Twilight of the Warriors wins best picture in 2024 Hong Kong Film Critics Society awards

Director Soi Cheang Pou-soi scores third win in four years for martial arts drama set in Kowloon Walled City; Papa wins two major awards

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Louis Koo Tin-lok in a still from Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, winner of best Hong Kong film in the 2024 Hong Kong Film Critics Awards. Photo: Media Asia Distribution

Published: 8:15pm, 13 Jan 2025

Soi Cheang Pou-soi’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In has been voted the best Hong Kong film of 2024 by a panel of critics, the Hong Kong Film Critics Society announced on January 13.

The best picture win for the film, a mega-budget martial arts spectacle that combines an exhilarating display of bone-crunching violence with an immersive recreation of the sights and sounds of the Kowloon Walled City, is the third such honour for Cheang in four years, after Limbo topped the same awards in 2022 and Mad Fate in 2024.

The best director prize went to Philip Yung Tsz-kwong for Papa, a heart-wrenching family drama based on a gruesome real-life killing in Hong Kong. Lau Ching-wan, who plays the father of a teenage boy who killed his mother and younger sister in the film, was named best actor.

Long-time assistant director Albert Mak Kai-kwong won the best screenplay honour for the darkly comic crime drama Rob N Roll, which he co-scripted with two others. The film, which was released over the Lunar New Year holiday in 2024, charts the criss-crossing paths of several robbers and robbers-to-be.

Lau Ching-wan (front) in a still from Papa. Photo: Golden Scene.

The best actress category looks to be one of the most hotly contested fields in years at the upcoming Hong Kong Film Awards, and Hedwig Tam Sin-yin struck an early win for her role in Montages of a Modern Motherhood as a working-class mother struggling to cope with the pressure put on her by both family and society.