Singapore CNY 2026 Film Reviews: A Local Cinema Preview - Maxthon

A Good Fortune ★★★☆☆

On the surface, A Good Fortune is a familiar rom-com scaffold: two mismatched protagonists, a high-stakes competition, festive backdrop, inevitable romantic revelation. What elevates it is the specificity of its Singaporean detail. The pineapple tart — painstakingly laboured over each year, a source of familial pride and intergenerational tension — is an inspired competitive arena. It is not merely a prop but a cultural artefact, carrying within it questions of tradition, authenticity, and what it means to belong to a place.

The annual CNY drive across the Causeway, experienced by hundreds of thousands of Singaporean families, grounds the film in lived geography. The casting of veteran comedic actors Liu Lingling, Patricia Mok and Henry Thia alongside the central pairing of Xixi Lim and Wang Weiliang ensures generational range, and the inclusion of Thai actress Usha Seamkhun — fresh off the regional phenomenon How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies — signals Singapore cinema’s growing willingness to situate itself within a broader Southeast Asian emotional landscape rather than a purely local one.

The reportedly unscripted kiss scene between Lim and Wang hints at a production culture willing to embrace spontaneity, which may lend the film an appealing warmth.

Luck My Life! ★★★☆☆

Luck My Life! operates in well-trodden thematic territory: the hubris of inherited privilege, the stripping away of material comfort, and the rediscovery of authentic values. In a Singaporean context, however, this arc carries particular cultural weight. The figure of the “silver spoon” inheritor sits uneasily in a society that has historically valorised meritocracy and self-made success. Richie Koh’s character Tian Cai — whose very name gestures toward talent and fortune — is thus not merely a comic protagonist but a vehicle for anxieties about wealth, luck, and desert that run deep in Singapore’s social consciousness.

“The true soul of the game” is a phrase suggestive of mahjong or some other competitive tradition, which would neatly tie personal redemption to a cultural practice. The film’s success will depend on how specifically Singaporean it allows that journey to feel, rather than settling for a universalised moral fable. With Tay Ping Hui in the cast — a reliably grounded screen presence — there is reason for cautious optimism.

3 Good Guys ★★½☆☆

The most tonally lightweight of the quartet, 3 Good Guys sends its three protagonists to Thailand for a spiritual reckoning with their romantic failures. The premise leans heavily on the well-established regional comedy tradition of Singaporean men behaving badly abroad and being humbled by circumstances, a formula that risks feeling formulaic without a sufficiently distinctive local voice at its centre.

The “spiritual adventure” element — with escape contingent on demonstrating empathy — has potential as a gentle critique of a certain emotionally stunted masculine archetype recognisable to Singaporean audiences. The guest appearances from Mark Lee and Annette Lee provide reassuring local comedic ballast, while the casting of Thai actors Ananda Everingham and Prang Kannarun reflects the same regional cross-pollination visible in A Good Fortune. Whether the film uses its Thailand setting to reflect meaningfully back on its Singaporean characters, or simply treats it as exotic backdrop, remains the key open question.

A Note on the CNY Film as Cultural Institution

Taken together, these four films underscore something important about Singapore’s popular cinema. The CNY release season has become one of the few reliable occasions on which local Mandarin-language and dialect-inflected storytelling commands mainstream theatrical attention. The recurring motifs — cross-Causeway journeys, festive food, intergenerational family dynamics, the tension between material aspiration and communal belonging — constitute a recognisable grammar of Singaporean life on screen. That this grammar continues to find new expressions each year is itself a form of cultural vitality worth acknowledging.

Liang Po Po: The Comeback ★★★★☆

Jack Neo’s decision to resurrect Liang Po Po after 24 years is equal parts audacious and deeply Singaporean. The character — a sharp-tongued, cross-dressed elderly woman born out of the sketch comedy tradition of Comedy Nite in the 1990s — is embedded in the cultural memory of an entire generation. Her return is less a sequel than a cultural event.

