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I got this series on Letterboxd.

Very cool to have a premise of “I really just wanna party and be a normal guy, but I happen to be freakishly good at tennis”, but that middle episode is extremely weird. Carlos Alcaraz isn’t holding anyone hostage here. His team clearly needs some sort of sports psychology presence, and it’s odd to see no one countering much of the toxicity in the series.

Watched on Saturday December 28, 2024.

Am I a shameless vulgar auteurist for enjoying the current phase of Anderson’s career? (And is it too early to call it late style?) I don’t necessarily derive much of an emotional experience out of his latest films, but I just think he’s become so obsessive, elaborate, and borderline deranged with his little storybook creations that they reflect a certain charm and personality (even if said personality is twisted). It’s like the Tom Cruise syndrome of “what the hell is wrong with this man?” Once again, his new film is a dazzling showcase of production design, coming from only one mind on earth who can make a film like this.

The problem with these films is that while he escalates, there’s inevitably a limit to how ridiculously fanciful he can get, so the films inevitably plateau in the middle. (This is probably why I massively prefer the Henry Sugar shorts, and why he may be better-suited for the short format.) This once again happens in The Phoenician Scheme. By the time we get to Scarlett Johansson’s segment, nothing new is happening anymore. It’s not until the super fun and physical fight between del Toro and Cumberbatch in the final segment that the film recovers.

I also think I enjoy the Henry Sugar films a lot more because they were written by someone else (Roald Dahl) and clearly all had greater points to make. I’m not sure what Phoenician Scheme’s is... it’s a sweet father-daughter story, I suppose, but it never gets emotional, unlike Asteroid City’s famous scene featuring Margot Robbie. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I don’t think the father-daughter arc fully works towards it. And for a story about a coldblooded billionaire businessman with plentiful jokes about slave labor, I don’t think Anderson – who certainly relishes in opulent mise-en-scène – has any insightful point to make about class, which only reinforces the perception of his films being out-of-touch in 2025.

Del Toro gives a performance I’ve never seen by him before. I don’t think other directors ever even imagine he can do something like this (and with this accent), so props to Anderson for getting it out of del Toro. Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter, gives pretty much a revelatory performance – it’s very hard for a green actor to nail that deadpan tone and comedic timing Anderson asks for, and she is right there with Del Toro. Everyone else is typically fine, and this may be Desplat’s best score in five years, except I couldn’t really tell which parts are his and which parts are source classical music (Stravinsky features heavily in the credits). Riz Ahmed is ridiculously hot and I wish he had more screen time. People like to joke that Anderson casts the same actors for every film – not that there is any inherent issue with retaining a troupe, but he has been gradually broadening it, and at this point, he needs all the freshness he can get.

The early bitesized Twitter reactions to movies industry really needs to die (or at least needs major reform). There really is no value in condensing film criticism to 280 characters just to unfairly and prematurely shape or flatten public perception of art. People were being so dramatic about this movie; it is absolutely fine. It’s very different from Dead Reckoning or a typical M:I movie, which has apparently made everyone freak the hell out. But a director making a movie that’s different from broad expectations doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie. It just means you didn’t get the movie you expected, which is the most common trap in film criticism. (So this is basically a mini Last Jedi all over again.)

No, there are very few masks, deception, or high-speed car chases in The Final Reckoning. But who said every M:I movie needs to have those things? Why are we bound by such rules? Just because it’s a “franchise film”? We can do better than that logic. Since McQuarrie took over the reins, he’s been adamant that every movie has to feel different to continue the approach of every movie being directed by a new person. So that’s why we have this film, which is very different from the other M:I films, but feels very appropriate to the scale and finality of this assignment. It would be artistically worse if McQuarrie just kept repeating the formula, especially for the alleged final film of the series, which clearly calls for something even grander and conclusive. It can be regrettable that the film has pivoted away from being a spy film, but I’m going to judge it on its own .

Take the middle action set-piece, for example, which is the best part of the film. It’s just Ethan Hunt doing his job and facing snowballing stakes in near-silence. There’s no Benji bantering and giving him instructions in the intercom here. It’s not scored to the typical crescendoes of the franchise; instead, it’s just extended ambient drones. As James Cameron would agree, McQuarrie understands the most terrifying thing in cinema is a wall of water hitting you. Has M:I even tried terrifying before? The effect here is not thrill, or even tension – it’s death, doom, and disaster. The film successfully delivers the finality it’s aiming for.

And the first hour, overblown to be the worst hour in the history of filmmaking or something, is fine as well. Yes, there are indeed scenes of people talking in rooms, but we are constantly reminded of the nuclear stakes in question, so I found my avenue to care about them. Actually, the exposition is the best it’s been since Rogue Nation – the stakes are very clearly and graphically represented by the countries turning red, and the three MacGuffins this time are all visually distinguishable from one another. (The hard drive, the poison pill, the glow stick.) There’s nothing like the identical three plutonium cores and Asian John Lark and Hunt Lark and real Lark drama in Fallout or the two real halves of the key and another fake half of the key bullshit in Dead Reckoning. The thing about The Final Reckoning is that McQuarrie is trying a different structure this time, and the film, using smaller fight scenes, has a very long build up to the underwater set-piece. This is a good thing – this is a very slow and patient movie that requires your patience, and the protractedness of the build-up only makes the underwater dive hit even harder. That is the grandiosity a final film requires. My biggest problem with the writing is Gabriel – I concede that I have no idea what he wants to do in the third act. (“Control” the Entity, yes, but how exactly?)

I may be a fanboy/auteurist/whatever but I’m not immune to seeing bad things; I do think the franchise callbacks are a bad choice and particularly awful coming from a writer/director who once famously (and correctly) proclaimed “information is the death of emotion”. It’s obviously a calculated and cynical attempt to make up for the audience who didn’t show up for Dead Reckoning. But there’s a reason why no major blockbuster has ever been made this way. (Not even Disney Star Wars, with all the bullshit retconning, would actually cut to clips of the previous films.) It’s the transparent commerciality of this “greatest hits” editing that is honestly devastating and unbecoming for this series. The first montage in particular feels like a viral fandom supercut that has no business being in an actual Hollywood movie. But even then, at its worst (Phelps and Rabbit’s Foot), these parts occupy a slim fraction of the runtime and are largely irrelevant easter eggs anyway. And at its best (Donloe), McQuarrie delivers a thematically relevant retcon that might have justified the existence of all retcons. (If it can be done this well, then perhaps it’s not inherently evil to begin with.) These parts are tolerable and not enough to compromise the entire movie for me.

Thematically, this is not as strong as the previous two films. McQuarrie is really rehashing the loved ones stuff when he’s already run it to the ground in the last few films. But it’s still fascinating how Cruise – the alleged figurehead of a religion/cult – when offered the opportunity to become the president of the world, rejects this power so resolutely. You expect him of all people to have a Messiah complex, but the rejection of the Messiah is precisely what makes it complex. More than ever, the selflessness of Ethan Hunt in these movies is interacting very knottily with Cruise’s “last movie star” persona. Meanwhile, Angela Bassett is very resolutely refuting being in A.I.’s world. The characters in the film keep saying “it’s The Entity’s world”, and saliently, she says “I don’t accept it”. That tells you all you need to know.

After the fantastic underwater dive, I’m disappointed by the biplane sequence because I feel like McQuarrie couldn’t find a way to keep escalating the stakes. His best stunts usually have many escalating sections to them, while this basically had one. The reason the similar one works in Fallout is because it’s not just the helicopter – it’s also the climb to the helicopter and the aftermath of the helicopter. As for the conversation scenes, I totally understand his geographically confusing coverage in Dead Reckoning to convey the paranoia closing in on Hunt, but here, other than series continuity, there’s really no emotional reason for it. Instead, it’s beginning to feel like he’s just using this to cover his tracks for the massive reshoots these films require. The painfully chopped-up plane conversation after the spectacular underwater dive is a particularly egregious offender. Still, he’s retained the pulpy flavor of Dead Reckoning, especially magnified in the Looney Tunes tone of the climax.

I can’t believe I’m saying this about a Zimmerling, but the departure of Lorne Balfe (replaced by even further-down Zimmerlings) is a massive loss. Extended ambient drones are what the chef asked for, but in other sequences, gone are the ethereal strings Balfe wrote for Dead Reckoning. There is no way one can believe any part of this movie is lazy (including the opening titles – what is that font?), so I’d rather say it’s rushed. But these movies have already been in the works for years, so why the rush? Still, this isn’t a bad movie. It’s just different in the way the alleged final film of the franchise requires.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

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 probably the first film since the De Palma to this is a spy series and really lean into fun spy craft, and this is probably the closest we’ll ever get to having an American Bond. (Funnily enough, this American Bond absolutely hates shooting in America and the U.S. “Senate” set looks egregiously fake.) At a time when Bond was pursuing Nolan-influenced “realism” and coming out against “exploding pens”, this is the silliest M:I film, with virtual invincibility and ridiculous gadgets like truth serum to really lock down the tone. (We’ve come a long way since serious Hunt in M:i:iii.)

Another reason this film bifurcates the franchise is because this is when the Cruise personality cult stuff gets really intense. This is the film in which we get the “living manifestation of destiny” speech. Yet strangely enough, McQuarrie and Cruise redirect the purpose of Hunt’s superhuman feats entirely to the well-being of his friends. The seeds of the McQuarrie sequence have been planted since the introduction of Julia, but now we really head into McQuarrie essentially forging a thesis out of these films by making it a save the world vs. save your friends moral dilemma. This would obviously hit its peak in Fallout. It’s fascinatingly complex to me (as in it’s a complex) that Cruise would refract all his superhuman worship into saving his loved ones. Obviously, I don’t think this excuses Cruise’s likely crimes against humanity, but I think it’s a demonstration of current Cruise’s ethos that has allowed him to climb back to the top of Hollywood. Most people just say: he’s just a really really nice guy! (I can see why Jeremy Renner left the series after this because he basically plays the anti-Hunt here: the non-fun bureaucrat whose entire function is to oppose Hunt’s plans. He doesn’t even get a stunt to do. Yet, in Mission: Impossible II there was a much worse purposefully obnoxious team member, and it’s a testament to Renner’s craft that his Brandt remains barely tolerable.)

The introduction of Ilsa Faust is obviously the powder keg that livens the film, and it’s still as effective ten years later. To show a female Hunt who can do everything Hunt does (sometimes even better) goes a long way, but that can easily fall into girlboss territory. It’s more because at least the B-plot of Rogue Nation is entirely about Ilsa’s choice of allegiance. For a female character whose entire conundrum is being trapped between the men who want to control (by betraying) her, she demonstrates so much agency by constantly upending the plot. It’s brilliant character writing through doing, and it’s why she’s such a compelling character. It doesn’t feel like she’ll inevitably become another anonymous addition to the IMF team. And of course, Ferguson’s performance is so physically demanding and layered yet entirely whole and natural; it’s a fully deserved star-is-born moment. Where did Cruise and McQuarrie even find her and why was the industry Naomi Watts-ing her before this breakthrough?

It’s Mission: Impossible, so I have to talk about the set-pieces. Prologue aside, McQuarrie struggles, with the first prison break fight basically being a mess. As a classical music nerd, the opera scene is glorious (I mean, action set to Puccini, how can I resist?), but there are still a few minor issues there (it might literally just be one cut). He improves by the time we get to the really kinetic motorcycle chase, and all is forgiven when we reach the end. After all these years, I still love blockbusters scaling down for their climaxes, and Rogue Nation doing that in the form of mind games and dialing up the noir is just delectable. This is the last M:I film shot mostly on celluloid, and Robert Elswit really brought his A-game here. The monochrome look through all the fog in the world and the Third Man references are simply to die for (don’t forget the cemetery scene earlier in the film). The ending with the glass box is just so clean and elegant, and I’ve always maintained that Solomon Lane, with Sean Harris’s creepy voice, is a worthy foe. This may not be my favorite one anymore (though these silly things are always in flux), but McQuarrie did what he needed to do – stabilize the franchise after the highs of Ghost Protocol – which allowed him to gloriously re-peak (again! this series!) with Fallout.

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 him dangling 500 meters in the air, but that he’s doing that and acting at the same time. He’s having a whole back-and-forth conversation that makes sense, and we know these M:I films are written on the fly. And the “coverage” of that sequence is just exquisite – the build-up to the stunning pull out to extreme wide, every detail captured so precisely. And it keeps finding ways to throw in curveballs and escalate the sequence beyond the already impressive feat. It’s very likely to be the greatest stunt in the series (the last film unseen), and I’m just blown away by something I already knew is amazing. And of course, Dubai isn’t just the Burj – it just keeps escalating, from the climb, to the really fun room number-switching, to the tense transaction, to the hand-to-hand combat, then from foot chase to car chase. It just keeps rolling and spinning like crazy. 

But the biggest contribution Ghost Protocol made to the series is definitely the humor it added. I definitely noticed during M:i:iii that Ethan Hunt is mostly very competent; he pulls off Shanghai without a hitch, and even the missions he fails are usually undone after he’s successfully completed all his steps. This is certainly not the case in Ghost Protocol, in which every stunt is littered with little bumps and mistakes along the way. It’s that element that really unlocks the Chaplin/Keaton nature of Cruise’s performance and finds the fun in the series. Ethan Hunt went from a really intense guy to a really intense and fun guy, and it’s very obvious which one is better. And of course, they cast the perfect actor to bounce with – Simon Pegg’s deadpan delivery is so perfectly tuned, never exaggerating the humor MCU-style. His “red? dead” line delivery stays in my head.

This is somehow also the first M:I film that feels truly global. Obviously, the previous films were already shot in a variety of exotic locales. I don’t know what Brad Bird did, but when he cuts to Dubai, it’s like seeing the world for the first time. The reason “India” falters in the third act is not only because it can’t match that scale or fun, but also because it’s clearly not shot on location, and that India simply doesn’t feel real. The cross-cutting also divests the energy a bit (like who really cares about Jeremy Renner auditioning to be the replacement Hunt by redoing Cruise’s most famous stunt unwillingly?). It’s a shame because Bird did the fake Moscow so well, but perhaps they really just ran out of creative energies. McQuarrie (uncredited) ed the team here, and this is one of the cleanest script doctoring jobs he’s done. The premise of the stolen list is just so simple and cleanly set up. But after Dubai, there’s a random access code, and a random detonator, and it feels like that good work is being undone. Still, Bird keeps it together and Dubai alone may be enough to seal this as the greatest film of the series.

