Dear You (2026 film)

Category: Historic foreign-language drama

Original Chinese title: Love Letters To Grandma

Directed by: Lan Hongchun

Similar to: How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies

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Yet another addition to the collection of Asian films I have watched because of a viral Instagram campaign. Some of my friends and family wanted to see this because they saw the Instagram clips of people walking out of this movie crying and thought "this must be good!".

Me, I still have the slightly bad taste left in my mouth by Sunshine Women's Choir, so I was admittedly quite hesitant, especially when I saw the people crying part - but I promised Mrs Damo that I'd sit and watch this with an open mind.

One of the unique aspects of the film is that it is entirely in the Chinese dialect of Teo Chew - a rarity, and gives me reason to explain Chinese names and language and culture to my readers. China is not one homogenous group of people. It has a national language (Mandarin) that is spoken by pretty much everyone - and especially when you get to government-level positions – but then there are regional dialects native to whatever region of China you happen to be in. For example, if you are in Guangdong, you will hear Cantonese being spoken a lot. In Fujian or Taiwan, you will hear Hokkien, and then you can also have city-level dialects as well - a lot of people I know speak Shanghainese which is a separate language all its own (though related to Mandarin). And in a particular region of the densely populated Eastern region of China named Chaoshan, you get Teo Chew (or sometimes stylised as Teochew).

So to a very large extent, you can actually tell where a person's family or ancestors are from by the dialect they speak at home and/or the phonetics of their surname. The western equivalent would like if you're a red-headed kid surnamed Kernaghan - three guesses as to where your parents are from.

But why the viral marketing campaign? In a surprise twist, this movie is actually targeted to the elderly generation, and particularly the generation of Chinese whose parents left China post-WW2 to build a new life.

But forget viral marketing campaigns - does this movie do enough to earn a prestigious Damo Reviews Movies recommendation?

The plot:

Hiao Ui (Zheng Runqi), a young man living in the Shan Tou region of China (one of the eastern coastal areas) has fallen afoul of loan sharks and needs to find money quick while promising he'll have the money by next week. Conspiring with his uncle Zheng Chulong (Zheng Pengsheng), Hiao Ui gets the idea of going to Thailand to either find his rich grandfather or retroactively try to claim a piece of the inheritance (not sure how far that story would get him, but points for trying) because it turns out that the grandfather, Bak Seng (Wang Yantong), has numerous schools named after him in Thailand. He must be wealthy, right?

1 Brother, 7 Siblings (2025 film)

Category: Foreign language drama

Original Indonesian Title: 1 Kakak 7 Ponakan

Directed by: Yandy Laurens

Reminded me of: Wonder

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"Damo, Damo, you have to watch this - I heard it's really good!" said Mrs. Damo, right after Mr. Damo recovered from watching Siksa Kubur. And as soon as it started, Damo realised that he and Mrs. Damo have a VERY different taste in movies.

Apparently, this movie is an adaptation of a Sinetron titled (in English) "A Sister & Seven Siblings" from the 1990s, just with a gender-swap.

The plot:

The movie starts off with Moko (Chicco Kurniawan) who moves in with his heavily pregnant older sister and her husband, Agnes and Atmo (Maudy Koesnaedi and Kiki Narendra) to prepare for his thesis defence and graduation to a Masters program in architecture. Agnes and Atmo live with Woko (Fatih Unru), Nina (Freya Jayawardana, credited here as Freya JKT48) and Ano (Ahmad Nadif) who is Atmo's nephew.

Grave Torture (2024 film)

Category: Foreign language - supernatural horror

Original title: Siksa Kubur (Indonesian for 'grave torture')

Directed by: Joko Anwar

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So recently, it was a public holiday where I am in Australia. As a film buff, I decided to whip out the ol' Netflix and see what was available. A film called Grave Torture sounds kinda interesting - supernatural splatter horror, and with an R18+ rating. This better hit hard because anything with an R18+ rating isn't (and shouldn't be) a walk in the park!

And I can only hope it will be better in terms of Indonesian horror than Guna Guna Istri Muda, which in reality isn't a high bar to clear.

The plot:

The movie begins with siblings Sita and Adil (Widuri Puteri and Muzakki Ramdhan) working at their parents bakery. Their parent's (played by Fachri Albar and Happy Salma) are kindly people, but business is struggling. While standing behind the counter, Adil catches the attention of a man with a serious look on his face and wearing headphones. The man walks in, hands Adil a casette tape, talks about fighting the enemies of Allah and warns him to not go outside. Sita attempts to prevent a theft of cash from the till with the parents confronting the thief outside, but they all fall victim to the man Adil encountered before who turns out to be a suicide bomber.