What makes this premise compelling beyond nostalgia is its thematic ambition. A cross-border kidnapping plot anchored by organ trafficking is unusually dark material for a CNY comedy, yet Neo has always understood that Singaporean humour tolerates, even requires, an undercurrent of social anxiety. The Causeway setting is richly symbolic: the Singapore-Malaysia relationship, with all its historical friction and everyday interdependence, has long been fertile ground for local storytelling. Casting Liang Po Po as an economic migrant seeking employment in Malaysia quietly inverts the usual directional narrative of that movement, injecting a wry commentary on regional labour dynamics.

The “strongest duo of Singapore and Malaysia” framing suggests Neo is leaning into the bilateral goodwill that characterises the current moment in cross-Causeway relations. Whether the film earns that sentiment or merely performs it will determine its lasting resonance.

A Good Fortune ★★★☆☆

The reportedly unscripted kiss scene between Lim and Wang hints at a production culture willing to embrace spontaneity, which may lend the film an appealing warmth.

Luck My Life! ★★★☆☆

3 Good Guys ★★½☆☆

A Note on the CNY Film as Cultural Institution

Note: These reviews are written as anticipatory previews based on available synopses. Assessments of performance, direction, and execution await full viewing.

Q: Which films would you like reviewed? (Select all that apply) A: Liang Po Po: The Comeback

Q: What tone should the reviews take? A: Academic / critical

Feb 20

Liang Po Po: The Comeback — A Critical Review

Preview essay based on official synopsis and production context

Nostalgia as Cultural Capital

Jack Neo’s decision to resurrect Liang Po Po after a 24-year hiatus invites scrutiny on at least two registers simultaneously: as a commercial calculation and as a statement about the cultural politics of Singaporean memory. The character first emerged from Comedy Nite in the 1990s, a television sketch format that was itself a product of a particular moment in Singapore’s nation-building cultural apparatus — one in which MediaCorp (then SBC) actively cultivated a vernacular comedic idiom to serve a Mandarin-speaking, dialect-adjacent mass audience. Liang Po Po, the sharp-tongued elderly woman rendered through cross-dressing performance, was never merely entertainment. She was a condensation of a specific sociolinguistic type: the Hokkien-inflected, pragmatic, irreverent ah ma whose blunt affect simultaneously caricatured and celebrated working-class Singaporean femininity.

To revive her in 2026 is to make a claim about the durability of that type. Whether the film interrogates or simply monetises that claim will be the central critical question.

The Cross-Dressing Tradition and Its Discontents

Neo’s performance of Liang Po Po belongs to a longstanding Chinese theatrical tradition of nandan (male performance of female roles), transposed into a modern comedic register. In the Singapore context, this practice has largely been received as harmless farce rather than gender commentary. Yet it is worth noting that the character’s enduring appeal rests partly on a specific construction of older womanhood as inherently comic — garrulous, meddlesome, physically incongruous. A critical reading must ask what ideological work this construction performs, particularly as Singapore’s population ages and the social position of elderly women becomes an increasingly urgent policy and cultural concern.

The film’s synopsis offers no indication that it reflects on this dimension. The treatment is likely to remain affectionate rather than analytical.

The Causeway as Narrative Space

More intellectually interesting is the film’s geographical imagination. Liang Po Po travelling to Malaysia in search of employment is a significant inversion of the dominant narrative logic of the Causeway, which has historically been framed — in both policy discourse and popular culture — as a passage taken by Malaysians entering Singapore’s labour market. Positioning a Singaporean character as the economic migrant, even comedically, subtly unsettles that hierarchy.

The cross-border rescue plot, centring on organ trafficking, introduces a register of transnational criminality that gestures toward the genuine anxieties surrounding regional mobility, bodily vulnerability, and the limits of state protection. Neo has used melodramatic scaffolding to carry social commentary before — most notably in the Ah Boys to Men series — and there is precedent for reading his genre choices as more than incidental. Whether this film sustains that interpretive generosity, or whether the organ trafficking premise is simply a thriller device with no deeper resonance, remains to be seen.