M:i:iii is actually a lot better than I , and probably would’ve been a masterpiece if J.J. Abrams had any idea how to shoot a movie back then. The emotional urgency is just brutally efficient – obviously, we have the outstanding opening scene, still gripping after all these years, but after that, we jump immediately to Ethan’s engagement. There’s no obligatory lovestruck scene, wooing montage, or anything. (This also nicely sidesteps the issue of having to show the alien Cruise falling in love with anyone.) Ironically and unironically (?), this relentless pursuit in pacing is also what I praised Abrams for in The Rise of Skywalker. Some of his tendencies can be maddening, and I can understand some criticisms of this (Julia doesn’t feel like a real character because of this), but I cannot deny its effectiveness.

It’s bizarre yet entirely reasonable that this is the movie that finally convinces me Phillip Seymour Hoffman was the greatest actor on the planet. So many Oscar winners have played “easy” villain gigs (thinking of you, Rami Malek and Jared Leto), but so many phone them in, and even among those who try, only a select few are able to make it look this easy. I don’t know how he does it – physically, he is obviously no match for Cruise, but he is genuinely so threatening and terrifying. Like his character, he just has the situation under control the entire time, and even when the script rather ludicrously asks him to engage in hand-to-hand combat, he has this tyrannical brutality to him that somehow convinces me he can beat Cruise up.

Obviously, shooting this movie entirely in fractured handheld close-ups should warrant capital punishment – the lack of scale and clarity is truly devastating – but dare I say Abrams made quite good use of Shanghai as a location, and I of all people should be the last person you’d expect to say that. Shanghai is genuinely beautiful in the film. It’s wild how much better aesthetic standards for studio blockbusters were even in the 2000s – the contrast is high in this film, and I’m also the last person I’d expect myself to say this, but I almost think the blacks are too crushed in this film. The highlights roll off the actors’ faces so beautifully, and these mere 20 years feels like a lifetime ago. It’s also wild how much better Abrams got at shooting action just ten years later in The Force Awakens – I the fights being legible and impressive instead of this garbled mess.

Watched on Tuesday May 13, 2025.

Not as pitch-perfect as I , but it’s still a stunning achievement, of course. De Palma lives in more than just the dutch angles and split-diopter flourishes; it’s every single choice in the film. What are those haunting and frantic recurring POV shots for example? He can pull off the massive blockbuster shots as required of him as well, such as that glorious CGI-assisted establishing wide push into an extreme close-up of a train window. Every choice he makes is telling the story, heightening tension or paranoia. His imprint is everywhere – when people want to make a Hitchcock-De Palma comparison, I think I’d point them to this film.

Watching it for a third time, I finally realize this movie actually has five million plot holes. Not that I’d take points off for them, since a movie like this is meant to be enjoyed than repeatedly scrutinized; I just find its perfect façade falling off illuminating and its ludicrousness funny and entertaining. It’s also more weirdly proportioned than I , but not to its detriment – De Palma takes more than an hour to build up to the Langley heist, then basically knocks out the final set-piece in quick succession. The debriefing in Liverpool Street after the Langley heist also truly sets up the blueprint for the series to follow, and McQuarrie would later pay homage to that in Rogue Nation. The first film still feels very different from the rest of them, but it’s crazy how much they got right from the get-go.

I had been curious about this since its release seven years ago (how?), but I never actually bothered to “watch” it, until Netflix decided to banish this to lost media a few days ago. I’m not rating it like I rate films and TV, because this is not TV and it is certainly not cinema. For me, I’ve always preferred a reverential relationship with the screen. I respect the filmmaker and I submit to the film. To have this dynamic turned back on me and to be given power to dictate what happens is certainly a strange experience – not one I’m used to, and not one I think I like.

The problem with Bandersnatch is that the choices are inconsequential. Frosted Flakes or Rice Krispies? “Yes” or “fuck yeah”? It doesn’t matter. It’s a false illusion, because they lead to the same path, meaning there is no consequence to the choice. And when there is no consequence, there are no stakes, and I don’t care. The experience seems fun at first, but it is actually not compelling. I don’t want to be given the power to choose; I want to be hooked. Traditional good screenwriting dictates the characters take you where they want to go, and it’s not that I’m not open to new things; it’s that I tried it, and it’s not good. When there is consequence to the choice – when your choice can jump to the ending – it is often emotionally unsatisfying and puzzling. Apparently there is an intended ending by Brooker and it fits right within the dark irony of the Black Mirror universe, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get to it. I only got to a weird, half-hearted ending that has some sort of an ironic twist but not enough. When you are offering the audience the voice, it means you have none, and without an artist’s voice to interpret, is this even art to begin with?

The thing about Bandersnatch is that it knows this, so it’s also about the ethics of making those choices. It makes you feel gross about deciding the characters’ fates. It even throws in a meta element, referencing “Netflix” as the evil corporation itself. That complicates things, and I might even be willing to call it complex, but is it really productive? I’m not sure. I when Black Mirror had a reason for its bitter cynicism, but here, it just seems pointlessly cruel, reg our protagonist to violent fate and rehashing dumbed-down The Matrix for the nth time. And of course, the meta nature means they couldn’t do anything further with this format again. Its true failure is the writing, with the characters so flat and devoid of any compelling personality or backstory that even good actors are not able to rescue. (What a waste of Will Poulter, and of course they are far too straight to pursue any homoeroticism between him and Whitehead.) To make the experience work, they are intentionally written as ciphers, not characters. The aesthetic is standard cheap Netflix ’80s nostalgia à la Stranger Things as well. I think I do applaud this for formal innovation, but it is not the form I recognize. Is it a video game? But I thought video games were supposed to be fun. This experience was more just tedious.

I first learned about this movie in an undergraduate class all the way back in 2019. I was both astonished and ashamed that I had never heard of this movie and that my white professor – a sweet elderly Italian lady – knew more about Hong Kong cinema than me. I couldn’t believe this movie exists. An explicitly lesbian period drama made in 1980s Hong Kong? That didn’t fit the false dichotomy of heroic bloodshed/genre and New Wave realism? The professor showed us clips, and it was part of the prescribed coursework, but perhaps out of arrogance, my lazy ass never got around to actually watching it.

Well, now that I’ve actually watched it, perhaps it’s tamer than the mythical status it’s accumulated in my heart suggests. The lesbianism is confused, at least. But it’s still a pretty daring movie by Hong Kong standards (no ifs or buts or “for its time” here), as it exists in a fascinating area between category III softcore porn/sexploitation and a genuinely thoughtful period drama. There’s no denying the category III roots here – even though category III hadn’t even come into existence at this point – and just to be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s just if we’re judging through the lens of sexploitation, it peaks with the first sex scene. Then there’s the thoughtful part: category III films, as far as I know, are not known for stunning framing and sets. If anything, they should be shoddily produced. Yet Amorous Woman is often deftly observed through extreme wide shots of its period architecture. (I’m always astonished to see Tang Dynasty China being recreated in, like, New Territories or something. Doesn’t seem at all possible today, even though the landscapes of Hong Kong are still there.) I don’t think it fully earns the “arthouse” label, whatever that means, but it feels like an authorial voice finding its way through studio filmmaking. Did other Shaw films of this time look like this?

With the daring premise and the personality behind the camera, what went wrong with Amorous Woman? Well, it’s more like despite the daring premise and graphic violence, Amorous Woman is really boring. After the film, I had to look up whether it’s based on a true historical figure or not, and lo and behold, it is, because it has the classic biopic-itis of “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened”. No motivation is given as to why Ms. Amorous s the monastery, leaves it, comes back, and later leaves again to establish her own brothel. She just does it sequentially. There’s no denying it’s a true feminist masterpiece in which the protagonist is extremely no-holds-barred “fuck the patriarchy” with agency (her late character choices remind me of Eileen Chang w/r/t Lust, Caution), so progressive that it makes current Hong Kong feel regressed. But this is a lesson that no matter how mesmerizing your star is (Pat Ha), how wild your premise is, and how thoughtful your camera set-ups are, if you don’t figure out your storytelling, you don’t have a film that works. Still, I can’t believe I would ever get the chance to see this in a movie theatre, let alone all the way in London. On D! With good subtitles! (The subtitles are extremely detailed, and they needed a by a translator who understands less is more.)

I’m mildly intrigued but not exactly fascinated by Yim Ho, whose two films I’ve seen are exclusively set in China. They don’t even have the sort of subconscious geopolitical tension found in some Tsui Hark films around this time; they’re just entirely about PRC people. Usually, I would dismiss this kind of deep-in-the-bone pan-Chinese-ism (大中華膠), but Yim’s is so reverent and heartfelt that I almost respect it. Anyhow, as an indigenous Hong Konger*, I have zero experience with visiting a “hometown” in the PRC, so as much as I want to appreciate other people’s culture, this exists in a weird twilight zone for me that is more alienating than anything.

Still, I respect that Yim Ho could make a movie this peaceful and serene back in ’80s Hong Kong, where the industry has always been genre-dominated. Even today, this has the aesthetic of a true indie film, and he captures an authentic, muddy slice of rural China akin to something by the Sixth Generation. Also, there is a weird queer love triangle here that, albeit not explicitly romantic (and likely not intended), has a kind of uncomfortable, probing intimacy. Mostly because the “romantic” tension is really about urban-rural conflict and the changing of times, two ever-resonant themes. I don’t know where Yim Ho found the unknown Josephine Ku, but she truly has a face that embodies city contempt (complimentary). The theme would be much stronger for me if her character is actually raised in Hong Kong instead of a late immigrant from the PRC. Still, the flip side of “peaceful” and “serene” is inert and tepid, and only when Homecoming briefly visits the more developed Guangzhou does it give me a jolt. I’m just not built for this film.

* I am officially of indigenous Hong Konger (原居民) descent, but my father thinks it’s actually a false claim. Anyhow, I have no experience going to some mythical “home” in the PRC whatsoever.

My partner very presciently warned me that I was not going to like this, but I persisted because of its reputation. Well, he was right. Juvenile humor (e.g. flatulence) is to be expected from this brand of Hollywood comedy, I guess, but it doesn’t mean I’ve grown to like it. The premise is unique, of course, but this movie is so hellbent on satirizing everyone that none of the characters are remotely likable. Hence it’s actually really hard to care about anything that happens in this movie. I don’t care whether they end up making a (successful) movie or not. It’s all just flying by in front of my eyes. Perhaps I’ll appreciate it more if I see it less as a traditional three-act structure movie and more like a stream-of-consciousness rant.

Much has been said about the use of blackface in the film, but what about the Asians? I don’t think the movie’s heart is in the wrong place, but I’m not charmed. In a movie of which its chief point is Hollywood exploiting peoples and locales for mindless greed, it seems like it’s done that very same thing towards the inhabitants of its supposed setting. But then, by that point, I’ve already tuned out. Of all people, someone struggling to break into the industry like me should think the satire is very no-holds-barred and accurate, but even then, I think it’s too cynical. It feels more like Stiller’s angry tirade towards Hollywood than anything – valid, but exhausting. It works when its anger is rightly placed, and that’s why its best part is Cruise’s Les Grossman, but he’s only in the movie for five minutes. It is quite amazing though that a movie that consists so much of inside baseball was such an enduring hit – who cares that much about Hollywood these days?

Breaking my rule of not reviewing documentaries to say this: wow, I was not disappointed. I’ve heard so much about this being one of the best-ever documentaries that I was expecting something formally experimental and groundbreaking. But then I this was made for ESPN’s 30 for 30. Professional, polished house style prevails, but that restraint is exactly why this is so great. Edelman doesn’t touch the form, yet the anger boils and unfurls underneath. I was making a documentary and, frustratedly, I often felt like I had to do something really formal and unique to get people’s attention. Yet Edelman proves that you can make great art – yes, art – with just talking heads and archival footage.

And wow, the archival footage – I think that’s why I really ire this. Edelman might have been working with unlimited ESPN house money – even then, every filmmaker knows no house money is ever enough – but the archival footage and interviews he’s able to source for this is just insane. I cannot imagine how much meticulous work it took to source and assemble. It just feels like he has the perfect quote or clip for everything (that I never even wonder what he didn’t get). Of course, montage is the tool here – even just juxtaposing an OJ football run, his Hertz commercial sprint, and the infamous car chase in the credits sequence makes me feel so many things. In less-skilled editors’ hands, tying together Watts and Rodney King with OJ’s footballing career would be a ham-fisted stretch. Here, it feels like there is no other way to tell this story. You can also tell Edelman is such a great, disarming interviewer who makes his subjects reveal secrets and vulnerabilities, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that shit is so hard. Regarding the materials, I apologize to every fellow American Airlines enger who had to see the grisly murder photos on my entertainment screen. I’m pretty unaffected by gore, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget them.

Of course, the primary reason this works is still the narrative itself. I’ve seen the Ryan Murphy show, I’m sure I’ve done my OJ deep dive before, and nothing here is necessarily news to me. But still, Edelman manages to make you see things in a whole new light. The Civil Rights movement, Rodney King, the Trial of the Century – all of these events are so iconic that we just take them as basic facts. Yet when Edelman smashes them together so delicately and invisibly, he creates new things out of them. As far as true crime goes, the OJ case is pretty simple – knife murder of two people – and some (obviously) even considered it open-and-shut. Yet Edelman is able to wring out so many thorny, complicated questions. Did Simpson have the right to “abandon” Black people? Was the Black community right to feel vindicated by the verdict after the Rodney King trial? Some of the jurors’ and defense’s comments (and of course Fuhrman’s and Simpson’s) are certainly obscene, and I cannot find myself agreeing with them at all in present day. But when everything was stacked together, I’m almost certain I would’ve been on the OJ ers’ side back then. And Edelman forces you to confront that. In that sense, the show reaches greatness not because it’s about OJ, racism, or even America – it’s about your moral com, your values, your belief system, and who you truly are.

