Andrew Heskins

Andrew Heskins (born 1972) is a British film critic. He founded the film website easternKicks in 2002 and co-founded the Focus Hong Kong film festival in 2023.

Heskins was born in 1972.¹ He was introduced to Asian cinema when he watched the Monkey TV series in the late 1970s.² During the 1980s and 1990s, his interest in Asian cinema started after watching Japanese television drama and Hong Kong Shaw Brothers movies on TV.²³ In the mid-1990s, he worked as a graphic designer for the Loss Prevention Council and became an art director at Wardour, where he worked on magazines and newsletters.⁴ In 2002, he started easternKicks, a website about Asian cinema with news, reviews, and interviews.³⁴ He also wrote for the Japanese film magazine Cut.⁵ In 2012, easternKicks had grown with seven regular contributors, and Heskins kept working on it full-time while also doing freelance graphic design.² He got involved with the Chinese Visual Festival to promote Asian films³ and has been interviewed by the BBC and The Spectator as an Asian film expert.⁶⁷ His reviews have also been quoted in Film International.⁸ He also did commentaries for the movies The Champions and Black Mask and appeared in the Blu-ray re-releases of those films.⁹¹⁰ In 2023, he co-founded the Focus Hong Kong Film Festival with the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, London.¹¹

Heskins lives in London with his wife.¹ Besides movies, he is also a vinyl record collector, which was influenced by his parents. He got into acid jazz in the 1990s and started collecting records, eventually owning over 8,000 with a value of around $39,000 by 2015.¹