The “Unlikely Partnership” and National Allegory

The pairing of Liang Po Po (Singaporean) with Ah Beng (Malaysian), their initial feud giving way to the “strongest duo of Singapore and Malaysia,” maps onto a recognisable diplomatic fantasy. Bilateral relations between Singapore and Malaysia have historically been managed through a careful choreography of competitive interdependence and performative goodwill. Popular culture has long participated in this choreography — the Ah Beng figure, with his Malaysian Chinese working-class valences, has appeared in Singapore comedy as simultaneously familiar and foreign, a figure through whom anxieties about regional kinship and difference are negotiated.

That this alliance is forged through the rescue of a child from an organ trafficking syndicate is structurally interesting: the nation-building through shared crisis, the child as figure of futurity, the criminal network as the external threat that dissolves internal difference. These are well-worn allegoric patterns, and Neo deploys them with the fluency of a filmmaker who has spent three decades working within and alongside Singapore’s official cultural imagination.

Conclusion: Between Archive and Commodity

Liang Po Po: The Comeback presents itself as a reunion with a beloved cultural artefact. The critical task is to hold that sentiment alongside a clear-eyed assessment of what is being preserved, what is being updated, and what ideological sediment travels unremarked within the nostalgia. Neo remains Singapore’s most commercially successful popular filmmaker precisely because he has an intuitive grasp of what his audience wishes to see reflected back at them. That is both his greatest strength and the principal limitation of his work as social text.

The film will almost certainly succeed on its own terms. Whether those terms are sufficiently examined — by the film itself, or by the critical culture that receives it — is a separate and more consequential question.

This review is written as an anticipatory critical essay. Textual analysis of performance, cinematography, and editing awaits full exhibition.

Liang Po Po: The Comeback as Geopolitical Imaginary: Reading the Bilateral Future Through Popular Film

The Symbolic Register of Popular Cinema

Popular film does not predict the future in any straightforward sense. What it does — and this is arguably more important — is reveal the anxieties, desires, and imaginative horizons of a society at a particular historical moment. When a film achieves mass commercial success, as Neo’s work reliably does, it does so partly because it has successfully articulated something latent in its audience’s collective consciousness. Reading Liang Po Po: The Comeback symptomatically, then, is less about forecasting bilateral relations than about mapping the cultural mood within which those relations are currently embedded.

Several thematic elements are worth examining closely.

1. The Normalisation of Cross-Causeway Mobility

The premise of a Singaporean seeking employment in Malaysia, however comedically framed, reflects a structural reality that has been quietly intensifying. The opening of the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ), the expansion of the RTS Link, and the sustained depreciation of the Malaysian ringgit relative to the Singapore dollar have collectively created conditions in which cross-Causeway economic flows are becoming more genuinely bidirectional. Singaporeans working, retiring, or investing in Johor Bahru is no longer a marginal phenomenon.

That popular cinema is beginning to imaginatively inhabit this reality — even through satire — suggests that the cultural normalisation of southward-to-northward mobility may be underway. If the film resonates with audiences, it will partly be because it reflects an emerging lived experience rather than a purely fantastical one. The prediction implicit here is that the Causeway will increasingly function as a permeable membrane rather than a one-directional valve, and that Singaporean popular culture will gradually need to renegotiate its self-image accordingly.

2. The Threat Landscape: Transnational Crime as Shared Vulnerability

The choice of organ trafficking as the film’s central antagonist is culturally and geopolitically legible. It locates the primary threat not within either nation but in the transnational criminal networks that exploit the regulatory seams between them. This is a meaningful narrative choice: it displaces bilateral rivalry onto a common external enemy, constructing Singapore and Malaysia not as competitors or even merely neighbours, but as partners whose cooperation is made necessary by shared vulnerability.

