Welcome back to the Fridae Movie Club! We hope you notice and approve of the slight redecorations we've made to the Fridae website design.

Our pick for the week is The Great Magician, a lighthearted yet very clever film by Hong Kong writer-director Derek Yee, which takes recent films like The Prestige and The Illusionist and turns them into a comic farce while retaining all the cleverness. The film reunites Tony Leung and Zhou Xun, as the titular illusionist who must rescue the love of his life from the clutches of a bumbling Chinese warlord.

Contraband continues the recent invasion of Hollywood by Iceland's talented filmmakers. In this remake of an award-winning Icelandic film, Mark Wahlberg plays a reformed shipping smuggler who must make one last big haul to protect his wife and save his brother-in-law from certain harm.

A Happy Event is a dramedy that offers an honest, politically incorrect, no -holds-barred view of pregnancy and child-rearing. We recommend it for fans of experimental films with odd structures and unconventional storytelling.

I Spit on Your Grave is the remake of the original notorious rape and revenge film from 1978. Find out if the remake can still shock in an era where Hollywood and Korean cinema have turned torture porn and revenge fantasies into a spectacle and an art!

Till next week,

Vernon Chan