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…
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…
With the public’s appetite for true crime reaching seemingly insatiable levels, Netflix has gone all-in on serial killer Ted Bundy, releasing the four-part documentary Conversations…
In 1987, Margaret Thatcher made her infamous assertion that “there is no such thing as society” in order to espouse her doctrine of methodological individualism.…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some…
Film history is chock full of men falling in love with the ‘whore with a heart of gold,’ either to the effect of their own…
For writer-director Terry Gilliam, a filmmaker who’s been ’tilting at windmills’ for most of his career, Miguel De Cervantes’s Don Quixote always seemed like an…
Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell is a ferocious film, built upon a mesmerizing, volcanic lead performance by Elizabeth Moss. Moss plays Becky Something, the aged lead singer…
Over his 30-plus year career, Mike Leigh has incisively observed human interactions and dissected the various factors (upbringing, education, religion, etc.) that define those relations. So…
“The closer you get, the further away it seems.” Claire Denis’s latest takes to space to articulate humans’ place in the cosmos, with a story that…