Of course, once you dive into the Simpson rabbit hole, you find things that Edelman excluded or missed. In that sense, it’s truly incredible that I wanted even more after this eight-hour miniseries. (But of course, it’s also Edelman’s point that Simpson’s life after the trial and the whole Vegas debacle deserve no more than 30 minutes.) Reading a New Yorker piece written back then, I’m surprised to find out quite a few Black intellectuals weren’t happy with the verdict, contrary to how Edelman presents the “Black community” almost monolithically in the film. (I certainly didn’t expect Spike Lee to be disappointed by the verdict.) It tells me what’s really missing from the series is the point of view of Black feminists. I don’t think the show misses the mark on domestic abuse (Simpson is very unequivocally painted as a heinous, sociopathic, monstrous serial ab and predator and that is clearly the whole reason for the murders), but while Edelman makes it all about race, I think it’s not sufficiently about gender.

Still, while every documentarian can easily throw out a thesis like “OJ Simpson was an American tragedy”, not many can actually demonstrate it, and even fewer can make you feel that way. I don’t think an OJ narrative biopic can ever be made because of the expansive complexity Edelman captures here. But you know what this makes me want to see? An OJ opera.

Watched on Tuesday May 6, 2025.

No, I refuse to celebrate this, despite being an original film that made $36 million from a $10 million budget – our standards simply cannot be that low. From Ex Machina to Leave the World Behind and god knows what, I’m so tired of these single-location films of characters going to some remote luxurious mansion for a weekend. They have become an excuse for minimum effort. It’s too easy for Hollywood to rent some sterile mansion as a sole location – what happened to production design? What happened to imbuing locations with character? It’s not that it can't be done – see Parasite – it’s that the industry is too lazy. In line with this, the coverage of Companion is utterly thoughtless and autopilot. There isn’t a single exciting composition or shot here.

As for the storytelling, I’m tired of this C-tier Black Mirror treatment too, not that Black Mirror is that good to begin with. Companion has the most rudimentary ideas of AI awakening and sentience that I don’t know if I should even call these ideas. Of course this companion is a sex bot whose intelligence you can dial in generic UI – I don’t care if this film is critiquing it or not, this is just like the five million sci-fi student films I’ve seen in the past, and even some of them have more inspired production design. Think about how Her uses an AI girlfriend to explore issues of intimacy and divorce, while Companion ceases to think after the most basic level – they are worlds apart. It’s the laziness, the refusal to even try to think or deepen that infuriates me most. Companion begins to gain some thematic relevance and intrigue when it insinuates that straight white male fragility is the source of all problems, but when it resorts to a slasher solution for its final act, it hasn’t contributed any productive discourse (nor provided any real satisfaction).

I don’t even know why I’m taking this so seriously when it’s clearly a Blumhouse B-movie, but then, these movies are somehow the lifeline of the industry now. Sophie Thatcher is doing her best Emma Stone impression here, and at least we have gay actors playing hot gay robots?

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Well, this is an incredibly difficult movie to talk about. I was ready not to do any mental gymnastics for its ideology until the end, when Zhang seemingly contradicts himself multiple times. He first presents a very typical Gal Gadot-“Imagine” video-style “peace for all mankind” lesson to be learnt, enshrouded in some silly convoluted bullshit like how that’s the true meaning of the word “sword”. It’s ’00s naïveté, perhaps, but inoffensive – you can’t really fault a mega blockbuster advocating for peace, can you? But then his Emperor does exactly the opposite of that, betraying a lack of trust in the authorities, which in this case can only be the C. I don’t think Zhang necessarily endorses the Emperor – it’s Nameless, not the Emperor, who’s the titular “hero” of the film, after all. That alone elevates this to be allowable on a vulgar auteurist level in the sense that we can detect contradictions and tension over the final edict of the film.

Then Zhang tops himself with the infamous final titles of the film, in which he basically says expansionism is okay as long as it’s limited (but are there limits to the C’s expansionism?). It’s inarguably the Party line, i.e. “China’s borders must be protected”, whatever said “borders” mean. Even more inexcusable is the literal use of PLA soldiers as the extras of the film, whether one opposes that on an ethical or metaphorical level. (I’m definitely not interested in the whataboutism of “the U.S. has military propaganda films too” – no shit.) I definitely cannot fully endorse this film, but there is enough going on here that makes me think this is complex, worth studying, and, most importantly, personal. It’s not Zhang in the current autopilot zombie phase of his career.

I’m more embarrassed that I used to call this movie “formalist” (in big capital letters, nonetheless) when it really isn’t all that. We have to be able to look past the easy C propaganda interpretation and the catchy colors for fruitful analysis. Dividing your film in segments of red, blue, green, etc. is an accomplishment in mise-en-scène, no doubt, but that isn’t actual formalism. Under that superficial level is how Zhang actually uses the form – camera choices, cuts, sound, etc. – and it’s no masterpiece level, but it’s formidable (especially for one’s first wuxia outing). Zhang makes excellent use of contrast, bouncing his film between quiet moments of stillness and extended frenzies of motion. The editing is not necessarily always communicating on a geographical level (though it’s always geographically clear), but accenting the grace or kineticism of his actors’ choreography. This is probably the best use of Christopher Doyle by the Fifth Generation, in the sense that the DP is actually tuned into the director’s vision, but Doyle is still allowed to go wild with movement in the red hallways, in an otherwise über-stately film. I want to say Zhang is an imposter and this isn’t real wuxia, but that’s just me being prejudiced – hey, he did the damn job. (It’s also called hiring people especially action directors who worked in Hong Kong.) Because of the affectedness of the conceit and structure, Hero’s thrills are compromised in short spurts, but Zhang tries to make up for it with high frequency (sometimes too frequent for my taste). It’s a well-executed, slightly untraditional and off-kilter action blockbuster, just not the formalist masterpiece I used to think it is.

Other than that, there isn’t much to say about this film. The Rashomon structure is rather exhausting in how it doesn’t contribute much, but I concede it to the nature of this film being a legend. Cheung and Leung are fun as an onscreen couple that actually gets to be in love with each other – they are so iconic, yet people easily forget they haven’t actually shared the screen that much. Cynically, one can say this is Zhang’s nationalist mission to wrestle the wuxia away from Ang Lee’s globalist hands, and I definitely understand how people can feel uncomfortable with it. I feel uncomfortable with it too. But I think Zhang has definitely done his homework (and this is still a half-Hong Kong film, enough to qualify for the Hong Kong Film Awards). What can I say to that, really?

To be honest, I’m not too sure what there is to say about this nothing-burger of a movie. As a follow-up to the Palme d’Or-winning Farewell My Concubine, it is definitely a disappointment; it is overly complicated with the familial relationships in the first half of the film (I definitely thought it was about incest, which at least would’ve made it intriguing), so I’m sure that definitely did not work with Western audiences. The bigger problem is that while Concubine had so much to say about modern China (and so much anger to dispel), Temptress Moon just goes over tired themes of urban-rural divide and Chinese familial conservatism. Points are made, I guess, but with such horrible characters and wonky plot development, nothing is felt. Leslie Cheung’s so-called scandalous occupation is tame (building to a cross-cut showdown sequence that defies all logic), and the incessant Fifth Generation need to film in the most opulent rooms and recruit the most extras is at best only superficially pleasant and at worst distracting. Christopher Doyle’s sensibilities in the roving long takes never produce chemistry with Chen (while Chen’s static long takes speak volumes in Concubine), and while the use of mirrors and reflections in Concubine is ingeniously embedded, in Temptress Moon, it’s an ostentatious show-off. At least Shanghai period reconstruction is always nice to see.

It makes so much sense that Gong Li was recast halfway through production because the film is simply a massive waste of her talents. To be honest, I’m interested in reading a piece about how she embraced these sexually forward roles (by a Chinese actress’s standards) yet was very much thrown around like a puppet under her directors’ male gazes. (This movie, at least partially about women’s desire, definitely fails the Bechdel test.) Who is Gong Li as an artist, and what does she think? Like her character, she is a cipher to me, albeit a very commanding one. Despite occupying half of the movie’s runtime, she acts entirely at the whims of the male characters, and we are removed from accessing the awakenings of her character. Perhaps because of the late casting, her opium addiction is only verbally repeated, but not physically embodied.

Cheung, on the other hand, fares much better. I’m not sure if he is dubbed here or not (very few people know he is in Concubine), but casting a Hong Konger as a colonial Shanghai outsider in a traditional Chinese setting is as perfect metatextually as he is fully convincing in the role. What I realized after a week of watching Leslie Cheung movies is that despite his origins as a pop idol, he is excellent at the traditionally “actorly” demands of his roles, whether it is throwing tantrums, screaming, or just having a good old cry. He is really adept at dialing and delivering intensity – he reminds me of the Chinese saying “intestine-breaking” sadness (斷腸) – which his best roles often complement with his devilish charms and suaveness. I find this noteworthy because he is seldom put on the highest tier of Hong Kong “pure” actors like the Tony Leungs, Chow Yun-fat, or Anthony Wong, yet he is absolutely on their level. This is a disappointing film, but he is easily its best part again.

I’m reading my previous review from five years ago and I have absolutely no idea what I was talking about:

his longer long takes are too performative, he miscalibrates tension in the middle (tries too hard to find it where there isn’t, doesn’t milk it where there is), but he nails the basics like establishing the premise through cutting between CUs. His tracking shots are also thrilling in short spurts.

What is going on here? In reality, Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice is brilliantly staged, especially for a first-time feature director. There is careful (if blunt) depth and layering to his many tracking shots, which are constantly and consistently thrilling, not only in short spurts. And dare I say the standout ball sequence is aping from masters like Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons and Visconti in The Leopard? I’m not saying it gets there, but a laudable attempt was certainly made. I’m not sure what all my smugness was for. If anything, Wright staging a key conversation through shallow DOF medium close-up shot-reverse shot (albeit in the rain) is boring, especially with the architecture the characters are in, but I only one instance of it.

The bigger problem with this adaptation is a story problem. It is irable how efficiently Moggach and Wright blaze through this text, especially with the constant influx of new characters. But condensing this novel to a two-hour film is simply too much, and it suffers, especially with Elizabeth’s mid-film change of heart regarding Darcy. How did she go from full resentment to “I can’t be with anyone else”? The 180º turn is too fast and too extreme, explained to the viewer yet not felt. If anything, and this is very cynical, but it seems slightly like Elizabeth is just struck by the grandiosity of Darcy’s estate (the statues). Different text, different outcomes, of course, but Greta Gerwig’s Little Women brilliantly balances the storylines of four sisters while Pride & Prejudice sacrifices nearly all of them for Elizabeth. There is never really the feeling that these women are sisters.

This is a major (if not the first major) film adaptation of an Austen text, and how it has endured throughout the last 20 years speaks to a certain timelessness in it. But it is also dated in its attempt to chase a quasi-Hugh Grant romcom or 2000s “chick flick” (hate that term) vibe when unnecessary. The worst offender might be the characterization of Mr. Collins – I’m still reading the book, so I might come back to update this, but Austen never writes him like a bumbling fool as in the film. These attempts to quirk up the film are distractions to an otherwise very earnest and heartfelt film. Who understood the tonal assignment was Dario Marianelli – call it faux classical or whatever, but I can eat that exquisite, splendid score up for days.

Wright also talked about his attempt to make a “gritty” version of this text, as in making the Bennets muddier and their “relative poverty” more obvious. This is at best silly and inconsequential to the contemporary viewer, and I’m finding more pleasure in reading the Austen original, in which all characters are clearly rich people with nothing to do all day than to discuss inheritances. There is no faux pretense that the Bennets are poor or whatever, and this honestly makes everyone more likable. Thankfully, this is slight in Wright’s film, which is otherwise decked out in ridiculous opulence (the statues!), and that is the correct way, instead of misguided ’00s attempts at realism. The perfect cast does a lot to make this bunch more likable than the rich idlers they are on paper.

I feel vindicated as my previous thesis about Ronny Yu vis-à-vis The Bride with White Hair is finally correct here: Yu was born in Hong Kong, educated in America, and later adapted The Phantom of the Opera to a Chinese setting. Is there anything that more encapsulates the default Hong Kong narrative of “East meets West”? And I suspect the inspiration was less Gaston Leroux’s Phantom than Lloyd Webber’s, which was at its first peak of popularity on Broadway and West End at the time. Not only was it Western aesthetics brought to a Chinese background, it was white Western aesthetics in a colonial Hong Kong obsessed with white standards of beauty. (I’m a huge “Phan”, but I can it The Phantom of the Opera is the whitest thing ever. Even Donald Trump is obsessed with it.)

What I didn’t expect is just how Chinese this film is. Ronny Yu just straight-up made a Fifth Generation film. (Is he the only Hong Kong director who made a Fifth Generation film?) The Phantom Lover looks as if it was filmed on the sets of Fifth Generation icons like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou; every room is opulent and impossibly massive. (How tall do you want these ceilings? Taller!) There are even Fifth Generation undertones like the rejection of Communist propaganda plays (yangbanxi), even though the timeframe of the story is extremely ambiguous. Though the film claims Shanghai as its geographical setting, it is very obviously filmed on sets and might as well exist in some magical fantasy bubble. It is peak Fifth Generation aestheticization/Orientalism to the extent where it is completely divorced from any social reality at the time. Now is that a problem per se? We don’t really fault the Lloyd Webber Phantom for not depicting Paris with realism or not addressing the issues of its time, do we? So while I do find this kind of escapist detachment odd and off-putting, I have to consider where my impulses come from.

