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 22 August 2026 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
I recognize that there's a huge filter at work in terms of what Chinese animated movies make it to the United States and we don't get the annual Boonie Bears or McDull movies, so you can only make sweeping generalizations about what you see, but, dang, what we do get is so cool. The animation isn't always Disney/DreamWorks caliber, but there's almost always some sort of jaw-dropping visuals that make one realize that nobody else is really getting close to what the medium allows. The fantasy adventure like this are things Tsui Hark and company could barely dream of doing in live action.
Every thousand years, the Doomsmite arrives, bringing disease, floods, and other disasters, and can only be thwarted by the Yu-Xu Lantern, currently believed to be in the vault of the Gods Fu Lu Shou in the City of Penglai. Lü Dongbin, carrying the sword of the Lantern Bearer, has arrived to recover it, which involves tracking down Zhongli Quan (voice of Chen Hao), a masterful pickpocket who studied under the same master before being expelled from the Immortal Academy, who disguised the Lantern as another artifact and is the only one who can identify it. They make a plan to tunnel into the vault (which also contains a fortune) from a disused temple - but posing as Immortals means they must grant wishes to maintain their cover, they wind up needing to let five other rogues in on their plan, and then warrior He Xiangu crashes the party, and she's not nearly as dangerous as the forces behind the scenes.
Production studio Pearl Studio is a DreamWorks spinoff - it started life as "Oriental DreamWorks" and worked on Kung Fu Panda 4 and Abominable - and you can tell; the characters do kind of have DreamWorks face and there's more than a bit of the "look how we make this ancient city like present-day New York, er, Beijing" to the setting. It perhaps also inherited the sneaking suspicion that for as good as it looks flat, it must look amazing in Imax 3D, as the staging of all the flying hordes of magic warriors likely becomes clearer when there's more separation for folks stacked three deep in every corner of the screen. Like much of the output of both the original studio and animated Chinese fantasy in general, it spends a lot of time in mid-air.
Which is part of what makes it such a fun, fanciful adventure, even when the fate of the world is at stake. I suspect that a lot of the jokes and backstory land a lot better for those who grew up with the mythology - I smiled when they set up some Monkey King ex machina but could not read the subtitles fast enough as they tried to explain a twist rooted in the Chinese characters of a person's name - but the idea of an Ocean's Eleven-style heist set in a magic city with the highest stakes comes through anyway, and the vibe is right throughout. While I had to play a little catch-up when it got to the stakes suddenly being even higher because a certain mythological character showed up, it leads to a back half full of crazy fighting on a palace that has become a flying boat and a couple genuinely shocking turns. It's a whole load of fun animated action, even if the epilogue is stretching things a bit too far.
I wonder how many other animators in China are trying to replicate the success of Ne Zha 2 with movies like this (and why wouldn't you?), and how many aren't coming as close as All Wishes Come True! does, both in terms of being big irreverent fun and massive hits in China. Probably a lot, and we're probably lucky that the filter only lets things this good through.
Hot Spot
☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Seen 25 August 2026 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Two screenings about a month apart seems like the idea way to review a movie - just long enough that the initial impression isn't overpowering, but not so long that you can't consciously take a second look at various things, and the potentially different audience can lead to different observations. Unfortunately, it's impractical; it barely gives me enough time to recommend seeing it in a theater.
It takes place in one of those futures where climate catastrophe has rendered much of Europe an uninhabitable desert, with society controlled by The Head, an artificial intelligence that efficiently manages resources and serves as an almost-telepathic communications system for those connected. It's not perfect - heads occasionally explode - but it mostly seems to work. Today, it is dispatching Djonny (Andrzej Konopka) to investigate a murder at a refugee camp full of people who will not connect to The Head. Leader Rana (Noomi Rapace) is accused of being a "cyber-witch", though she objects to the cyber component. She and Djonny crack the case relatively quickly, allowing him to go home to his musician wife Ayka (Reika Kirishima), and son Zen (George Aurimus Cris). Ayka is not nearly so sanguine about the benefits of The Head, and that's before a cascading failure.
Hot Spot looks like a futuristic murder mystery, but its frequent brilliance is that it's never quite what it appears to be. The main mystery is solved in relatively short order, with Djonny not exactly uniinvolved, but often seeming like a genial middle-aged white guy around to do a bit of the work and take all of the credit. He's the easygoing face of a bad system that is sympathetic at points but constantly displays a rigidness that one can see getting worse even in this small sample. A bit that popped into sharpened relief a second time through is how uncomfortable Filippa Koutoupa's Maria is as the junior officer assigned to assist him; she initially looks like a goof on cosplaying green-haired millennials not belonging in serious places, but she's very much the sympathetic one looking pained at how Djonny and the other cops won't respect the refugees' culture at all.
Mostly, though, it's strikingly clever in how the filmmakers use a retro aesthetic to hide how they are satirizing very modern concerns. One laughs at Djonny's garish outfits and perm, especially when "The Final Countdown" starts up on the soundtrack, and while giggling at the Seventies aesthetics, it's easy to miss that the way people interact with The Head mimics how the audience uses social media without obviously being commentary because there's no phone. Writer Robert Bolesto and director Agnieszka Smoczynska (who previously collaborated on The Lure find all sorts of ripe targets, from AI-resurrected relatives to how literally invasive and corrosive the technology is, without getting too hung up on making the metaphor exact or getting too subsumed in the details. The vibe is impeccable, from how the refugees' garb symbolizes a balance between openness and privacy to how the lack of safeguards presents as a symptom of the system exiting human control rather than bad world-building.
It allows the story to be kind of rough, for better or worse. The plot is simple and whatever is convenient, with a bunch of major stretches that go well beyond how the system is meant to be much more rickety than it appears. Rana is foremost among the characters who don't really get to do much and are probably about 75% interesting only because Noomi Rapace is playing her like she's trying to capture every nuance of a favorite character in a novel whose part had to be cut in the screen adaptation. The early solution to the "mystery" can make the rest a bit rudderless, like Smoczynska and Bolesto are doing a better job of pasting scenes that only work in this setting they're unlikely to revisit together than most but maybe not entirely making a story of it.
The film's kind of a hoot nevertheless, especially as it embraces its Corman aesthetic without it and the makers' love for the genre seeming to be the entire point. It's a throwback with its eyes relentlessly set on the present; maybe not quite so entertaining the second time around as when it initially seemed like such a breath of fresh air, but certainly entertainingly eccentric.
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