General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

All About Women (女人不坏)

All About Women (女人不坏; also translated as Not All Women Are Bad) is a 2008 Chinese-language romantic comedy directed by Tsui Hark (徐克) and co-written by Tsui Hark and the South Korean director Kwak Jae-yong (郭在容), set in contemporary Beijing and following three women as they each pursue love.¹^•² It stars Zhou Xun (周迅) as Ou Fanfan, Guey Lun-mei (桂綸鎂) as Tie Ling, and Kitty Zhang Yuqi (张雨绮) as Tang Lu, with Stephen Fung, Alex Fong Chung-sun, Eddie Peng, and Godfrey Gao in supporting roles.¹ The film marked Tsui Hark's return to intentional comedy after a decade spent largely on other genres, and it was his first comedy made after relocating from Hong Kong to Beijing.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	女人不坏 (traditional: 女人不壞); English title All About Women; alternate titles She Ain't Mean and Not All Women Are Bad²
Director and writers	Directed by Tsui Hark; story and screenplay by Tsui Hark and Kwak Jae-yong¹
Mainland release	11 December 2008⁴
Runtime	Reported as 120 minutes by Baidu and Cinémasie, 116 minutes by 1905.com, and 1 hour 59 minutes by Rotten Tomatoes⁴^•⁵^•⁶
Box office	22.08 million yuan in mainland China, against a stated production cost of 30 million yuan⁴
Producers	Tsui Hark, Nansun Shi, Huang Jianxin, and Elvis Lee¹
Genre	Romance and comedy, with science-fiction and black-humor elements⁶^•⁵

Spoilers

Premise and characters

The film is structured around three women with different temperaments, each facing romantic trouble in a newly booming Beijing.⁷

Tang Lu (Kitty Zhang) is a strikingly beautiful, independent corporate woman who believes in money and her own brains rather than love; men fall for her everywhere, yet she finds herself drawn to an unlikely, hapless man.⁷^•⁸

Ou Fanfan (Zhou Xun) is a medically trained, scientifically minded woman, plain in appearance and so awkward around men that being touched makes her stiffen. Working at a health-check center, she secretly experiments with pheromones, developing clear stickers that emit chemicals designed to attract the opposite sex; after early failures she produces a version that drives men wild, and she uses it on Xiaogang (Stephen Fung), an indie rocker who resembles her former dance instructor.⁸^•²^•⁹

Tie Ling (Guey Lun-mei) is an alternative rock band singer and boxer who writes web novels on the side; since childhood she has idolized the pop superstar "X" (Godfrey Gao) and has gradually imagined him into a perfect boyfriend who exists only in her fantasy.⁹^•⁴

The pheromone thread gives the film its science-fiction coloring: 1905.com describes it as a work blending science-fiction elements with black humor that reimagines female characters through a fantastical narrative about contemporary emotional predicaments.⁵ Around the main story, the reviewer Kozo of LoveHKFilm lists subplots involving land redevelopment, renewable energy, billion-dollar business deals, the indie rock scene, product placement, and ageless pop superstars, and calls the story a strange concoction of wacky plot devices, feminist themes, broad slapstick, and disconnected gags.²

Origin and production

Tsui Hark said the idea came to him two years before production, when, drinking at a friend's home in Beijing, he saw a piece of calligraphy reading "女人不坏" and conceived the film from those four characters.¹⁰ He had long been interested in female-centered comedy: six years earlier he had planned a film called 女人是流氓 ("Women Are Rogues"), but abandoned it when he saw Kwak Jae-yong's My Sassy Girl, whose premise was similar. When the All About Women concept formed, he approached Kwak and the two collaborated.¹⁰

The production launched with a press event in Beijing on 8 January 2008, with Tsui and his three lead actresses appearing publicly; the launch was staged together with a fashion show, and Tsui said he wanted the film to convey a sense of the modern, of Beijing, and of women.¹⁰^•¹¹ Sina's coverage at the launch noted that Tsui, famous for wuxia (martial-arts) films, was making a comedy for the first time, and that this genre switch was the film's biggest selling point.¹¹

The producers were Tsui Hark, Nansun Shi, Huang Jianxin, and Elvis Lee, with Sheng Xiaodong as executive producer; the crew included cinematographer Choi Sung Fai, editors Chan Ki Hop, Hideyuki Mako, and Tsui himself, production designer Lee Ta-Chi, and costume designer Poon Wing-Yan, with William Chang Suk-ping credited as styling consultant and visual effects supervised by Christopher Bremble.¹^•¹² Production companies included Film Workshop, Beijing Polybona, Dong Yang Huan Yu Media, and J.A. Movies, a China-Hong Kong co-production.¹³^•¹⁴

Release and reception

The film opened in mainland China on 11 December 2008, in the year-end holiday release season (贺岁档).⁴ It premiered in Beijing and Zhengzhou on 9 December 2008, and at a Zhengzhou preview panel of 20 surveyed viewers, the composite score exceeded 4 out of 5 and 85.7% of respondents said they would recommend the film; in the same survey, 42.8% felt Zhou Xun's performance was merely average and 57% felt Guey Lun-mei's was somewhat overdone, while Kitty Zhang was voted the standout performer by a one-vote margin.¹⁵ A Sohu Entertainment review panel in Beijing, mostly male and drawn by interest in Tsui Hark rather than in urban romance films, laughed throughout the screening but scored the film only 3 stars, an average result.¹⁶ Sina's topic page for the film carried a headline reporting that the film's Taipei box office fared badly, with Tsui responding to the criticism.¹²

Mainland box office reached 22.08 million yuan against a stated production cost of 30 million yuan.⁴ The film later screened as the closing film of the "2009 Chinese Film Festival" in South Korea.⁴

Critical assessments varied in emphasis. LoveHKFilm judged the film overlong, overstuffed, and all over the place, yet still capable of surprise and entertainment, and concluded that Tsui Hark was back, though in the daffy register of his mid-1990s comedies rather than his revered 1980s work.² A Southern Metropolis Daily review reprinted by ifeng argued that the three lead characters were well designed: Zhou Xun's character, unsure of love, invents pheromones to attract men; Guey Lun-mei's imagines a perfect boyfriend; and Kitty Zhang's is a universal heartthrob who is also a feminist.¹⁷ A Sina commentary by the critic Cheng Qingsong (程青松) observed that compared with Tsui's frenzied earlier work, All About Women is quiet, and that the film's premise is that women are not bad, only men too well behaved.¹⁸

Context in Tsui Hark's career

By 2008 Tsui Hark had been adapting to the mainland Chinese film market for several years, first with the wuxia film Seven Swords (2005), then the suspense thriller Missing (深海寻人), and then All About Women; he had settled in Beijing, and his observations of young people in the capital's bars, creative industries, and office towers fed the film's portrait of urban life.³ The film was produced by a cross-border group of companies from Beijing and Hong Kong, a pattern the film scholar's account in the HKU Press volume identifies as Tsui's contemporary comedy co-production model, which he later applied again on his 2014 hit The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D.¹⁴ Tsui and Nansun Shi, his longtime producing partner, are credited together as producers on the film.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026