This structure mirrors the actual policy direction of ASEAN-level and bilateral law enforcement cooperation, which has increasingly focused on transnational organised crime, human trafficking, and cross-border syndicates. The film’s implicit argument — that Singapore and Malaysia are stronger together against such threats than apart — maps onto a security discourse that both governments have been cultivating, albeit with varying degrees of conviction, for some years.

The prediction suggested here is one of deepening operational interdependence in law enforcement and border security, driven less by political goodwill than by the practical impossibility of addressing transnational threats unilaterally.

3. The Sentimentalisation of Kinship and Its Limits

The “strongest duo of Singapore and Malaysia” framing is emotionally appealing and diplomatically flattering, but it is worth interrogating the conditions under which that alliance is achieved in the narrative. Liang Po Po and Ah Beng do not begin as friends; they begin as antagonists. Their cooperation is not chosen but compelled by crisis — specifically, by the kidnapping of a child. The child, Xiao Yun, functions in the narrative as a figure of pure innocence and futurity, the stake that makes bilateral cooperation not merely desirable but morally obligatory.

This structure suggests something important about the realistic basis of Singapore-Malaysia cooperation: it is likely to deepen most reliably not through abstract goodwill or historical reconciliation, but through concrete shared interests and shared threats. The diplomatic history of the relationship broadly supports this reading. The most substantive bilateral progress — on water agreements, on the JS-SEZ, on transport infrastructure — has tended to occur when both sides perceive a tangible mutual benefit rather than when either side appeals to cultural or ethnic solidarity alone.

The prediction here is cautiously realist: genuine bilateral partnership is achievable, but it will be transactional in its foundations even when it becomes affective in its expression.

4. The Generational Transmission Problem

Liang Po Po is, at her core, a figure of a generation that is passing. The ah ma archetype she embodies — shaped by mid-twentieth century migration, by dialect culture, by a pre-air-conditioned urban Singapore — is sociologically receding. Her pairing with Ah Beng, a younger Malaysian Chinese working-class figure, is intergenerationally suggestive: the older Singaporean sensibility and the younger Malaysian one, finding common ground through action rather than through inherited sentiment.

This may be read as an intuition about how the bilateral relationship will need to be renewed. The generation that carries personal and familial memory of a shared Malayan past is aging out of cultural and political influence. The generation that succeeds it has a more instrumentally mediated relationship to bilateral identity — shaped by economic calculation, social media, and regional pop culture rather than by the lived experience of separation and nation-building. Popular films like this one are, among other things, attempts to transmit affective ties across that generational gap: to give younger Singaporeans and Malaysians a shared comedic vocabulary, a common set of cultural references, within which the bilateral relationship can continue to feel warm rather than merely functional.

Whether this cultural transmission succeeds is genuinely uncertain. The prediction implicit in the film’s very existence is that the attempt is considered necessary — that the filmmakers, and by extension a significant portion of their audience, feel that the affective dimension of the bilateral relationship requires active cultivation rather than passive inheritance.

Concluding Assessment

Read as geopolitical imaginary rather than entertainment product, Liang Po Po: The Comeback projects a future for Singapore and Malaysia that is neither naively optimistic nor pessimistically adversarial. It imagines a relationship defined by friction that is ultimately productive, by cooperation that is forged under pressure rather than declared in advance, and by a shared vulnerability to forces that neither nation can manage alone. These are, on the whole, reasonable coordinates for where the bilateral relationship actually appears to be heading.

The film’s most honest prediction may be structural rather than thematic: that it takes a crisis — comic or otherwise — to make neighbours remember they are also, in some meaningful sense, kin.

Gender and Performance in Liang Po Po: The Comeback: A Critical Essay on Pending Implications

A critical-analytical essay

Prefatory Note on Method

What follows applies feminist film theory, gender performance studies, and postcolonial cultural criticism to a film not yet widely reviewed. The analysis proceeds from the available synopsis and production context, while drawing on the broader scholarly literature on cross-dressing performance, the representation of elderly women in Chinese-language cinema, and the gendered dimensions of Singapore’s national imaginary. The word “pending” in the prompt is taken seriously: these are implications that the film has not yet resolved, and may never fully resolve, but which its existence necessarily raises.

