Zhang Yimou’s One Second was originally scheduled to premiere at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, but was pulled at the last, ahem, second for what were claimed to be “technical reasons” widely assumed to be political censorship, due to the film’s Cultural Revolution setting.…
Chen Yu-hsun’s My Missing Valentine swept the 2020 Golden Horse Awards, winning Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Editing, and Visual Effects out of a total of eleven nominations. I don’t want to say this is entirely because the once prestigious Taiwan-based festival, for decades…
Ohku Akiko’s Hold Me Back is, like her 2017 film Tremble All You Want, a portrait of a lonely young woman whose inner life manifests itself on-screen in fantastical sequences more reminiscent of anime than traditional romantic comedy. Tremble was a kind of musical…
Shunji Iwai is one of the most reliably adventurous mainstream directors in world cinema today. A quick look at his recent output: After his epic 2015 chronicle of a lonely woman and the Internet (A Bride for Rip Van Winkle), he made an animated…
Hong Kong director Ann Hui joins several of her most illustrious peers as the subject of a biographical documentary, Keep Rolling. Unlike Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, and Johnnie To, however, she does not sing karaoke in the film. But she does tell Sylvia Chang…
Despite the fact that Hand Rolled Cigarette (no hyphen) is the directorial debut of Chan Kin-long, it’s a film steeped in the golden age of Hong Kong crime cinema. It was produced by Lawrence Lau, also known as Lawrence Ah Mon, the director of…
Takayuki Hirao’s Pompo: the Cinéphile is like Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful, but anime. Imagine that film, but instead of Kirk Douglas’s brilliant sociopath as a producer you have a diminutive anime girl named Pompo who bursts into every room she enters…
Jerichow isn’t really an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, at least not any more than Transit is an adaptation of Casablanca or Undine an adaptation of The Little Mermaid. Christian Petzold doesn’t translate familiar stories to the screen so much as he…
After five uninterrupted minutes of a camera looking out a train window at the passing greenery — we know it’s a camera looking and not just a person, because we can see the reflection of the camera in the reflection of the window opposite…
The idea of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, set in an ultra-modern Taipei with an all-female cast, certainly sounds appealing. As does the idea of transmuting Shakespeare’s Edenic Forest of Arden into an internet-free zone of play and gender non-conformity. Unfortunately, filmmakers…