The Phantom Lover was pre-CEPA, when Hong Kong-China co-productions were more ambiguously defined. On one hand, you have the casting of Leslie Cheung (there is no greater colonial Hong Kong symbol especially when playing a classic Western literature character) and the aforementioned unique background of Yu; on the other hand, you have the peak Fifth Generation aesthetics and the all-Mandarin-speaking ing cast. This is a film set in Mainland China about Mainland Chinese characters, and apart from Cheung and Yu, there is basically nothing that makes this a Hong Kong film. This is definitely uncomfortable to me, and I feel an emotional distance from this sort of project pre-1997/CEPA, but at the same time, I wasn’t even alive to judge these people’s intentions or inclinations. My only argument coming from filmic analysis is that Cheung is massively wasted: you have Cheung playing a dual role, yet you spend so much time with the uninspiring and anonymous ing cast? A C-plot between the Mainland Chinese young couple, really? The fake Mainland Chinese Cheung is clearly no match for Cheung, and as in A Moment of Romance, I really don’t care for Wu Chien-lien here. (Yet somehow I have no issues with her when she returns to Taiwan in Eat Drink Man Woman.)

I apologize for all this quasi-geopolitical bullshit before actually getting to the film itself: as an adaptation of Leroux (which, to be clear, I’ve never read), it is extremely loose and suffers. The main appeal of Phantom is obviously the titular character – his allure and seduction – yet Cheung spends half of the movie playing a slightly annoying lover boy in his usual princely image, almost as if he is scared of donning the mask. I don’t understand why they waited for so long as he is actually excellent at the more conventionally actorly demands of throwing tantrums and screaming. And in this version, Christine Daaé is no anonymous girl plucked from the ensemble, but the daughter of the richest man in the country. Talk about a downgrade in appeal! But the biggest problem with The Phantom Lover is Cheung writing all the songs himself. I would almost call Cheung a formidable songwriter – he wrote many of his best tunes including his heartbreaking swan song “A Love Like Glass” (玻璃之情) – but these meandering, repetitive ballads that go nowhere in The Phantom Lover are simply not it. (Struggling to hit the high notes – what high notes??) And they are sung multiple times! It’s made even more embarrassing by the film treating them like groundbreaking avant-garde work that shook the core of the audiences. But again, they definitely reflect the Hong Kong-ness of this film as these syrupy ballads were (and still are) very much in vogue at the time.

From a pure visual perspective, this is an irable film. It takes prowess to ape the Fifth Generation guys and go head-to-head with them. After The Bride with White Hair, Peter Pau returns as the DP, and together with Yu, he stages one of the most exquisite and stately Hong Kong films I’ve ever seen, certainly indicative of a film industry in its prime. It’s also quite remarkable that this actually predates many of the choices in the ghastly, campy Schumacher version by a decade, such as the transition from heavy filters to full color – and even more courageously, especially for a Hong Kong film in 1995, Yu and Pau commit to the filtered look for half of the film. Based on this alone, I’d argue The Phantom Lover deserves a full restoration and to be more widely seen, but it’s a shame that the story does not back that up.

Having last seen this in 2019, on a DVD rip of dubious quality, seeing the 4K scan of the original camera negative* is like seeing the film anew. Cue the iconic opening theme, and I am nearly in tears. It’s even more stunning than I : back then, I didn’t really know how to appreciate things like blocking with depth and layers, and seeing Hou pull it off in this film (and this filmmaking context – this is the first sync sound film ever made in Taiwan!) is simply a miracle. In my review for The Time to Live and the Time to Die, I talked about his long take feeling too stately, but I was wrong – when it’s this masterfully executed, it doesn’t. Nearly every one of his masterful fixed long takes has multiple planes of action going on – how does one even block this? – and when he finally moves the camera, it’s like opening your eyes to a whole new world. The clarity of the new 4K scan really helps to enhance the appreciation of the depth. Like the historical events depicted, layers that were previously enshrouded in muddiness are now present in full view again.

Ironically, it is the stillness and distance of Hou’s long take that allow the rupture of violence to be captured. The violence in the film is very matter-of-fact and brutal, but also distant and sometimes even obscured, a sensitive approach that nonetheless preserves the scarring of the nation. Hou really leans into this with stunning naturalistic shots of the Taiwanese landscape – how can something so brutal and ugly happen to this island, so beautiful as to be called formosa?

However, six years later with my memory wiped, my issues remain the same: the Shanghainese gang subplot is simply too difficult to comprehend. Hou really pushes his ellipsis to the extreme here (not sure if it’s accurate or not to keep attributing this to Ozu): in one scene, Third Brother is insane; in the next, he is fully recovered with a different look; a few scenes later, he is back to insane. There is just so much happening between the cuts and so many random characters being plopped on screen without introduction that I have to imagine it’s exceedingly hard for non-Sinophone viewers to understand what the hell is going on. You’re just supposed to know who each new character is or what their function is (and they’re often brought in in groups). Even for someone with knowledge of White Terror like me, it’s not impossible, but it’s very hard to keep up with. This is a film that demands you to do the work, and rightly so, I suppose.

And there is something gained with this elliptical style. For a film known as the definitive 228 film, it is surprising how peripheral the 228 incident is. It is completely offscreen and just heard through a radio broadcast. If you’re expecting the explicit lashings of historical events in a traditional manner (in, I don’t know, Schindler’s List style), you will be underwhelmed. But the film is even more remarkable because of how this peripheral violence creeps up on our main characters and eventually envelops and consumes them. Our family lives in Jiufen, not Taipei, but they’re no exemption from the claws of the authoritarian state. Instead of sweeping events, A City of Sadness commits to moments in-between, such as a lot of eating and a lot of talking through intertitles, or celebrations and weddings amidst the crackdown. Because what are engaged couples gonna do, not marry during martial law? And because A City of Sadness is so elliptical, it doubly functions as broken pieces of memory, a film and a period of history defined not by presence but by ghostly absence. You witness Tony Leung go from green actor in his first arthouse lead role to traumatized silence in the span of 158 minutes, and the final title card that this all happened before the KMT even arrived in 1949 is simply crushing.

And there’s still so much lurking underneath the surface of this film, undepicted by Hou. What does it mean for Hou, a waishengren, to make this definitive movie about benshengren’s trauma? What is it trying to say about the remnants of Japanese colonization? Did you know the leftist guerrillas in the villages were actually factions of the C? It’s tempting to say the characters are too flat (especially the angelic Tony Leung), but Kent Jones’s beautiful review printed by the BFI offers a resounding rebuttal. This is obviously a suggestive, complex, and deep film, not without flaws or missing pieces (or exempt from reproach, as its status might suggest). But Hou balances the majestical and the historical weight with, somehow, a sense of familial intimacy that makes this such a masterpiece. And only he could’ve made this movie in this very specific way.

* The 4K digitized version I saw at its UK? European? premiere has been theatrically released in Hong Kong for an astonishing two consecutive years. (Make of that what you will.) It is only a scan of the original camera negative, not a full restoration, because producer Chiu Fu-sheng decided the OCN was in good enough quality for release. After seeing it, I can report that is indeed true, and despite all the rights hell that this film has been through, we are beyond blessed that the OCN of this seismically important film has survived in such pristine conditions. However, there are still dust and speckles in certain scenes (particularly the opening), which, I suspect, makes it unacceptable for release by US/European labels. An actual restoration has been announced and I assume it’s still underway. Sadly, this means we are probably another few years away from the film being widely available worldwide.

I thought the two Ronny Yu-Leslie Cheung collaborations, The Bride with White Hair and The Phantom Lover, have a reputation for being these decadent and opulent costume dramas that didn’t really leave a lasting legacy. But I was dead wrong about The Bride with White Hair at least – it’s surprisingly good! After a really laborious 20 minutes or so of exposition, during which I assume 99% of foreign audiences will get lost (note to Eureka: you do not and should not translate every single word for subtitles), it gets to a thematically complex middle section. The tables are turned, the heroes are not what they appear to be, and the classic post-’89, pre-’97 question of “stay or leave” is asked by none other than Mr. Émigré himself Leslie Cheung. Given how morally one-sided and simplistic some of these Hong Kong ancient Chinese period films can be (A Chinese Ghost Story, more on that later), the unexpected twists and turns of The Bride with White Hair are welcome and delightful.

But the finale drops the ball. After raising those thorny questions, The Bride with White Hair goes back to that classic Chinese Ghost Story mode of quasi-body horror, freakish comedy, and swinging Hong Kong action. The problem is it doesn’t do any of those things as well. Compared to the over-the-top zaniness of Ching and Tsui, the creature design of The Bride with White Hair is tame. As for action, it’s not even in the same league – Ching is a master choreographer and everything in The Bride with White Hair is a jumbled mess. The comedy may be the only thing on par, with an early Francis Ng playing a surprisingly queer role (with heavy eye makeup and everything), but even then, comedy is the last thing on this movie’s mind. It feels like a politically thoughtful movie is trapped within the confines of a typical Hong Kong genre pic. At least Cheung gets to darken his peak pop idol/heartthrob performance from A Chinese Ghost Story – he was one of the best hysterics in cinema.

Even then, there is something aesthetically that sets this one apart. The famed Emi Wada is the costume designer, and Oscar winner Peter Pau is the DP. Yu et al are clearly going for impressionistic looks beyond even the usual Hong Kong standards. This may be confirmation bias, but to me, this movie makes perfect sense – Ronny Yu talked about how he wanted to turn this ancient Chinese wuxia story into his Romeo and Juliet, essentially “Westernizing” Chinese folklore (I know this technically isn’t folklore, but you get the point). Yu was an American college graduate returning to work in the Hong Kong film industry, and I can feel those influences in The Bride with White Hair, even though I can’t exactly pinpoint where. I have absolutely no academic substantiation for this, but his extreme aestheticization and taste does feel very white, especially when compared to the Tsui/Ching films, which feel a lot more “Chinese”. Is that synthesis not the essence of Hong Kong cinema back then? The clichéd tale of “East meets West”? It’s a shame that Yu never got to further develop this route and make a true masterpiece, because Hollywood wasted him on stupid shit like Bride of Chucky instead. How do Hollywood execs watch this beautiful, stunning romance and conclude “yep, we should totally get that guy to direct Freddy vs. Jason”?

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

As I wrote in my review for Double Tap, after Leslie Cheung’s death, there was some really heartless, dehumanizing, and pernicious gossip that claimed Double Tap and Inner Senses – both directed by Lo Chi-leung – drove Cheung to suicide. I wouldn’t want to entertain Hong Kong’s toxic tabloids, but because of this urban legend, these two films have gained a special reputation and status in Cheung’s filmography. And instead of anything to do with suicide, these two films represent an active attempt by Cheung to pursue darker roles and challenge himself. His lovely, naturalistic presence in the first half of the film as a professor/psychiatrist neatly sets up his ferocious, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink physicality in the second half. Of course he doesn’t look 45 in this film, but he begins to show a sense of maturity, and that daddiness genuinely feels like a new side of him I’ve never seen before. More tragic than anything, his excellent, final performance shows what he could’ve given us in the next phase of his acting career.

The rest of the film, however, is just as tragically bad. When Cheung isn’t on screen, the first half is a very generically made and predictable horror that doesn’t shock or terrify. Aesthetically, it’s very early ’00s Kurosawa horror that already feels stale at this point. When every trick is so lazy (ghost in the mirror! ah!), it really becomes tepid. Karena Lam, only in her second film role after her star-is-born emergence in July Rhapsody, overacts her horrified face by a bit. But the first half is still enlivened by Cheung’s screen presence and the film raising the question of whether ghosts are real or figments of our imagination. It’s not until the second half that the film really jumps the shark. Cheung is a very youthful-looking 45-year-old, but the 22-year age gap between him and Lam is simply diabolical. Lam is literally as old right now as he was when he died! This bizarre onscreen coupling aside, the film doubles down on its sauceless horror with cheap early ’00s CGI. When Cheung has no romantic chemistry with anyone in the film, emphasizing his character’s straightness in 2002 is just a painfully unconvincing choice. Holding her own against Cheung, Lam is more believable in this second half and shows why her debut was so impressive.

Lo Chi-leung directed Cheung three times, making him as prolific of a collaborator with Cheung as Wong Kar-wai was. Both Double Tap and Inner Senses are quite bad, but at least Inner Senses has the far superior Cheung performance that is worth checking out. It’s one of his bests, and for Cheung completionists, I’m afraid it’s unmissable.

This movie definitely deserved a second chance after I judged it prematurely at Cannes while I had a 100ºF fever. Looking at my Letterboxd friends’ reviews, I notice a cultural divide between the English and Chinese speakers – the Anglophone highbrows absolutely love this movie for its formal experimentation, while the Chinese speakers generally think it’s a lazy mess that says nothing. I kind of felt the latter way when I first watched it – I called it a greatest hits album with diminishing returns – but after knowing what Jia is trying to do with this film, I do have a newfound appreciation of it. It’s a massive ethnographic study of China in the last 25 years, and more alike his documentary works, such as 24 City, than his narrative films.

The first half, especially at its more outré ages, is pretty formally worthwhile and a breakthrough for Jia. There are extended long takes/sequences of people just singing for ten minutes, reaching a brand of slow cinema I didn’t expect from him. But the diminishing returns still hit in the second half, when Jia tries to tie up the narrative loose ends of the “plot”. We have seen this exact same story much more emotively in Ash Is Purest White, and I’m not sure what the point of repeating it here is, other than the rather superficial dose of TikToks and vertical shorts. The film especially drags whenever Zhao Tao’s character disappears, and we’re left to care about the very unlikable men. There is, for the first time, a scene of queerness in Jia’s filmography, but I don’t think it has anything to say other than “I did it”. Still very much baby steps for him.

Like I said in my previous review, a fact that has been crucially overlooked in the Anglosphere is that Jia officially ed the establishment and served as a rubber-stamping congressman for five years in China prior to making this film. I don’t dare to know where his politics lie after that (I believe this new film is screening without a Dragon’s Seal?), but it is obvious that he spends half of this movie capturing China in ruins. Formally, this breaks my brain a little; I don’t even want to begin to think about what’s new footage and what’s old, what’s Zhao Tao in makeup and what’s not. Her shape-shifting silence through the years is impressive as hell, and the criss-cross of formats and eras miraculous, even if a bit undisciplined. Something I didn’t catch is that it presents a dialogue with Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film, in the sense that both films are about reviving unused footage shot in Hu–Wen-era PRC.