1. Performance, Masquerade, and the Limits of Butler in the Singapore Context

The foundational theoretical reference point for any analysis of cross-dressing performance is Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performativity — the argument, elaborated in Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), that gender has no ontological ground but is constituted through repeated, citational acts of performance. On this reading, Jack Neo’s embodiment of Liang Po Po ought to be subversive: a male body performing femininity exposes the constructedness of both categories, denaturalising the assumption that gender expression flows inevitably from biological sex.

The difficulty is that Butler’s framework was developed in a specific Western, queer-theoretical context, and its application to Chinese comedic cross-dressing traditions requires significant qualification. The nandan tradition in Chinese opera, and its popular cultural descendants in figures like Liang Po Po, have historically operated within a very different semiotic economy. Cross-dressing in this tradition does not typically aim at, nor does its audience typically read it as, a destabilisation of gender norms. Rather, it tends to function as a form of comic excess — the humour arising precisely from the visible disjunction between the male performer and the female role, a disjunction that the audience is invited to enjoy rather than interrogate. The gender binary is not troubled; it is, if anything, reinforced through the comedy of its transgression.

This is not to say that subversive readings are unavailable, but that they must be actively constructed against the grain of the text’s dominant mode of address.

2. The Elderly Woman as Comic Object: Ageism, Gender, and Cultural Affect

Liang Po Po is described in the synopsis as “sharp-tongued” — a descriptor that, in the representation of older women across multiple cultural traditions, carries a specific ideological charge. The sharp-tongued elderly woman is a recognisable comic archetype: her verbal aggression is rendered safe and laughable by her age and gender, both of which position her outside the circuits of social power within which such aggression would otherwise be threatening.

This is worth examining carefully. In Singapore’s social landscape, elderly women — particularly those of the pioneer generation and their immediate successors — occupy a complex and somewhat contradictory position. They are sentimentalised in official discourse as embodiments of resilience, sacrifice, and national memory. They are simultaneously marginalised in everyday cultural representation, appearing most frequently as objects of filial concern, comic relief, or nostalgic pathos rather than as subjects with autonomous interiority and social agency.

Liang Po Po participates in this ambivalence. Her sharpness of tongue is coded as charming rather than authoritative; her competence, when it manifests, is framed as surprising rather than expected. The question the film must eventually answer — and which it almost certainly will not ask of itself — is whether it reproduces this marginalisation affectionately or whether it finds, within the comedic register, some genuine recognition of elderly women’s social intelligence and resilience as worthy of respect rather than merely of laughter.

The structural irony, of course, is that the character is performed by a man. Whatever authentic elderly female subjectivity might be accessed or represented is already foreclosed by this casting choice, which prioritises the recognisability of Neo’s star persona over any representational fidelity to the demographic it ostensibly portrays.

3. The Absent Female Body and Its Implications

This brings us to what may be the most structurally significant gender implication of the film: the systematic displacement of actual elderly Singaporean women from the centre of their own representation. Liang Po Po is not played by an elderly woman. She is played by a middle-aged male director-star whose career has been built substantially on the commercial exploitation of working-class Singaporean archetypes, several of which are female.

The implications of this displacement are multiple. At the most immediate level, it forecloses the possibility that an actual elderly Singaporean actress might occupy a lead role in a major CNY release — a commercial opportunity that the industry’s gender and age demographics would suggest is vanishingly rare. Singapore cinema has produced significant female talent, but the structural conditions of the CNY blockbuster format — dominated by male directors, male producer-stars, and male comic traditions — consistently reproduce a landscape in which women appear primarily in supporting, romantic, or decorative functions.

