In 1989, following the success of a prime-time Chinese Television System soap called Endless Love, which he worked on as a writer, Tsai Ming-liang directed All the Corners of the World, a miniseries episode about a dysfunctional family in contemporary Taipei. The project offered about as much freedom as a young director could hope for within a mainstream television system — which is to say, more in terms of subject than in style. First introduced helping his mother scalp tickets…
There comes a time in every young pop vixen’s career — usually, after her third or fourth album has dropped and sales slowly start waning — where she supposedly has to “grow up” and re-shape her image if she wishes to remain professionally relevant.…
#111: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: This week, as the world goes to hell in a handbasket, we return to a simpler time to tackle a guy who doesn’t seem all that…
#100: Vampire’s Kiss Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: This week, we are celebrating both our Month of Horrors Extravaganza and our 100th episode by treating ourselves with Nicolas Cage in his most deranged role – 1989’s Vampire’s Kiss, directed by…
The inaugural CineCina — officially, New York’s only Chinese cinema-focussed film festival — wrapped about a week ago. Featured in this report are just some of the fine narrative and documentary films from across the Chinese diaspora that played as part of the program,…
Was it when Elvis first suggestively gyrated his hips on national television? The first time a fan let out a piercing, adulatory scream as the Beatles sauntered by? Or was it further back than all that — the moment that Sister Rosetta Thorpe first…
In an effort to reboot our music coverage, In Review Online has launched some monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. One such feature is Foreign Correspondent, a survey of new releases from the international music world — which, going forward, will now be published…
If A City of Sadness represents Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s greatest achievement to date — an assessment that its Venice Golden Lion and long-standing reputation would seem to support — this is in part because Hou’s oblique, elliptical approach to narrative creates an astounding frisson with the film’s…
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 DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review…
In taking on the horrors of Vietnam, Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War may be said to mark a departure for the American director of such baroque Hitchcockian exercises as Body Double and Obsession. With a script by David Rabe (best known for three…
