In 1994, a British critic named Tony Rayns picked out a graduation short by an unknown Korean film student, Bong Joon Ho, and put it in front of audiences in Vancouver and Hong Kong, its first screenings outside Korea. Rayns, who spent more than five decades introducing Western readers and festival audiences to the cinema of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, died at his home in London in early July 2026. He was 77.

For readers who never noticed whose words they were reading under a subtitled film, Rayns' hand was still on the screen. He worked for years as a translator and subtitle writer for films from Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, and his audio commentaries and liner essays became fixtures on prestige home video releases from Criterion, Masters of Cinema, Arrow and Eureka, according to Screen Daily. Directors he championed over the decades included Wong Kar Wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Lee Chang-dong, Hong Sang-soo and Bong Joon Ho, filmmakers who reshaped how the rest of the world watched Asian cinema partly because Rayns had already been making their case in print.

His own interest in film started early. He ran a film society at his secondary school in England, then three more at university. He began writing for the underground magazine Cinema Rising before joining the British Film Institute's Monthly Film Bulletin in the early 1970s, and he wrote for the BFI's Sight and Sound from around the same period until his death, alongside stints at Time Out, Film Comment, Artforum and the Korean magazine Cine 21. Monthly Film Bulletin folded into Sight and Sound in 1991, closing out two decades of his byline in its pages.

His most enduring platform may have been in Canada. In 1989, Vancouver International Film Festival programming director Alan Franey hired Rayns to run a strand originally called Cinema of the Pacific Rim, soon renamed Dragons and Tigers, according to Georgia Straight. Rayns stayed with the festival until retiring after its 2016 edition. He also served as a programme advisor for the BFI London Film Festival, first in 1979 and again for several years from 1997, and sat on festival juries in Cannes, Sapporo, San Sebastian, San Francisco, Vladivostok and Beijing.

Korea became a particular focus in later years. Rayns advised the Busan International Film Festival when it launched in 1996 and served on its jury two decades later, in 2017. He received the festival's first Korean Film Award for his contribution to the country's cinema, per Screen Daily, and in 2012 the Korean Film Council gave him its inaugural plaque of appreciation, timed to a Busan documentary built around his twenty-five years of engagement with Korean film, according to The Korea Herald. The council later commissioned his book Just Like Starting Over: A Personal View of the Reinvention of Korean Cinema, published in 2023. Announcing his death, the Busan festival said Rayns "championed the value of Korean and Asian cinema to the world ahead of anyone else."

Japan honored him too. Rayns won the Kawakita Award in 2004 and received Japan's Foreign Ministry Commendation in 2008, both recognizing his advocacy for the country's films, per Screen Daily. He kept working almost to the end: in April 2025 he wrote a Sight and Sound cover interview with Bong Joon Ho, the same year a second edition of his BFI Film Classic on In the Mood for Love appeared, and his last published feature, on the restoration of Filipino director Lino Brocka's Macho Dancer, ran in May 2026, per BFI.

Rayns also worked from behind the camera. He directed the 1989 documentary series New Chinese Cinema, examining China's Fifth Generation filmmakers, and 2001's The Jang Sun-woo Variations, a portrait of the South Korean director that premiered in Rotterdam. In 1999 he co-wrote the screenplay for Away with Words with cinematographer Christopher Doyle. He also wrote and edited books on Jang Sunwoo, Wong Kar Wai and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and long essays on Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Garin Nugroho, Edward Yang and Jia Zhangke.

Jia Zhangke, the Chinese filmmaker whose work Rayns subtitled and helped carry to international festivals, led the tributes after the news broke. "Throughout the 28 years we knew each other, it was always me asking things of you," Jia said. "Whenever I reached out, it was almost always because I needed something, whether it was having you subtitle my films or seeking your advice on a problem. I feel I should have called you more often... You were a free spirit in the realm of cinema," he told Screen Daily. The Korean Film Council echoed the sentiment in its own statement, saying Rayns "introduced Korean cinema to the world and made a significant contribution to establishing the international status of Korean cinema," adding that it would "forever remember his deep affection and dedication to the Korean film industry."

What persists is concrete. The subtitles still running under Wong Kar Wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien films on Criterion and Eureka discs. The commentary tracks queued up on Masters of Cinema and Arrow releases. The essays archived in Sight and Sound's back catalogue. Dragons and Tigers, the Vancouver strand he built from a one-off Pacific Rim program into a fixture that ran for close to three decades. The directors he picked out early, a Korean film student in 1994, a Taiwanese New Wave filmmaker, a Hong Kong stylist working outside the mainstream, are now part of the standard account of world cinema, in no small part because Rayns wrote them into it first.