Check Out: The Movie (2023)

Sasaki Ryohei (Yamada Ryosuke), the second son of the Sasaki family, is a high school student who lives in Shimane. He has just been chosen to be the vice captain of the youth soccer club. Setting his sights on participating...

A romance between a soldier and country boy splinters into a mythical venture based on Thai folklore.

Ho Kau Kei Hospital is the worst place to be for a person who’s got health problems. Doctors and nurses are concerned about everything except for the patients; an incredible amount of papers has to be filled to get anything done; and the management is more interested in saving dollars than lives. Sir Ho Kau Kei was unlucky enough to become the patient of his own hospital. After having such dreadful experience, Sir Ho decides to improve the situation and invites Joe, a skillful doctor who has previously worked at Ho Kau Kei Hospital but got disappointed and quitted after the situation turned for the worse. Together with his fellows Jim and Yan, Joe tries to turn the hospital into a decent place.

Based on strange events believed by many locals to have taken place in Chiang Mai late last century, the story opens with 40-ish marketer named Thi, his wife Parn, his rebellious teenage daughter Nan and lively young son Nat moving from Bangkok to Laddaland, an upmarket housing estate located in Chiangmai. Convinced that his new job with a company that sells dietary supplements is the answer to all his troubles, Thi ignores Parn's legitimate concern over hefty mortgage payments; he also believes that the move will lift Nan's deep-seated resentment of him and Parn, who left the girl with her grandmother for much of her childhood. Following the grisly murder of a Burmese housemaid and Thi's unpleasant encounter with wife-beating next-door neighbour Somkiat, ghosts start appearing before Nan, who is unable to convince her parents that she's not making up these supernatural incidents...

Issues of modern romance and personal identity are played for intelligent laughter in this tart comedy from Taiwan. Wu (played by Rene Liu) is a businesswoman in her early 30's whose professional life is going just fine. It's her personal life that's giving her problems. Since she's not meeting the right sort of man in her daily life, she decides to take the bull by the horns and place a personal ad in the newspaper; she gets over 100 responses to her ad, and much of the film is taken up by her meetings with a variety of men who want to know more about her. Her potential suitors range from a restaurant manager with a shoe fetish and a writer who his brings his mother along to a would-be rock star and a lesbian in male drag. Director Chen Kuo-Fu was a leading Taiwanese film critic in the 1980's before moving to filmmaking in the early 1990's.

A Mi, for instance, keeps sleeping with her boyfriend Heung Soo, but she knows too well that this rocker-wannabe does not have any real chance to succeed in this tough world where there is no protection whatsoever for talentless men. A Mi willy-nilly stumbles into a better choice at this time, a capable man named Seung Won (Kim Seong Su), who is an accountant for Deloitte's Seoul office. Except for this guy's dreadful sense of humour, A Mi vaguely assumes that her life would change for the better if she tied the knot with him. But what really concerns her is neither of these men. She is, after all, an aspiring screenwriter, and she is determined to finish her first project, no matter what. When it comes to determination and toughness, A Mi is portrayed as a cinematic macho who used to be a hardcore chain-smoker, but resolutely quits cigarettes once she gets serious about her career as a far stronger, almost traditional alpha male...

Antique dealer Koike Norio flounders around as he goes after a big break. He heads for Sakai, Osaka to find a treasure and meets down-and-out potter Noda Sasuke. A prominent appraiser dupes them and the two losers collude to make a pile of cash by faking "Rikyu's lost tea bowl."