Ultimatley, I think both takes I mentioned above are valid: if you’re being uncharitable, you can definitely interpret this as a random, low-rate assemblage with very little to say – an old, washed master’s midlife crisis pre-late style – or you can stick only to the formal accomplishments and go from there. My opinion, as always, is in the middle: I see the merits but I think this ends up as not-so-major Jia like 24 City. I kind of feel like I will end up watching it for a third time just to try to make sense of what he has to say, but it might very well be nothing.

Only Hong Kong cinema can collect all the best artisans in the industry (Tsui Hark, Oscar winner Peter Pau Tak-Hei, Oscar nominee William Chang Suk-ping, Man Lim-chung, Lowell Lo) and make this zany, unhinged version of Eat Drink Man Woman. (The God of Cookery is probably a bigger influence, but I haven’t seen that one.) The all-star production design is genuinely creative and fantastic – do not watch this film when hungry – and Pau’s cinematography has flashes of brilliance, but all in service of this tomfoolery. The car chase through neon-lit Nathan Road is as unbelievably thrilling and dangerous as it is stupid. You can really tell they are struggling to fill that feature runtime when the first 30 minutes are completely irrelevant to the actual premise of the film. But at the same time, Leslie Cheung gets to play a debt collector/smalltime gang leader who is somehow trying to redeem himself by becoming a star apprentice chef. Anything goes!

This was made during Tsui’s peak era, but it’s also Tsui at his most director-for-hire I’ve seen so far. That is until the second half begins to show Tsui’s politics and obsessions, for all the Tsui vulgar auteurists out there. The “Royal” Hong Kong Police Force is made fun of, while notice how all the villains are inexplicably wearing Qing Dynasty garb while the good guys – a pan-Chinese assemblage of Hong Konger, PRC, and Taiwanese actors/characters – are modernized and global, “ethical” in how they eat meat. I know Tsui’s politics throughout the years are very confusing to some, but to me, they’re clear as hell – they’re basically the exact same as my father’s. It’s kinda worth it to sit through that terrible first half just to watch how Hong Kongers’ worldview cannot help but reveal itself, even in this likely improvised Lunar New Year comedy. And even before all the geopolitics come in, there is something illuminating about Hong Kongers’ hyper-obsession with competition, even in supposedly artful culinary settings.

Even before I started my Leslie Cheung series, I became intrigued by this movie because I learned about the legendary “imperial feast” (滿漢全席) that actually happened in Hong Kong, for the last time to date, in the 1970s. (It was even televised!) So it’s really a shame that the movie basically cannot cope with the concept of having a 108-course banquet and just cops out and focuses on three main dishes. This sounds like a nitpick, but when you have the opportunity to do the imperial feast, why settle for a prix fixe menu? A better Lunar New Year film like Fat Choi Spirit would never settle like that. It just shows that this movie wasn’t really thought out and, in classic Lunar New Year film tradition, was just haphazardly put together. The artisans did their best, and I haven’t even brought up the all-star cast. Cheung and Anita Yuen continue to be the strangest onscreen couple that somehow balances each other well, Vincent Zhao is cute as hell here (no wonder he had a fling with Anita Mui), and there’s somehow even an Edward Yang regular here (Joyce Ni from A Brighter Summer Day and A Confucian Confusion). There’s also a character whose name is, for some reason, a pun on Hou Hsiao-hsien. Do I have to mention that the movie is hilarious?

A lot of nostalgic cinephiles regard the mid 1990s as peak Hong Kong cinema. Hard Boiled, Chungking Express, Stephen Chow... it’s hard to top that era. But behind all that glory was the beginning of the end. 1993, specifically the release of Jurassic Park, is still considered a pivotal turning point in Hong Kong cinema history – it was the first time a Hollywood movie became the highest-grossing film of all time in Hong Kong, and it marked the start of the Hollywood demolition of Hong Kong cinema. By 1996, Viva Erotica was made. (This Zhihu response, albeit in Simplified Chinese, is a pretty good recap of those tumultuous years.)

All the stories about “Hong Kong cinema is dead”? We’ve been hearing that tale since the golden era. This is not to dismiss the situation – the Hong Kong industry is indeed in really bad shape right now – but Hong Kong cinema will survive, and Hong Kong films, if not Hong Kongers in general, have always thrived with creativity under hardship. In Viva Erotica, this takes the form of a zany, highly meta, semi-autobiographical comedy. Cheung plays an unemployed director who’s struggling to balance art and commerce – like Cheung in music and the film’s co-director Derek Yee, whose romance films with a commercial sheen are considered “literary art” (文藝) in Hong Kong. The director takes a job to make a softcore NC-17 film – a unique cultural export of Hong Kong cinema, which makes it very easy to mistake this premise as “struggling director turns to porn”, but it’s not that – that has the same title as the very film we’re watching. Then to make things even twistier, Sean Lau Ching-wan cameos as a failed “literary art” film director “Derek Yee” who commits suicide because of his film’s failure. Add a sprinkle of Wong Kar-wai and Wong Jing references; what in the meta hell is going on here?

Of course, a lot of that meta autofiction is fabrication. To this date, Derek Yee has not committed suicide. He made box office hit after box office hit in the 1990s, including this one. The part where he went from actor to director is true though; to this day, he is still well-known by his nickname from his acting days. The point isn’t the veracity of the actual events, but the spirit it captures. It’s not just the indefatigable spirit of Hong Kongers, but also the torment of the artist – despite the comedic, “un-prestige” softcore exterior, Viva Erotica translates how hard it is to be a filmmaker, how much it takes from your body and soul, and how much sacrifice it asks for. It’s just unfortunate that the film’s zany creative energy dips in the second half, when it seemingly runs out of energy amidst increasingly inscrutable plot turns. A late football analogy is also weak and unconvincingly edited together from match footage. Otherwise, it deserves to be in the “films about film” pantheon alongside Day for Night and Pain and Glory.

Like I say for many other mid-’90s peak Hong Kong films, the most beautiful city in the world is a cheat code for mise-en-scène. Two characters are having a conversation in a cafe, and out the window are gigantic neon signs with so much detail and depth. That’s all gone now. Look at that deep focus when Leslie Cheung goes to the beach? The insane split-diopter shot I chose as the header of this review? That taste is inexplicably gone too. Also gone is Leslie Cheung – I didn’t know Viva Erotica is basically a Cheung star vehicle, in which he is in nearly every scene. He goes all out here – imagine being a princely pop idol, a “serious” prestige actor who allegedly lost Best Actor at Cannes by a single vote, then following it up with all this comedy, nudity, and sex, screaming profanity at the top of your lungs. Being a Hong Kong actor meant you had to be able to do anything, and only he could act such vulgarity with elegance.

What isn’t gone though is Shu Qi, who did start her film career doing NC-17 softcore films in Hong Kong, transitioned to more “serious” acting with this film, and in a few years time, would star in multiple Hou Hsiao-hsien films competing at Cannes. Is that not the spirit of Viva Erotica, an example that even the smallest, lowliest troughs can lead to great heights? That was true for Hong Kong pre-Handover, and that remains true for Hong Kong today.

It’s been six years since I last saw Terrorizers – maybe I underrated Taipei Story and overrated this. Visually, both movies are essentially on the same level; there isn’t a big breakthrough here as I , with not much more than fragmenting characters with frames/lines and the signature Yang shot of filtering characters through reflections in glass windows. It’s still impressive, of course, but I ed more. More importantly, I don’t this movie being so... boring. Most people would describe the premise of Terrorizers by beginning with a prank phone call, yet that phone call doesn’t happen until at least 35 minutes into the film. For the vast majority of the runtime, there’s basically nothing happening.

Yet that seems entirely by design. With Yi Yi, Yang made one of the warmest, most humanist dramas of all time, yet with Terrorizers – which I perhaps erroneously characterized as the test run for Yi Yi – Yang made one of the coldest. Not one character here is likable, and everyone is acting like an inhuman alien incapable of human communication. Yet that is precisely Yang’s point. It is the complete breakdown of human communication and connection brought by the city. I’m beginning to get the “Bressonian” comparisons here, but in Bresson’s hands, I would say this is too cynical, too alien, too cold. In Yang’s hands, perhaps because he gives us glimmers of character to hold on to – woman’s desire, for example – it is complex and almost “relatable”. Yu-fen’s monologue about the tedious repetitions of our everyday life is still for the ages. (Understandably, this is the last time Yang would accept such egregious dubbing for his productions.)

I’m definitely less taken by this on second watch – perhaps many of the sequences are simply less viscerally impressive – but I had no issues with it conceptually, thematically, or narratively before. Somehow, this time, I find it inscrutable. I understand others’ “WTF” reactions coming out of the theatre. And I suspect my reaction will change again if I revisit it in a few years. It’s almost as if the film keeps revealing new sides of itself to me. That there is always something new to mine in this endless maze. Terrorizers appears as if a pretentious horseshit of nothingness, but at the end, it’s still a piercing diagnosis of the cosmopolitan condition. It’s a very impressive film that shows a young, emerging director possibly at his angriest and hungriest. Didn’t I say the same thing for Taipei Story?

Ryan Coogler has been building towards this moment for 12 years, and he made sure he met the occasion. He definitely has a top two most enviable CV of any emerging director from the last decade (the other one is Chazelle’s), but the thing is I don’t even envy him – I just root for him. It’s because he has the talent to back it up, and that talent comes from hard work. I know what they teach at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and it’s not this. It takes 10x more work (studying films, collecting cultural wealth, thinking about filmmaking) to get to this level, and this is a payoff that has made the entire world erupt in joy (except some racist studio execs, apparently).

I mentioned “thinking about filmmaking” because it’s obvious how much thought went into satisfying audiences through a traditional genre film formula and subverting it multiple times for complexity. The most obvious, laziest comp here is Get Out (it’s giving “I’ve only seen Boss Baby”): both films have incredibly patient build-ups that lead to one-off yet explosive finales. Most filmmakers would reasonably cut to the chase, but despite some small clunkers in the plot development, it’s that definitive hour of rich cultural tapestry that makes Sinners special and memorable. Then after the finale, Sinners takes two extra steps towards a coda and an epilogue, the first of which makes the metaphorical literal and the second of which basically changes who the main character of the entire film is. They’re very bold choices in genre filmmaking that show a confidence to play with formula and strong authorship. In his previous films, you can still say Coogler was a studio guy who had a lot of ideas and a great sense of how to play with the camera; with his first fully original screenplay, he’s graduated to a singular voice (in fear of using the a-word) who just happens to work with a studio.

Another very Peelean thing about Sinners is the writing that can easily lend itself to think-pieces. Coogler drops a lot of clues and historical references along the way without stopping for exposition, and content farms will spend months writing silly listicles about them. But it’s too easy and superficial to set up this kind of dichotomy between the two filmmakers: with Nope, Peele proved he can do the blockbuster/Spielbergian thing, and with Sinners, Coogler proves he’s a formidable original screenwriter as well. This is such an important step in Coogler’s career development, and he did it with a script that’s writerly as hell. It has so much to say about Blackness – what it means to be Black in the U.S. and the conflicting ways to deal with it. Ending the film with that note of subversive ambiguity and melancholy is almost unheard of in studio filmmaking. For a genre film, the character work is the best I’ve seen in a long time. He has double anti-heroes as the setup, each with distinct personalities, and he subverts their expected trajectories. And if that’s not enough, he has a whole cast of colorful ing characters who each bring their own thing to the table. It’s hard enough to write leads well, and he gives us an ensemble of eight? ten? To borrow an obvious comparison brewing in the media, the purely functional, lifeless ensembles of Christopher Nolan? Coogler excelled at this with Black Panther, and now he’s done it with original characters.

Watching Sinners was such an exhilarating time that I was hard-pressed to think of a flaw. In retrospect, perhaps Coogler’s visual style is stagnating a bit. Sinners has a lot of shot-reverse shot coverage that feels too standard and autopilot for a film with such ambitions. Even the most inspired sequences (you know which one) use possibly stitched long takes that are a bit too predictable. It was impressive when he did it in a Rocky reboot, but three movies later, it’s not cutting it anymore. The big fight scene at the end delivers only chaos not clarity, and that’s something I was defending in Black Panther. Still, it’s shot-reverse shot with varied ensemble blocking and depth in the frame, so it’s certainly competent – it’s just not imaginative. Shot on film, Sinners has a baseline of contrast, and it never looks disastrous, but there are still symptoms of contemporary cinema such as flat lighting that really shouldn’t exist for a period film on celluloid. (Though I suspect, for a key sequence, the projector was not adapting well to an aspect ratio change – will have to check the D.)

It seems like most of the imagination went to the music department. It does peeve me a bit that Ludwig Göransson already has two Original Score Oscars when it took Zimmer and Desplat decades, but after watching the film, I’m fully on board with his third. The opening did worry me a bit with Oppenheimer-style overscoring, and Göransson’s written some questionable “Chinese” music before for Turning Red, but god damn is Sinners’s blues-and-rock score fantastic. The melodies flow, the genres switch, and when Göransson mixes it with the traditional bombastic orchestration towards the end, I’m convinced this is his best score to date. That man can simply write/produce anything.

To perform not just the score but the film as well is the cast of the film. Sinners is a good end to my ten-year celebrity crush on Michael B. Jordan after his disappointing comments re: Jonathan Majors; it’s a testing performance that would be a proud pinnacle on any actor’s CV. I’m more turned towards the ing cast though: yes, Miles Caton is a revelation, the women are giving it their all, and Jack O’Connell’s* character actor transformation is massively delightful. Everyone’s firing on all cylinders here: you can tell they know they are part of something great, and that can only happen under great stewardship. It’s easy to get sucked into hype in this industry, but damned if this isn’t Ryan Coogler’s Moment.

* O’Connell’s “Chinese”, like Amy Adams’s Mandarin in Arrival, makes me almost want to advocate for Adrien Brody-style AI dialogue correction. Almost.