Xixi Lim’s central role in A Good Fortune, also releasing this CNY season, offers a partial counterpoint. But the contrast is instructive: Lim plays a romantic lead in a genre — the rom-com — that is conventionally feminised, while Neo occupies the traditionally masculine space of the action-comedy, wearing femininity as costume rather than inhabiting it as identity.

4. Masculinity, National Heroism, and the Gendered Nation

The film’s resolution — in which Liang Po Po and Ah Beng become “unexpected heroes” — deserves scrutiny through a gendered lens. The heroic narrative in Singapore popular cinema has been overwhelmingly masculinist in its construction, from the Ah Boys to Men franchise to the various crime and action films that have populated the local release calendar. Neo himself has been the primary architect of this tradition.

That the hero of this particular narrative is nominally female — even if performed by a male body — is superficially interesting. But the heroism in question is physical and cross-border: it involves rescue, confrontation with a criminal syndicate, and the restoration of a child to safety. These are action-genre functions that, in their conventional form, reproduce rather than challenge the gendering of heroic agency as fundamentally masculine. Liang Po Po’s femininity, in this context, may function less as a genuine gender intervention than as a comic alibi — a device that allows the film to claim novelty while operating entirely within the normative structures of the action-rescue plot.

The deeper question is whether the film imagines a Singaporean national identity capacious enough to accommodate female heroism as something other than a joke. The answer, on current evidence, is probably not — but the question itself is worth sustaining.

5. The Adopted Daughter and the Politics of Care

A detail in the synopsis that has received little analytical attention is the figure of Xiao Yun, Ah Beng’s adopted daughter. The specification of adoption is not narratively neutral. In the context of a film about organ trafficking — where the body is literally made into a commodity — the adopted child carries particular symbolic weight. She is a child whose belonging to a family is legal and chosen rather than biological and given, and she is precisely the child whose body is targeted for extraction and commodification.

There is a feminist reading available here that the film is unlikely to pursue: the adopted female child as figure of the most vulnerable intersection of gender, age, and non-biological kinship in a regional context where such children have historically been disproportionately exposed to exploitation. Whether the film’s treatment of Xiao Yun gives her genuine subjectivity or positions her purely as a passive object of rescue — the classic function of the imperilled female in action cinema — will be one of the more telling indices of its gender politics.

6. Pending Implications: What the Film Cannot Yet Resolve

The phrase “pending implications” is analytically precise. Several gender questions raised by this film’s premise remain genuinely open, resolvable only through the film’s actual execution:

Whether Liang Po Po is permitted moments of genuine authority and strategic intelligence, or whether her competence is always framed as inadvertent and comic. Whether the film reflects at all on the conditions that drive an elderly Singaporean woman into cross-border economic migration, or whether this premise is purely a comic device. Whether Xiao Yun is a subject or an object in the narrative’s moral economy. Whether the male-female dynamic between Liang Po Po and Ah Beng reproduces conventional gendered hierarchies — the woman as comic foil, the man as primary agent of action — beneath the surface inversion of the premise. And finally, whether Jack Neo, now operating from a position of considerable cultural authority in Singapore cinema, uses this film to expand the representational possibilities available to elderly women on screen, or whether he simply annexes that demographic as material for his own star performance.

Conclusion: Affection Is Not Analysis

The cultural affection for Liang Po Po is real, and it would be reductive to dismiss it. Popular attachment to an archetype can itself carry social meaning — the ah ma figure has, in her various iterations, functioned as a vehicle for the expression of values — practicality, bluntness, communal loyalty — that official Singapore culture does not always find easy to accommodate in more formal registers.

But affection is not analysis, and the fact that a representation is beloved does not exempt it from critical examination. The gender implications of Liang Po Po: The Comeback are pending in the precise sense that they have not yet been discharged by the film’s actual realisation. What can be said with confidence is that they are substantial, that they connect to live questions about how Singapore imagines its elderly women, its comedic traditions, and the relationship between performance and identity, and that they deserve a more rigorous critical reception than the CNY blockbuster format typically invites.

Whether that reception will materialise is, unfortunately, also pending.