Before exhilaration, there’s relief. Relief that people from my hometown still know how to make movies. That there is care and attention being paid to good production design (yes, this is how much effort it takes). That there is finally tasteful, smartly limited use of CGI within Hong Kong cinema’s budget. That there is a Hong Kong blockbuster without the infamous “piss-soaked” color grading because Cheng Siu-keung is singlehandedly carrying the entire industry on his back with his high-contrast and…

Nothing I’ve heard about this movie prepared me for what an absolute fucking masterpiece it is. With so many peaks in Tsui Hark’s career, I dare not pinpoint a magnum opus, but I’ve never seen him climb such literal heights. I’m used to period Tsui from this era with an earthier color palette and more utilitarian camera placements, so I was completely taken aback by this pure aesthete, carefully placing his camera for elegant widescreen compositions. Even for the most…

I used to love Rogue Nation so much that it briefly had a spot on my favorite films of all time, but watching it immediately after Ghost Protocol was perhaps a bad idea, because nothing here really matches the majesty of the Burj. Still, it’s a film in which many things go amazingly well. The McQuarrie films are essentially a series within the series, and this being the start of the McQuarrie sequence acts almost like a soft reboot. It’s…

Watching this for the first time in more than ten years is a revelation. It’s tempting me to kick all the other films off the top of the M:I list. Burj Khalifa might just be one of the greatest sequences ever committed to celluloid. This is the movies, so you know Tom Cruise will survive, yet that sequence is still so unwatchably tense that I almost sweated a bucket at the end. And the most impressive thing to me isn’t…

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has long held that audiences are allowed to sleep during his movies, and at his New York career retrospective earlier this year, expanded that “sleep is very close to cinema: the collective dreaming.” Well, Apichatpong-heads, we may have met his true successor. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, an unbelievable directorial debut by Vietnamese director Pham Thien An, is Weerasethakul’s cinema or slow cinema on steroids—at a gargantuan 182-minute runtime, even longer, even more beguiling, and at many times,…

I hate the saying “style over substance” because it implies a dichotomy between those two things, when style itself can be substance. But in the case of Only the River Flows, it may very well be applicable, because the movie keeps hinting at a “substance” – themes and socio-politics – that isn’t there.

Only the River Flows is adapted from a short story by Yu Hua, one of the most famous authors from the last hundred years of Chinese fiction,…