I feel a bit like I was hit by a train. I’ve never truly connected with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s long take – I mean, it’s mightily impressive, and I’ve raved it to heavens, but it can also feel too affected sometimes. In A City of Sadness and Millennium Mambo, the camera sits or shifts magnificently, but I’m also aware of where they are. Little did I know that before he made those technically demanding masterpieces, he made his first one with a much more pared down technique. The long take in The Time to Live and the Time to Die* is blisteringly unassuming and naturalistic. It’s supremely confident filmmaking at such an early stage of one’s career and often utterly devastating, such as the minutes-long take of the mother’s monologue. You don’t feel like Hou is either intentionally obscuring or showing; life just exists as it is. With pillow shots abound, no wonder Shochiku handpicked Hou to make their Ozu centenary film. And who knew returning to the exact same nondescript alleyway again and again can somehow invoke so many emotions in the viewer?

As someone who thought he knew a lot about Taiwan’s modern history, I feel ashamed to say that I still missed a lot of the political clues in this film (basically my same experience with A Brighter Summer Day... eight years ago). It seems like the common interpretation is that the various deaths in this movie represent the changing attitudes of the Waishengren in the decades after their arrival. It’s made quite explicit in the film, but I think I was so engrossed in the family dynamic that it somehow just flew over my head. If anything, I didn’t feel the political aspect of the film precisely because of how unpronounced it is. A historical reference that I caught is the death of Chen Cheng, broadcast on a radio in the film. (I still thought it was Chen Yi lol.) It’s the death of a major political figure, but in the film, it’s just background noise; people carried on with their lives. That’s not to say that the White Terror had no effect on people, but that it was complex and the effects were often oblique. As a waishengren chronology, the film is political; as slice of life, it is apolitical; that’s what makes this film so rich and worthwhile.

The Time to Live and the Time to Die may take a slight dip in the second half when it seems like all there is to teenage Taiwanese life in that period was family and delinquency (echoed in so many other films, and why I don’t care for The Boys from Fengkuei). But what sets this version apart are its naturalism and intimacy. Hot young Hou might’ve been a delinquent, but he was a reluctant one, and Hou would rather spend more time gazing at the rain by a window for minutes under stunning natural light, crafted by maestro Mark Lee Ping-bin. The Time to Live and the Time to Die is astoundingly intimate, often revealing experiences in Hou’s adolescence that feel almost invasive to witness, yet it is that searing vulnerability that seals the film’s greatness. The film opens and closes with Hou himself monologuing, commenting as both the director and a fictional character, and I wish there are even more of these ages that play with the grey area between fiction, reality, and authenticity.

(* What is up with this English title? The Chinese title “childhood events” has a Ozu-esque, statement-like simplicity that potentially contains multitudes in irony, but the English one places too much emphasis on death. Deaths anchor the film but they only comprise a small piece of the runtime.)

I really need to watch That Day, on the Beach to figure out what the hell happened between 1982 and 1985, when Edward Yang somehow graduated from the moderately decent filmmaker in In Our Time to a visual master in Taipei Story. Every visual thing we associate with a Yang film is basically present in Taipei Story: faces filtered through sheets of glass, long lenses to compress distance from the cityscape, big consumerist billboards and American iconography, etc. Where did he get this perspective from? Antonioni is a popular answer, but to translate that from black-and-white to neon color in the modern metropolis is a talent of its own. His observation is just so perceptive and strong, something he found with this film and quickly planted his flag in.

But scattered strong observations do not necessarily make a coherent, powerful film. Taipei Story is somehow both a plotless and plot-heavy film: the first hour essentially has no plot, just characters floating listlessly in various states of unemployment, but the second hour suddenly relies on pieces of debt being ed around. Because Yang is so eager to chop up and obfuscate, the plot-ful parts of the film are generally quite confusing, even though there is, thankfully, some tension inherent in the situations Yang presents. This confusion due to over-abstraction is not present in any of Yang’s later films, especially when he gets to the multi-threaded generational epic of Yi Yi, in which every cause and effect is remarkably clear. Now of course, it’s unfair to compare this sophomore feature to that swan song, but that’s the responsibility you shoulder when you’ve made the greatest film of all time.

There is a direct lineage one can trace from Taipei Story to Terrorizers to Yi Yi, almost as if each film is a test run to build to his late, great masterpiece. Taipei Story may have the images already present, but when put together, it generally doesn’t have the power of Terrorizers. An early argument scene between the central couple in Taipei Story mirrors that in Terrorizers, but whereas Yang expunged all his anger into a powerful force in the Terrorizers scene, he is too preoccupied with the characters’ ennui in Taipei Story. A late scene between the couple is entirely shrouded in darkness, almost Akerman-ian in its coldness and alienation; the scene is memorably stark, but at that point, it doesn’t even feel like a human drama anymore. (It is truly a devotion to the arts to dump Hou’s mortgage/his mother’s savings into a film like this.) The same can be said for his trademark burst of violence late in the game: whereas the Terrorizers version is an explosion, Taipei Story’s is almost an obscured happenstance. I’m not saying there is only one way to do things in cinema, but there is a reason Taipei Story fails to elicit much emotion in me.

I’m more interested in a geopolitical reading of Taipei Story: to me, both Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Chin are KMT/waishengren icons. Hou was born in Mainland China and made a waishengren generational epic; Tsai is best-known for singing folk songs and her grandfather is a literal ROC founder. The mid-1980s were an extremely pivotal time in Taiwanese history: calls for democratization were finally coming to fruition; two years later, Martial Law would end; three years later, the Chiang family dictatorship would finally topple. Essentially, Taipei Story places these two waishengren icons (faces of colonizers and oppressors yet also children of the White Terror) and questions: how do they adapt to this rapidly changing Taiwan? The spoken languages and strategies differ, as do their fates. The central image is the late scene of the Presidential Office Building’s political slogans all lit up in commercial neon – it says everything about Taiwan at that moment. Taipei Story is a classic urban-rural conflict narrative one might easily find in a Hou film, but presented from the perspective of a city boy; it’s no wonder the American-educated Yang chooses that fate to seal the film’s ending. But he crucially deepens it by the film’s final note of ambiguity, a shot that would go on to become Yang’s trademark. Globalism by way of capitalism might have won, but at what cost?

The titles of the film are another curiosity: the English title ambitiously aspires to the heights of Tokyo Story. Tokyo Story was made on the cusp of Japan’s economic miracle, Taipei Story on the cusp of Taiwan’s; whereas Ozu’s film is all elegance and formality, Yang’s is all disorganized ennui. Unfortunately, the latter is more a potent point than a compelling film. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the concept of the “national picture” – a film that can represent everything about a country – and while A Brighter Summer Day is a more obvious contender by Yang, Taipei Story basically contains everything in Taiwan’s 20th-century history, from Japanese, American, and KMT colonization to the country’s geographical fabric being torn apart by the economic miracle. In that sense, Taipei Story is a fitting title. But I’m actually more partial to the irony of the Chinese title, which can be loosely translated into “childhood sweethearts”. It’s almost too clever for its own good in its venomous irony, while the English title is too ambitious for a sub-masterpiece. I guess that might as well encapsulate my appraisal of the film.

I seem to be in the very small minority that prefers The Makanai to this, but then, I think The Makanai is a perfect show. These two shows are for all the haters who think Kore-eda repeats himself and only makes contemporary dramas about troubled, makeshift families. The Makanai expanded his world to the frozen-in-time streets of Gion, Kyoto, while with Asura, he transports back to late-Shōwa Tokyo. (This is the first Kore-eda period piece in... 19 years?) Just when I thought Kore-eda has fully transitioned to digital, he surprises me with going back to celluloid. Unfortunately this celluloid is crushed by Netflix’s compression, existing in some weird uncanny valley between grain, smoothened textures, and shallow depth of field. Just when Kore-eda reunited with the supremely underrated composer Yoko Kanno for The Makanai, he hires a jazz trio (!) to score Asura, avoiding the syrupy nostalgia that can easily plague a period piece like this (even though jazz is its own kind of nostalgia) and giving the show an unexpected lightness and vibrancy. To those who think Kore-eda is resting on his laurels: at 62, he has never been more prolific and more eager to innovate and branch out. If you want to see what a Kore-eda boxing match looks like, check out Asura. It’s pretty dope.

And at the basics, Kore-eda has never been better. In Asura, he plays with shadows, silhouettes, and negative space in a way that I’ve never seen him do before. Even when the story flounders, many of the compositions are genuinely breathtaking, using shadows to communicate when characters can’t. And he approaches Asura completely like a film, not a show: he overwhelmingly trusts his observant long take and avoids traditional TV coverage, and the results are rivetingly engaging. How many shows has Netflix allowed to shoot on film? Kore-eda is in a class of his own. Production design has become his strongest suit, and the environments of Asura are typically, unbelievably lived in. The budget may be limited, but the Shōwa era recreation is again uncanny: Tokyo has changed so much yet so little at the same time, reflecting the stagnation of the lost decades. (It’s just a shame that the lighting and shallow depth of field still make this a very contemporary-looking show.) And finally, this is Kore-eda at his most Ozu-like: he has refuted the lazy comparison in the past, but there are many ellipses in this show that undeniably hail from the master, especially the giant leap in the sublime episode three. That one is just a true true Ozu inheritance and perhaps a shameless but nonetheless supremely effective recreation of Still Walking. It’s a major, jaw-dropping gag.

But the Kore-eda film Asura most resembles is obviously Our Little Sister; with a similar four-sisters set-up, Asura is the grown-up, darker antidote to Our Little Sister’s cherry blossoms. But that’s also where Asura starts going off the rails. Perhaps to embody this grownup-ness of life, Asura is a generally aimless show. Whereas The Makanai has a graduation to work towards, there is no central narrative drive to Asura, especially after the premise is essentially resolved after episode three. Things just... happen. The finale is both extremely dramatic and uneventful at the same time. Is this to reflect the ennui of Japanese women in the 1970s? Probably, but it makes for weirdly balanced TV. You cannot just use “it’s life” to wave off all uneven hiccups in screenwriting. (I also find the age gap a bit bewildering: I can accept a 50-year-old having a sister in her twenties, but to suggest that they had childhood memories together? Am I getting something wrong?)

Another lazy comparison to make is Little Women; four sisters aside, Asura is also a text that has been adapted and remade countless times, seemingly a sort of timeless national story. The other adaptations unseen, I don’t think Kore-eda’s has much to offer. The characters are wonderfully complex and archetypal at the same time; Rie Miyazawa, who probably has the least screen time, has nothing to do across seven episodes other than fitting into her mistress archetype – what a waste. Among the absurdly star-studded cast, Yū Aoi has the most remarkable screen presence, yet don’t let the disguise of realism deceive you: her story is an unconvincingly sweet romance. For a character drama by a renowned humanist, to have her love interest be a flawless, selfless prince is unacceptable. But the most egregious of all is the thesis: these women, in accordance with the era, are aggrieved, maligned, and cheated on, yet the show produces not more than a pensive sigh. It may throw punches, but it ultimately upholds the patriarch like Ang Lee’s “Father Knows Best” trilogy. Is this the fate of Japanese women in both the 1970s and the 2020s? Probably, but as Greta Gerwig showed in her Little Women, there is a possibility of a contemporary update here, and one I think Kore-eda squandered. If not, why adapt this at all? Or is this more a damning indictment of how little Japan has progressed in 50 years?

Hmm, seven years ago, I declared Mother Bong’s magnum opus, but after a much-delayed rewatch*, I’m not so sure. Watching it unfold for the first time might’ve had me hooked to the screen, but after knowing what happens (and only vaguely, for I have a bad memory), Mother just seems so... lax. “Slow burn” is the nice way to put it, but it feels more undisciplined to me. We spend a whole hour on a cell phone detour that actually turns out to be an unnecessary red herring, and after the big showdown climax, there are still 15 minutes before the actual ending. I don’t mind a moodier thriller, but this script is just not tight and not clever enough, especially coming from a genre master like Bong. “Exit early” is a mantra of filmmaking, but there are many smash cuts to end scenes which are better at looking clever than actually revealing anything.

But the bigger problem with Mother is that I’m not sure what its sociological point is, other than “Memories of Murder can still happen twenty five years later”. Bong being Bong, Mother is still sociologically informed, as we can see how class difference penetrates this murder investigation. But Mother wants to touch on so many other things – police brutality and corruption, misogyny and child sex trafficking, the treatment of the mentally ill – that it ends up being rather unfocused and muddled. (To be honest, its view on mental illness seems at best dated and at worst stigmatizing.) By far its strongest thematic point is the less sociological and more philosophical theme of parental/heretidary evil, which I do really like in movies. But it feels wrong to call that the magnum opus of a filmmaker who so famously makes films about class struggle.

It makes sense why Bong made one of those retrospective black-and-white versions of this film; Mother might very well be the darkest film in Bong’s filmography. At many instances, the color version is already monochromatic, almost as if all humanity and life has been sucked away from this town. There are basically no likable characters in this movie; everyone has selfish goals and ulterior motives. The problem is that it makes for a very hard watch. At many times, it feels almost pointless and overly cynical. Despite recently finishing a tirade against Trump (Mickey 17), Mother is probably Bong’s angriest film. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – it’s almost as if he needed to expunge this anger out of his system – but anger is not the mode I most prefer, and again, it feels unrepresentative of a filmmaker who has always balanced darkness with wicked humor and hope.

So why still 4.5 stars? Well, the craft is undeniable. Bong has always been impossibly precise with his wizard-like camera movements and blocking, and he’s in fine form here, moving through his locations with a revelatory, Spielbergian fluidity. It’s really remarkable that he deliberately placed his film in the most anonymous and generic setting of a random town, yet he is able to imbue a sense of distinction, character, and immediate familiarity into every single location. His sense of geography is simply unparalleled, and that’s of course also down to his “coverage”, always uniquely tuned to the demands of the scene and never just generic, default shot-reverse shot. There’s of course the famous Every Frame a Painting video about the profiles in this film (their first!), but what I see is him deliberately toying with whether a shot is profile or frontal to echo the uncertainty of the story. Now that is really unique.