A Quiet Place: Day One (2022 film)

Category: Creature horror

Directed by: Michael Sarnoski

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One of the most famous quotes ever to come from the pen of English essayist Samuel Johnson was that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel". The quote is not actually about patriotism itself, but critiques the insincere use of patriotism and how some individuals exploit the concept of patriotism for self-serving purposes. And if I may bastardise the quote for second, Damo the middle-aged movie reviewer thus states "prequels are the last refuge of creatively-bankrupt movie studios - who may or may not be scoundrels".

And I start off with this because the first "A Quiet Place" movie was a surprise smash hit - a surprise smash hit to the point that Paramount Pictures decided to do Paramount Pictures things and pump out a sequel. I haven't seen the sequel, but I get the impressions it didn't quite hit the same creative and box office heights as the first. And so we are faced with the age old question - what do you do when you can't advance a story further, but want to milk more out your IP? The answer - you run it back to the beginning.

So now we have "A Quiet Place: Day One", chronicling the very beginning of the monster invasion of Earth (which takes place in New York, because of course).

The plot:

Lupita Nyongo plays Sam, a woman dying from cancer and living out her days at a hospice in upstate New York, alongside her cat Frodo who keeps her company. Sam reluctantly agrees to go on an day trip to a New York City theatre (on the promise of pizza afterwards) for a marionette puppet show. Sam sneaks out for a quick bit of personal shopping then back to the theatre right at the end, and right when she thinks its pizza time, we see meteors flash across the sky and the patients are ordered back on the bus to evacuate and head back to the hospice.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (2026 film)

Category: Historic gangster drama/TV series tie-in.

Directed by: Tom Harper

Similar to: The Dark Knight Rises (but in Birmingham).

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I wouldn't consider myself a Peaky Blinders fan. I liked it, sure, but not enough to make Red Right Hand my ringtone or to get a Peaky Blinders haircut - I was much more a fan of how they recreated the time period. The series did a fairly good job of presenting the ethos and spirit of post-WW1 Britain, but my main gripe with the series was how Tommy Shelby kept on surviving assassination attempt after assassination attempt. That, and the very last episode which verged on outright ridiculous.

But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, and given how popular the series was, there was always going to be an attempt to revive the IP in some form be it a movie or a series return. So with that in mind, we get the feature-length movie Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.

Oh man. I'm not a fan of that subtitle for starters...but here goes!

The plot:

The movie starts off in Germany where we see a large-scale operation where counterfeit British banknotes are ready to be shipped to England in order to ruin the British war-time economy, the transport of which is being facilitated by Beckett (Tim Roth).

Melania (2026 documentary)

Category: Documentary

Directed by: Brett Ratner

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There's an old saying from Madame de Stael that goes:

In life, one must choose between boredom or suffering. 

In light of that, shall I add, that on the very rare occasion, life gives you both at the same time.

With this in mind I bring you my review of Melania, a documentary film released earlier in 2026 that chronicles three particular weeks in the life of current United States First Lady Melania Trump in the lead-up to the January 2025 inauguration of her husband, Donald Trump.

Just to make clear - I'm reviewing this as a film watcher and keeping any thoughts about US president Trump or his administration, be they positive or negative, aside. If you're after a Trump-bashing exercise, this isn't it.

But even as a film watcher, I have some fairly strong opinions which I want to get to, so let's get into a plot recap first:

There honestly isn't much of a plot or a story here.

Sunshine Women's Choir (2025 film)

Category: Musical drama

Directed by: Gavin Lin

Similar to: Glee, but in a prison.

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Regular readers and the bots that scrape this website will know that foreign language movies aren't really my thing - out of the 70 or so movies I've reviewed so far, only a handful have been foreign. Not out of hatred or anything, but just that one tends to feel more comfortable with the things they're familiar with. 

However, I can now add another foreign movie to the list - Sunshine Women's Choir, which marks my first Chinese-language movie. My wife wanted to see this since it had quite a bit of hype from its release in Taiwan, and look, discounted movie tickets and a night out with the family aren't the worst combination in history.

When I was told that we're seeing Sunshine Women's Choir, I initially thought it was about the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine - and yes, there is literally a suburb in Melbourne called Sunshine, named after the company that built a manufacturing hub in the suburb around WW1. A movie about a group of women from a working-class immigrant suburb forming a choir wouldn't have been a bad premise for a movie, but it turns out this movie is about a bunch of women in a prison who form a choir instead.

Let's get reviewing, shall we!

Plot (really badly explained):

Inside the northern women's prison of Taiwan (implying there's also a southern women's prison in Taiwan), the pregnant Hui-Zhen (Ivy Chen) gives birth and raises her daughter. In her cell (which looks more like a creche than a place where people do hard times) are three other women who help raise the girl - the more senior Yu Ying (Judy Ongg), the middle-aged Pei Ying (May Suen) who has a male pen pal/love interest on the outside, and Xiu Lan (Amber An).