Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play is a vicious work that descends into the depths of corruption in both a private enterprise (the events…
Lou Ye’s 2014 film Blind Massage marked a transition for director, one that took him into broadly more commercial territory for the first time. Based…
Despite Lou Ye’s reputation for pushing the boundaries of Chinese censorship guidelines – due to his often frank and incisive takes on politics, gender, and…
Love and Bruises, which Lou Ye made during his five-year, government-imposed ban from filmmaking in China, is a tale of l’amour fou set, appropriately enough,…
A film built upon gay male hypersexualization overlaid with some hamfisted prose, Spring Fever turns the sadness of being gay and Chinese into a dry…
There’s something clunky about the title John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. Parabellum means “prepare for war”, and this third entry in Keanu Reeves’ saga of…
It’s probably safe to say that Sylvia Chang’s Love Education is the kind of film that is impossible to get made in America at this point in…
Lou Ye’s Summer Palace is an exasperating experience, full of interesting ideas and an incendiary political backdrop but falling victim to clichés of poeticized romantic longing.…
Purple Butterfly is a film of dreamy realism, sometimes insoluble and suffused with a haze that is, at once, sepulchral yet sultry — a film about…
The year 2000 was a watershed year for Chinese-language cinema. Milestones like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and In the Mood for Love and Yi Yi…
The most striking aspect of Weekend Lover, the directorial debut of Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye, is its palpable sense of existence as a…
The literal translation of Don’t Be Young’s Chinese title, “Wei Qing Shao Nu,” means “Emotional Young Lady”— and it is, in many ways, a more than…
After a first encounter, Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye seemed ripe for being written off as a Wong Kar-wai copycat — at best an adept craftsman…
Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition…
In the 2018 election, more women, and specifically women of color, ran for elected office than ever before. Many of these women were progressives running…
The recently released High Life is perhaps the first film by septuagenarian Claire Denis with a plot fit for an elevator pitch: “Robert Pattinson fucks…
Patience is a virtue that most hip-hop fans don’t possess, and one that they don’t really need to; it’s generally been accepted that in order…
From the moment Vampire Weekend stepped off the Columbia University campus and quite literally into Rostam Batmanglij’s “studio” apartment to record songs about Lil Jon,…
From its whispery, ethereal opener, “Contact,” Big Thief’s new album is permeated by an air of otherness. Adrianne Lenker’s voice is an aural phenomenon, Buck Meek’s…