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Hong Kong Cinemagic contains credits for cast and crew members, portrait galleries, screenshots and trailers, as well as reviews written in-house and special notes of information on films. Additional information about alternative titles, titles in Chinese and pinyin, production company, country of origin, genre, release date, box office gross and languages spoken is included where known. Information about cast and crew members may include gender, birth dates and biographies.
In addition to browsing with the website's own search engines, film can be browsed by date, name and genre, and people can be browsed by name and role. A person's filmography can be displayed by date, genre, and activity and/or by selecting solely Hong Kong productions or productions from all countries. The site also provides information on film companies and studios, the dates companies were founded and by whom, and the films they have released or distributed. A glossary of terms specific to Chinese cinema and Chinese culture is also available.
As of March 2009, there are over 10,000 films and over 17,000 people in the database, as well as information on 1,300 studios. There are 26,500 images and 2,000 trailers and other videos. In addition, the site contains biographies, film reviews, interviews, feature articles, and reports.
Hong Kong correspondents and editors have interviewed many key figures of the Hong Kong film industry In-depth interviews of actors, directors, and film technicians are available in English and/or in French. Past interviewees have included Johnnie To, Patrick Tam, Wong Jing, Anthony Wong, Eric Tsang, Peter Chan, Lawrence Ah Mon, Gordon Liu, Ti Lung, Stanley Kwan and Chen Kuan Tai.
In contrast to databases such as HKMDB and IMDb, Hong Kong Cinemagic does not include the names of the characters that actors played in their films. However, the film pages often do include comprehensive image galleries of cast and crew.
One advantage the site offers is the listing of cast and crew members by the names and spellings most recognisable to western audiences, in contrast to HKMDB, which lists people by the names and spellings most recognisable to Chinese audiences. For example, HKCinemagic have a listing for Lau Kar Leung (the Cantonese form), whereas HKMDB's listing is for Liu Chia-Liang (the Mandarin form). Although both sites allow searching for all variations of names, it may be easier for western users to recognise the entries on Hong Kong Cinemagic's site.
Another key difference between HKCinemagic and HKMDB is the former does not require any membership to access the complete database.
All entries, articles and interviews at the site are written by the HKCinemagic editors, collaborators and guest writers. Visitors can propose amendments and forward comments using an error report form accessible via a link in the footer of each page.
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