“Transnational Chinese cinema” has become an ever-more handy portmanteau term for the cluster of industries, people and products that have turned film from the Chinese-speaking world into a global commodity. Like most portmanteau terms, the phrase is fuzzy; but that vagueness is crucial to its value. The reality is that film which is in some way “Chinese” is now so multi-form that it stumps attempts to define it in tidy ways. Yet its importance – to the societies of the Chinese-speaking world, to how the world understands China, and to cinema itself – is such that scholars need ways to describe it. Essentially, Chinese Connections is an attempt to unpack the term “transnational Chinese cinema” in its various guises so as to give this sometimes slapdash description more rigorous meaning. The volume's basic frame of reference is the “three Chinas” (the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), the Chinese diaspora and, most intriguingly, the cinematic crossbreeds that are appearing as Chinese film encounters global screen culture.

According to its editors, it is in this latter regard that Chinese Connections blazes a new trail, and it is easy to agree with them. The first section of the three-part collection presents a group of exciting essays on the unruly ways in which Chinese cinemas are interacting with their Hollywood and European others, and vice versa. Here, chapters on films as varied as The Matrix, Hulk, Rush Hour, and Irma Vep sit alongside analyses of how Elvis Presley and hip hop have inflected Chinese-language cinemas, and of how Hong Kong action films are received in France. Sheldon Lu has argued elsewhere that what we see from the late 20th century onwards is the “Hong Kongization, Sinification, and Asianization of Hollywood style.” These essays explore both this process and the journeys of American popular culture back across the Pacific; in so doing, they put real flesh on the idea that global flow has begun to reshape the deep syntax of film language across the board, making it every bit as multi-cultural as the urban societies in which most of us now live. But the final essay in the section also sounds a salutary note, reminding us of how the power disparities between Hollywood and the rest can make this process of cross-pollination less than entirely equitable. All in all, this section of the book is probably the most inventive; and one could perhaps have wished for it to be a little longer.

That said, there are plenty of quality contributions elsewhere in the volume. The second section, which takes gender and sexuality as its organizing concepts, gathers together an equally catholic selection of essays on, inter alia, Zhang Yuan and Jackie Chan's art of dance. By exploring Chinese transnationalism through films that treat bisexuality, transvestism, queerness and gender, these essays strike a dissonant note against the often conservative tenor of political and cultural writings on the meaning of “Greater China.” The final section brings the volume nicely up to date, with a brief but effective state-of-the-field survey of recent film from the “Three Chinas” and the diaspora via essays on Eric Khoo, Tsai Ming-liang, Ringo Lam, the Sixth Generation, and Zhang Yimou at the millennium.

At times, the eclecticism of the contributions threatens to thwart the attempts of the book's editors to impose order; but in a sense, it is the sheer scope and number of its essays which furnish this volume with its core strength. Chinese Connections contains 19 chapters in a volume just shy of 300 pages; and these pieces manage to cover essential films and essential filmmakers at the same time as straying into less tried terrain in stimulating ways. The result is a volume that has something to say to everyone from undergraduates to film specialists. Indeed, although the last few years have seen the publication of a several high-quality, broad-sweep volumes on Chinese film – both nationally and transnationally – few have quite the reach and range of this one.