I do think that nearly all of the best crime films necessitate a greater sociological point, and without that, I can see why Mother has been relatively forgotten as a minor film, sandwiched between the highest-grossing film in Korean history and a blockbuster entrance into Hollywood/English-language filmmaking. Like I said, it can even feel like a retread or stagnation from Memories of Murder. If this movie came out this year Un Certain Regard at Cannes, it would surely elicit a “that’s it?” response. But that’s a victim of Bong’s success. It’s still a well-oiled genre film (maybe not a well-oiled genre script); the “Hitchcockian” labels are earned. It just speaks more to my changing tastes that I’m massively reshuffling my rankings and Memories of Murder is shooting to the top of the Bong list.

* Mother was going to be one of my last theater visits pre-COVID, but it was sold out when I got to the Siskel Film Center. Unwilling to let a trip to The Loop go to waste, I went to the dine-in AMC next door and watched Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) instead.

I hopped on this train when the hype has already reached stratospheric levels and I’m always an acrobatic long take skeptic, so naturally, I have my reservations. It’s never not compelling, but in retrospect, the first episode is a massive waste of time because there is literally zero suspense as to whether he actually committed the murder or not, and I thought everyone is on board with that. The second episode is, again, largely compelling, but the way these first two episodes build up to and treat the Andrew Tate/Manosphere stuff as a shocking revelation that blows everyone’s mind is honestly a bit embarrassing. It feels like a show squarely made for Gen Xers and older.

But the last two episodes do turn this thing around. Episode three is an undeniable achievement – most people who have dabbled in screenwriting know how hard it is to write a good dialogue scene, let alone a 60-minute one. The natural flow of the dialogue to shift between the different points it’s trying to make is very impressive. Then the writing is not just technically skilled but also thematically nuanced. It would’ve been so easy to make the lead character Andrew Tate’s brainwashed top subscriber, but that he’s actually in some sort of wobbly grey area makes it all the more complex. And finally, the last episode is classic British kitchen sink realism at its best. There’s just no one doing it like the Brits. The characters are saying the most thematically on-the-nose dialogue like “Are we alright? Is it our fault?”, yet it’s somehow so raw and authentic. It’s a most incredulous situation that will only happen to 0.1% of the human population, yet you feel fully in these characters’ shoes. And that is the family of the perpetrator. Simply incredible.

As for the acrobatic long takes, I can be just as easily impressed when it’s a master like Alfonso Cuarón pulling it off invisibly. This is definitely not on that level, but it’s at least not as obnoxious and ostentatious as The Revenant. The “coverage” of episode three is judicious. And of course, the blocking effort of episode two must be gargantuan. It’s just that the style leads to a lot of downtime, when we just spend seconds tracking characters’ backs, going from one room to another. The thematic justification is that we need breathing time between moments of intensity, but it’s honestly just rather tedious. It stands out awkwardly because it’s not artful, and it feels like inefficient filmmaking or a limit of the form.

But whereas the show sacrifices micro efficiency, it’s somehow brutally efficient on the macro scale. Adolescence could’ve easily been an eight-episode series order, replete with the courtroom drama, the trial, flashback episode of the victim, the victim family’s perspective, etc. 99% of shows would’ve come back to conclude the lead detective character’s arc. All of that would’ve fine and dandy, but also utterly conventional and thematically irrelevant. Adolescence is much better this way, its elements stripped to their necessity – it’s actually a lot more suggestive and makes the world bigger. It’s essentially four acts of a play, and it’s riveting because of that restrained classicism. It’s always best when an artist knows exactly what they want to say and say nothing more than that. It’s even better when what they want to say is so urgent and necessary to the world right now, even when it comes off a bit didactic.

Alongside The Sandwich Man which came a year later, In Our Time is an omnibus film that kickstarted Taiwan New Cinema. It’s almost sacrilegious to say a bad word about these two films (especially this earlier one), because of how historically important and groundbreaking they are – how far they ventured outside of the Taiwanese film industry’s mold, in both style and content. I don’t deny that they are foundational and essential for a student of cinema. Yet, watching these films, especially this one, feels like homework. The directors involved (not just Yang and Hou) certainly moved on to do greater things later.

In In Our Time, we can already see some of the thematic and/or stylistic features that define Taiwan New Cinema. The obsession with American pop songs, radio and TV (which I suppose is foreign technology), and the city vs. countryside dichotomy are all present. The first two directors both employ the stylistic device of montage set only to music, both showcasing strong visual storytelling. In the last short, the visual escalation from a cramped apartment of two to a megacity of thousands (through an extreme wide telephoto shot) is also quite subtly striking.

But other than that, In Our Time is simply too inconsequential. I usually favor slice of life, but thematically, these shorts don’t seem to have much to say. (It seems that the act of saying eclipsed whatever they actually had to say.) The first one quietly riles against the patriarchy and the second one is about women’s desire, but when we get to the comedies, I’m not as sure... It’s telling when your anthology is titled In Our Time (and the Chinese title is basically the same), because “time” is one of the weakest and laziest programming through-lines you pull out after you’ve exhausted all other, more suggestive options. Sequencing the shorts chronologically by time/age is also thematic, but not cinematically emotive. In contrast, The Sandwich Man is much more politically witty and astute, emotionally well-balanced, and is also 30 minutes shorter.

I kind of hate that the Yang short gets all the attention when two of the other three directors also had/have quite accomplished careers. Contrary to others on this site, my viewpoint is the Yang isn’t really a standout. As I already said, he uses the same montage as the first director Tao Te-Chen, and the compositions here are really banal and simplistic by his standards. Still, even with dream sequences in the first short, Yang delivers possibly the only cinematically imaginative moment in the entire film, when a sound appears in the dark before it physically emerges. His dichotomous obsession with midcentury American pop and Chopin classics is also already present here, and the last lines delivered by a boy could’ve come straight from Yang-Yang’s mouth in Yi Yi. Lastly, out of the seven shorts in both this and The Sandwich Man, Yang’s is the only one from a woman’s perspective. That is really damning for a movement that notably had extremely few women directors, but perhaps shows why Yang stood out. And if you agree that queerness is regrettably and sorely missing from Yang’s œuvre, his short contains the queerest moment he’s ever created. It’s practically a photocopy of the climax in Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory.

This is another film that had the chance to be the first great film of my BFI Flare but fumbled it. The smart thing Night Stage does is that by embracing this throwback De Palma-esque atmosphere, all of its bolder, ostensibly “bad” stylistic choices like huge, obvious music cues and sudden snap zooms can be excused under “pulp” or even “camp”. The bad thing is that while it embraces its inspirations, those inspirations would’ve made much tighter and more satisfying films.

Night Stage is unafraid to be big, bold, and sexy. Like I said, it takes stylistic swings. The apartment adorned with huge red curtains is Almodóvarian. Unlike last year’s underwhelming Babygirl, at least this erotic thriller has a lot of sex. It is really, severely horny. That alone feels refreshing in 2025. But stylistic cues will only get you so far. The thing with Hitchcock and De Palma is that they weren’t just visual stylists – they were very good at honing their scripts to maximum satisfaction. On the contrary, the plot developments of Night Stage make no sense, and the ending (if not the entire third act) is as bewildering as it is deeply unsatisfying. The disposal of the ing characters adds nothing, and the main characters are far from pushed to their brink.

Night Stage wants to be about something. It utters its central thematic phrase “it’s a theatre” many, many times. Yes, it flirts with the idea that queerness and sexuality equal performance, but it never really shows the audience what it means by that. It is seemingly interested in different variations and performances of masculinity, yet the lead actor barely changes his voice or hair. Instead of really developing or fleshing out any ideas beyond initial hints, Night Stage is just about two men who are really, really horny. And I think the biggest shame is that the film doesn’t really get public sex. It doesn’t actually show how the world of gay public sex can reasonably operate (let alone the value of that). It doesn’t delve into why these two people are into exhibitionism, what drives their desires and mindset. Instead, they and the film are just blinded by horniness.

With the big swaths of hues and the experimental theatre troupe setting, another obvious influence it reminds me of is Argento’s Suspiria. I have my issues with that film, but at least it crescendoes to much greater heights. The same applies to Hitchcock and De Palma – they made taut, smart thrillers. Night Stage might have the superficial appearance nailed down (even then, it’s no match for the aforementioned masters’ tricks), but at its core, it’s too lazy and easily satisfied. Like my previous film Ponyboi, it’s a 90-minute film that has no business being two hours long.

(Intro Q&A by directors Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher)

There were hopeful signs that this would be my first great film of the BFI Flare Film Festival, but alas, it was not meant to be. Still, Ponyboi starts with promise: after my terrible previous film, finally, there is some actual good blocking here, with characters moving around with layers in wides. There’s actual interplay with the camera. Locations feel distinct and convincing, albeit at such a low budget and small scale (no idea if it’s actually shot in Jersey or not, don’t care). It’s never ingenious, but at least Ponyboi is visually smart and stylish.

What I like about Ponyboi is that it’s a rare queer genre film without any yucky exploitation. In this enlightened day and age, it feels harder and harder to make a queer genre film (especially crime or thriller) without it feeling like exploiting queer people’s pain and brutalizing their bodies for spectacle and entertainment. Even in rather dangerous situations, Ponyboi is never suffering porn, and is acutely in tune with sex as an autonomous means of survival. It’s a stark difference from something like last year’s Femme. Its exposition of intersexuality is well-woven and never didactic as well. The self-driven performance and development of the film by River Gallo is certainly a major factor.

But is the downside of that respectfulness the immense inertia of this film? The biggest problem with Ponyboi is that as a thriller, it does not thrill. Our hero is ostensibly on the run, yet the film has time to halt all its momentum for minutes-long meandering conversations with the Murray Bartlett character. Does that mean I only want to see the “exciting” or plot-pushing parts of a film? Not necessarily, but I believe a better balance can be struck. At the end of the day, Ponyboi’s world and premise are too thin; it’s a 90-minute film that has no business being two hours long.

The best proof of that is its Return of the King multiple endings syndrome: Ponyboi ends with a useless ten-minute coda that threatens to grind all its goodwill away. I understand the desire to preserve select moments in that epilogue, but a good filmmaker needs to be judicious and kill their darlings. (Not the mention the... implications of connecting so strongly with one’s biological family, but I won’t judge.) Ponyboi absolutely could’ve ended with the extreme wide shot of the bus riding into the night, and it would be a better film for that.

(Post-screening Q&A with director Esteban Arango)

I got a ticket to this to see where British indie cinema is at 14 years after Weekend, and it turns out, the answer is D-grade Weekend. We have a copy of Tom Cullen’s character in Weekend, down to having the exact same wardrobe and beard, except this version is an obnoxious twat, with the brand of obnoxiousness that only white people can get away with. The lead actor’s performance is ridiculously “actorly” and mannered, shouting whenever he gets intense, slowing down whenever he gets serious, switching between the two within seconds. The film needs a charmer like Josh O’Connor to pull this off, but instead, we got Ben Platt. (I’ve heard good things about the lead’s previous film In from the Side, so this might be a directing issue.) On the other hand, we also have a “I don’t do boyfriends” love interest, but at least this faux German guy fares a lot better just by virtue of being quieter and cuter. He should’ve been the lead, but the other guy dominates.

And I’m not sure why we’re supposed to care about these two characters to begin with. They’re just too thinly written. There’s no reason why they have to be a struggling actor and a nepo baby bar owner/failed singer – I suspect the failed singer part was only put in because having someone sing songs in your film is a lazy cheat code to “authenticity”. The reality is, they can be anyone, and there is too little visual information to give us a sense of who they are. Is it so hard to make a stop at the British guy’s failed bar? The romantic development between these two is clunky at best – this supposed gay film spends most of its runtime being very unromantic and totally asexual. And the financial situation of the film makes no sense: how did we get from having to steal someone else’s pint to buying drinks repeatedly over the course of a night? Your protagonist is never likable if he can just give money away (as if that’s some touching form of charity that will actually solve problems), doubly so if he was cosplaying as poor in the first place.

But the real problem with A Night Like This is that it also has a visual problem. To absolutely no one’s surprise, we are back in shallow depth-of-field land, where the city lights of London are blurred out just to look superficially “pretty”. You have the great city of London, and you decide not to incorporate its architecture into the mise-en-scène other than one extreme wide shot. Every conversation is shot through a master and shot-reverse shot, and there is no rhyme or rhythm in how the film cuts between those angles. At least I never saw any continuity mistakes. Every location is introduced by the most predictable brief montage of a few inserts scored to some cheesy guitar. When every location is the same, why would I care about this journey through the city? (There’s also the predictable montage of people tearing up when they hear a song, but at least A Complete Unknown is also doing that. The problem is A Complete Unknown is also bad.) And then, even with the benefit of micro-budget indie location shooting, the film manages to cook up the most inauthentic situation of magically finding someone through a bus window in a city of nine million. The dialogue is also mixed way too loud, and the most generic and bland songs show the director has awful music taste.

The “brief encounter” romance is one of the stone-cold classic premises in cinema, and it’s always fascinating to see different variations on it, but it’s also extremely difficult to pull off in of both situational and emotional authenticity. Through the dialogue of random non-sequiturs and heavy-handed metaphors, this team, unfortunately, did not manage to do it. I know first hand that every indie film is a gargantuan task to shoot, and I suppose we can be celebrate everyone, say “good job”, and call it a day. (I’m sure there is nothing worse than your movie getting absolutely slaughtered on Letterboxd after its world premiere.) But when we can also aim for the standards of Weekend and Rye Lane, we cannot and should not settle for A Night Like This. The final nail on its coffin might be its generic and boring title. A night like what, exactly? (This film is set in London, by the way, and there is not a single POC in it.)

(Post-screening Q&A with cast and crew)

Watched on Friday March 28, 2025.

“Sexy gay hustlers in the seedy underbelly of Manila” is such a winning premise that it’s no wonder Some Nights I Feel Like Walking won a production grant from virtually every film market in the world. Indeed I had very high hopes for this film, but the end result is someone trying very hard to make a typical international arthouse film – full of technique, but I felt close to nothing.

