Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/16World premiere: 23 August, 2013, Montréal World Film Festival The Blinding Sunlight, the directorial debut of Chinese filmmaker Yu Liu, wastes no time in setting up its aesthetics and its themes alike: the opening shot is in the backseat of a cramped vehicle looking through the windshield (soon […]
The most interesting fact about Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is that its producer, Wendi Murdoch, is the wife of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and that he exercised his, let us politely call it his “influence” over Fox Searchlight to make sure the film got a U.S. release. I do not claim that this […]
One would assume that an international film star with the appeal and cult of Jackie Chan would not have much if any trouble getting his way; and yet the path leading to Little Big Soldier, which premiered in Asia in the winter of 2010 and has yet to secure a proper release across most of […]
And now the latest in my irregular series: Man, Communist Governments Hate Good Movies. For a very brief span of time following the end of World War II, China enjoyed a cinematic golden age; like so many countries that got heavily dicked-over by the biggest combatants (and it’s arguable, I think, that China’s decade of […]
A slightly embarrassing confession: despite his reputation as one of the pre-eminent Chinese filmmakers of the current century, I’ve had some difficulty in the past “getting” the work of Jia Zhang-Ke, at least those films I’ve seen. To my eyes, his big breakthrough, 2000’s Platform, is an exceptionally over-praised work of no particular merit, while […]
The advertisements for 2007’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner, Tuya’s Marriage – and is there anything so ubiquitous as the ads for a two-year-old foreign film on the art house circuit? – all make the claim that it’s a warm study of human resilience. This is at best misleadingly true; the particular manner that the film […]
What a difference an authoritarian regime makes: to Western cinephiles, Jia Zhang-Ke is quite possibly the most well-regarded of Chinese filmmakers (certainly, he is by far the most important Sixth Generation filmmaker), while in China his works are tolerated as much as they are celebrated. Case in point: his fifth feature, Still Life, despite winning […]
A director (Ang Lee) who I love, a lead actor (Tony Leung) who I adore, and a cinematographer who I worship (Rodrigo Prieto) working in one of my consistently favorite genres (WWII resistance thriller), and Lust, Caution has the temerity to be a bit of a washout? It’s not just a disappointment, it feels like […]
When Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles was released this summer, you could practically hear the sigh of relief from cinephiles like myself: at last, “our” Zhang was back, the Zhang who made tiny small scale dramas of domesticity and relative intimacy, the Zhang seemingly in abeyance after a brace of colossal wuxia […]
All of Zhang Yimou’s films, even his recent martial arts epics, are ultimately intimate stories about the individual set in contrast to society. Not necessarily in opposition; but Zhang’s films usually explore the ways in which social animals are forced to behave in isolation. This has never been more apparent than in his latest film […]
They tell me that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was specifically designed to be a wuxia film for a Western audience. Mission accomplished. Because while I’ve seen a fair number of films from that genre at this point, not one of them has come close to equalling CTHD in my esteem. Part of the problem, I […]
