All she wanted was an apology. That’s all. In master filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), he tells the story of a woman who feels she and her family were wronged when the village chief kicked her husband in the crotch, causing injury, and refused to apologize. Q... Read More »
I haven’t been a reviewer for long however, I have been an avid movie watcher and film student for what seems like forever. For some, film watching becomes an absolute love where you time your week around your favorite movie theatre schedule. Like a writer, a filmgoer becomes sea... Read More »
Stanley Kwan’s 1992 film Center Stage is a brilliantly innovative biopic about Chinese silent film star Ruan Ling-yu, played by Maggie Cheung. She stared in approximately 30 films in 8 years, from 1927-1935 and was immensely popular. In 1935, at the age of 24, she committed sui... Read More »
When Red Sorghum debuted in 1987, it did not so much announce the arrival of two new major talents as it did shout it from the rooftops. The debut film from director Zhang Yimou, it also marks the first film for Gong Li, an actress who would be a muse for the director over the n... Read More »
The monumental Shaw Brothers logo hits the screen, but rather than the punches and kicks that would usually follow it would be followed by a sensitive modernism forgotten in the annals of literature and its acceptable subversive elements. The logo is succeeded by watercolor pain... Read More »
John Woo’s bullet ballet A Better Tomorrow (1986) was inspired by Patrick Lung Kong’s Story of a Discharged Prisoner, which involves crime, drama, and martial arts all in the same film—a hybrid of genres not typically seen in China at the time. Lung Kong, who was also an actor an... Read More »
Besides its setbacks—low grade film stock, repetitious music, narrative imbalance—Cecile Tang Shu Shuen’s The Arch (1969) remains a visual masterpiece, whose formal rhetoric profoundly speaks to the inner dimensions of human existence. A film, in her words, about the “interior fe... Read More »
Post-war China is recovering, Communism is gaining traction and Chinese films made a lot of political statements at the time. Spring in a Small Town is the exception as it doesn't focus on politics although it does show China's need to recover. This lack of political side saw thi... Read More »
36th Chamber of Shaolin begins with a kung fu trope that Lau Kar Leung helped father as Gordon Liu demonstrates various fighting forms that would used throughout the film set against theatrical monochromatic backdrops. The actions have no bearing on the plot; they are simply exp... Read More »
The brilliance of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love lies in the odd space where subtlety in character and story are able to intertwine seamlessly with breathtakingly obtrusive cinematography. Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle use a brilliant framed language in the film... Read More »
Hong Kong had already re-invented the cop thriller with the likes of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled long before Infernal Affairs arrived. But despite a poster campaign that showed drawn guns held by tough-as-nails cops, there would be no slow-motion shoot-outs in bu... Read More »
