Depending on one’s cinema appetite, while the Hong Kong International Film Festival is still on, this week is about either continuing a diet of challenging work or bingeing on junk food.
If one’s mood leans toward challenging, then Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama is precisely the kind of garbage, or genius, that will fit the bill. Borgli’s appropriately titled genre mashup is a curious cinema experience: It’s a film custom built to make viewers uncomfortable, and that’s a circuitous compliment to Borgli’s knack for diving into our collective psychology and demanding that we reckon with it.
The Drama is cut from the same cloth as Borgli’s 2022 debut Sick of Myself and 2023’s Dream Scenario, which skewered the ideas of narcissism, fleeting fame, sadness and loneliness. The film zeroes in on our capacity to — or lack thereof — to forgive, to practice the concept of second chances, and to ask if we can ever truly know another person. The film unfolds over the course of one tumultuous week before the wedding of Emma — Zendaya, affectingly nuanced — and Charlie — Robert Pattinson, proving he’s more than a sparkling vampire. The two play well-heeled young Manhattan professionals with a rock-solid relationship. When a pre-wedding dinner party reveals a devastating secret about one of them, the ugly truth threatens that relationship and their broader lives.
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That sounds coy, but part of The Drama’s beauty is its disjointed construction and shifting perspectives, and how those two techniques recontextualize our perceptions. More crucially, the film raises some hard questions about a thorny issue, which springs out of the blue, leaving the characters to wrestle with it. It’s something of a parlor trick that Borgli handles elegantly, balancing pitch-black humor and dead seriousness, though many among us will accuse him of being tone deaf. Either way, it’s a bold piece of filmmaking that will start conversations.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Han Han’s Pegasus 3, the latest in the racing franchise, which has grossed $1.3 billion since the first film was released in 2019. Pegasus 3 is 2026’s highest-grossing film worldwide so far.
Admittedly, Hong Kong audiences might feel disconnected from the story — the first two films didn’t open here — but to suggest Pegasus 3 is difficult to follow is a stretch. It’s a bog-standard sports drama that cleaves closely to genre convention. In it, an underdog rally team rises above the obstacles of wealth, power and corruption to win a critical race the right way and for the right reasons.
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Director Han emerged on China’s pop culture landscape as a race car driver in 2003, and so it’s no surprise that Pegasus 3’s strongest elements are its racing scenes. When the story picks up from Pegasus 2, ace driver Zhang Chi (Shen Teng), his second Sun Yuqiang (Yin Zheng) and their mechanic Ji Xing (Zhang Benyu) find that their driving school is hemorrhaging money and are desperate to keep it afloat. They get lucky when tech-forward Chinese team boss Bai Qiang asks Zhang to help put together the national squad for the complex Muchen 100 Rally, but soon find themselves pawns in a game of privilege and big business.
There’s never any doubt about how Pegasus 3 is going to end, so the second act filler weighs the film down with needless flashbacks and unwieldy exposition. However, when Han gets to the race the film takes off, with fluid cinematography and legitimate tension despite the inevitable outcome. Pegasus 3 — a Lunar New Year release — is fun and frothy and wants nothing more than to entertain and does so effortlessly. Social deconstruction can wait for another day.