The mise-en-scène alone is doing 50% of the work here. I mean, Manila at night, that’s not something we’ve seen a lot on the festival circuit recently, and predictably, it is alluring, vibrant, and colorful. It’s hard to deny Asian city lights. The youthful cast make up the other 50%; they are diverse, energetic, and fun to watch. But Some Nights I Feel Like Walking has an identity crisis – it is a melting pot of influences that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. Anora is an obvious comparison here, with a gritty, time-ticking crime-related plot centered around sex workers; Anora is another obvious comparison, in the sense that there’s a budding romance between two characters in the ensemble. But Anora does a much better job hiding the romantic chemistry in the background and trusting the audience to infer. The crime-ness of it is also like a more low-key Good Time/Uncut Gems, but without their relentless tension.

In the middle, the director suddenly re he has to be more stereotypically arthouse, so here come the big hues and psychedelia, dropping the stakes and the tension, replacing them with slower dream logic set in the wilderness of Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong. Then finally, we conclude with the Steadicam long take land of Bi Gan. As you can see on the poster, the final shot sets the world ablaze, swerving in and out of our characters as they go through some kind of spiritual cry (not knowing when to cut), aiming so extremely for emotion. Yet, I have completely lost track of these characters and the film, so I felt nothing. It is so cinematically literate, so technically impressive, yet so buried in all these modes that I barely have anything to latch onto. I would’ve said this is the typical greed of a debuting director, until I found out 32-year-old Petersen Vargas already has a few features under his belt. (His filmography includes presumably for-hire work like this BL web series. And you know what? It may not be “prestigious”, “arthouse”, or whatever, but it looks like a giant success.)

The reality is I felt a little cheated by Some Nights I Feel Like Walking, which isn’t really about gay sex workers. We have frequently topless guys to draw you in, and the first half is indeed very sexy, but halfway through the film, I realized it doesn’t have anything to do with sex work anymore. Instead, it became a crime film with a typical MacGuffin, and altogether, there’s actually only one sex scene in the entire film. Yes, it’s a classic case of false advertising setting up false expectations, but it’s also presenting me with a very promising first half and dropping the ball in the second. The characters’ gay sex work experiences are just so much more fascinating and eye-opening (and, of course, sexy) than yet another spiritual journey through the woods in Asia, especially with technique aped from masters.

On the short film circuit, I have seen Filipino friends made films like this – down to a very similar font choice, setting, and subject matter – so I hoped this would be a big feature breakthrough on the international stage. But it is not what I hoped it would be, and is closer to what I feared – so studied, yet almost sterile. At least there’s clearly a strong political context here that I got hints of, as I’m generally aware of the Philippines’s recent relationship with drugs, and I’m glad Vargas didn’t feel the need to explain much. Still, by premise alone, Some Nights I Feel Like Walking is unique. And it is very much like a lot of the tryhard arthouse films I see every year at Cannes. So in that sense, I can still say this film deserves better.

Years ago, I watched a promising indie gay Indian film called Loev that gave me high hopes for We are Faheem & Karun. We always want to celebrate "the first gay film from [insert location or context]”, but unfortunately there’s no way around it – We are Faheem & Karun is bad. In fact, it is amateurish. There’s a difference between amateur and low-budget – you can overcome low production values by telling a story really well. But Faheem & Karun is not that – it is just amateur hour, and you can tell director Onir just did not put in enough artistic effort to overcome the logistical obstacles. I was surprised to find out this is not his directorial debut.

The fairly glossy opening montage of Kashmiri mountains tells me we are emphasizing location here. Shooting anamorphic tells me you really want to bring out the location here. So why shoot everyone in wide-open close-ups with completely blurred out backgrounds? Why are you making me look at blurry nothingness? It is the worst traits of contemporary cinematography blown-up to the largest proportions. So low-budget is this film that they couldn’t even afford a focus puller – that’s fine, but shooting things on autofocus to the extent where you can see the shot bouncing in and out of focus is not fine. That’s even worse than what you’d see in a film school’s intro to production class.

And it’s not just the cinematography that is amateurish here, it’s the entire approach. The film is so untrusting of the audience that every time there’s a romantic gaze, the soft piano music plays. Yet for all that romantic gazing, it’s completely sterile in of sexuality. I understand conservatism for being the first film of its kind, but you don’t need sex to sell ion and longing. The film has neither; we’re just supposed to know that the two leads are in love because of the posturing, and that’s not good enough. If anything, this is false advertising: the film is less a romance and more a political story about the geopolitical tensions in Kashmir. The only mature choice Onir makes is to not explain the context to the Western audience and just dive straight into the crossfire. I was lost, but I’d much rather the film do that than give me a quickbite history lesson (that Onir smartly pointed out would be unachievable). At least I learned something about Kashmir, because I was encouraged by the film to look it up.

(Post-screening Q&A with director Onir and actor Mir Salman)

We are very blessed to live in a time when a movie like High Tide seems so generic and normal. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it – it is very decent, though decent might be where it stops at. The protagonist’s tourist visa situation is sufficiently sketched, though I’m not sure it’s fully convincing to me. I don’t any particular standout shots, but at least Provincetown feels like a real location here, even if it’s not necessarily alive – it’s crazy how a micro-budget film like this, shot on location, can feel ten times more authentic than a $200-million blockbuster shot in front of screens. Having a Black love interest in an otherwise non-Black film always toes the line of the magical Negro archetype, but again, High Tide does just enough for the character to escape those confines. (To be honest, he is so exceedingly hot that all I could think of was how exceedingly hot he is. Glad the movie kind of confronted that!)

But there is the feeling that everything is too slight here. Implication can be a strong tool, but High Tide is more absent and inert. Why is the drama of the ex-boyfriend left entirely off-screen? What is the dramatic purpose of the Marisa Tomei character? What are the true intentions of the landlord? I can infer most of these things, but they are weakly felt. The entire thing just feels like too brief and trivial of a deal for our protagonist. Perhaps the director is trying to avoid the high-key dramatics of a life-changing Before Trilogy type of romance, but that’s cinema – we want to feel things. High Tide is too polite and reticent; the protagonist barely takes risks (is he not allowing himself to fall in love?); the stakes aren’t high enough. It is so eager to gloss over things that there’s no follow-up to the protagonist essentially getting raped in the opening reel.

The lead performance by Marco Pigossi is impressive, given English is not the actor’s first language. There’s no big scene here, but he is able to carry the entire film on his shoulders and never loses the audience for a second. It’s less so for writer-director Marco Calvani – one can clearly tell English is not his first language, and there are some ages of really stilted dialogue here.

(Post-screening Q&A with writer-director Marco Calvani and actor Marco Pigossi)

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Massively reshuffled! So close it’s arbitrary.

Ranked in order of personal preference, not necessarily in of artistic merit.

1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
2. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
3. Mission: Impossible
4. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
5. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
6. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
7. Mission: Impossible III
8. Mission: Impossible II

Ranking them in order of iconic-ness? Charisma? Sheer lovability? Idk, I just know he’s the only actor I’d make a list about.

1. A Better Tomorrow
2. Happy Together
3. Farewell My Concubine
4. He's a Woman, She's a Man
5. Days of Being Wild
6. Ashes of Time
7. Inner Senses
8. Viva Erotica
9. The Bride with White Hair
10. All's Well, Ends Well

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ranked in order of personal preference, not necessarily in of artistic merit.

Missing Xiao Wu and Platform! I know!

1. The World
2. Still Life
3. A Touch of Sin
4. Unknown Pleasures
5. Ash Is Purest White
6. Mountains May Depart
7. Caught by the Tides
8. 24 City

Ranked in order of personal preference, not necessarily in of artistic merit.

1. Still Walking
2. Shoplifters
3. Monster
4. After Life
5. The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House
6. Maborosi
7. After the Storm
8. Asura
9. Our Little Sister
10. Like Father, Like Son

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ranked in order of personal preference, not necessarily in of artistic merit.

1. Memories of Murder
2. Parasite
3. The Host
4. Mother
5. Okja
6. Snowpiercer
7. Barking Dogs Never Bite
8. Mickey 17

Ranked in order of personal preference, not necessarily in of artistic merit.

To-do: sex, lies, and videotape, Erin Brockovich, Logan Lucky, Solaris

1. Ocean's Twelve
2. Contagion
3. Ocean's Eleven
4. Black Bag
5. Behind the Candelabra
6. Out of Sight
7. Presence
8. High Flying Bird
9. Kimi
10. Ocean's Thirteen

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ranked in order of personal preference, not necessarily in of artistic merit.

1. The Social Network
2. Fight Club
3. Se7en
4. Gone Girl
5. Zodiac
6. Mank
7. Panic Room
8. The Killer
9. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

There have been better years.

1. Nickel Boys
2. The Brutalist
3. Dune: Part Two
4. I'm Still Here
5. Anora
6. Wicked
7. The Substance
8. Conclave
9. Emilia Pérez
10. A Complete Unknown

The 2017-2018 Oscars race has been called the most unpredictable one in recent times by many Oscar prognosticators. Frankly, most years since the implementation of the preferential ballot in 2009 have been wild, and the last two years saw the surprising yet justified triumphs of Spotlight and Moonlight over The Revenant and La La Land respectively. But the 2,000 new Academy have made this an especially tempestuous year. The top prize seems to be between The Shape of Water (PGA, DGA winner) and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (SAG, BAFTA winner), though the buzz for Get Out and Lady Bird is very much alive. Sadly, unpredictable doesn't necessarily translate to exciting – the Best Picture frontrunners don't reflect how great cinema was in 2017.

The other categories from directing to acting seem pretty locked up. Best Original Screenplay is a bloodbath between the same Best Picture frontrunners, though Get Out clearly should win. Below-the-line is where it gets interesting – will Roger Deakins, finally, get his most overdue recognition for cinematography? Will Greenwood's luscious, 60-piece score triumph over Alexandre Desplat's work? Will the Apes trilogy at least get a consolatory prize in visual effects? What about the frontrunner-less Documentary and Foreign Language categories? And don't forget the most unnoticed battle in Best Original Song between Coco's heartstring-tugging " Me", The Greatest Showman's pop-theater earworm "This is Me", and the aforementioned "Mystery of Love" by Sufjan Stevens.

2017 had great arthouse cinema (A Ghost Story, The Florida Project, BPM), blockbusters (Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Logan, etc.), and those in between (Blade Runner 2049). I mourn their snubs, yet the nominations aren't bad at all, especially in of diversity, from race (Get Out) and gender (Rachel Morrison) to gender identity (A Fantastic Woman). Let's not get ahead of ourselves and self-congratulate too soon. Who knows what kind of nominees would Hollywood-in-turmoil produce in 2019?

1. Call Me by Your Name

   Many have called Call Me by Your Name a picturesque postcard, and yes, it is unbelievably beautiful. (What other postcard in the world has Sufjan Stevens songs to go with it?) But it's also so much more than that – its casual style smoothly translates international cinema for American audiences, its undercurrent of tension in a carefully chosen time period renders it a solid entry in the queer canon, and its world-building is so breathable. Like The Shape of Water, it's a romantic fantasy, but its romance is so much more heartwarming and heartbreaking, ethereal and transcendent. And it's so seemingly effortless.

2. Phantom Thread

   This movie is insanely good. Insane, because so much of it seems downright bad. Daniel Day-Lewis plays a character called Reynolds Woodcock and his performance isn't even the best one in the film. It juxtaposes literally laugh-out-loud comedy with a ridiculously self-indulgent score by Jonny Greenwood. You might think it's that boring British period drama with lavish costumes, but its story is more akin to Fifty Shades than Shakespeare in Love or The English Patient or The King's Speech or whatever else. All of this works, sublimely, thanks to the genius of Paul Thomas Anderson. Thank God it got its six surprise nominations, even though PTA didn't give a tinker's fucking curse about campaigning.

3. Dunkirk

   Unsurprisingly, a Christopher Nolan film is my #1 (even though I'm torn between #1 to #3 and they are easily swappable – 2019 update: I have swapped them). Of course, it has all the trademark complexities of a Nolan screenplay; he was never going to make your standard WWII drama (i.e. Darkest Hour). But those who complain about Nolan's films being 'lifeless' can finally shut up, as Dunkirk is not only a brilliant piece of visual storytelling, it's also human, universal, and uplifting – words not commonly associated with a Nolan film. When the score dwells and Kenneth Branagh's eyes well up, I felt a sense of empathy I've never felt before. It's a glorious film that not only captures but also embodies the Dunkirk spirit.

4. Get Out

   Get Out is by far the best screenplay of 2017. It's wickedly clever, overflowing with ingenious details, and hauntingly relevant. Peele's direction is more than serviceable; as a first-time effort, it's shockingly good. But what people should really be talking about is Daniel Kaluuya's rightfully nominated powerhouse of a performance – his eyes will now be forever ingrained in the history of cinema.

5. The Post

   On paper, The Post is as Oscarbait as it gets, but there's no denying how solid this film is. It's not as stunningly heartbreaking as writer Josh Singer's previous effort Spotlight, but it retains Spotlight's powerful conciseness, now upgraded with Spielberg's always reliable direction. Much like Spotlight, it breathes and flows like a good piece of journalistic writing, with delightful Spielbergian accents of thriller added on top.

6. Lady Bird

   Rarely does Hollywood make a coming-of-age film that embraces yet also defuses the tropes that go with the subgenre, and even more rarely does Hollywood make a film so real, lively, and lovely. Greta Gerwig could've been more confident behind the camera – her direction feels just slightly too hesitant – but there's more than enough to make this movie special.

7. The Shape of Water

   There is so much I love about this film – its beautiful lead performance, its celebration of minorities, its stunning ode to cinema. But The Shape of Water doesn't love love itself; for how much the fairy tale revolves around love, its central romance feels detached, insipid, and ultimately unemotional. It constantly impressed me but it never for a moment moved me. Guillermo del Toro clearly loves cinema more than love; love just gets buried under the glitz and glamor of the mise-en-scène.

8. Darkest Hour

   Darkest Hour is the obligatory, standard Oscarbait. It definitely didn't need to get into Best Picture to win Gary Oldman his long-awaited Oscar, but it's not difficult to sit through. Its depiction of the Miracle of Dunkirk is staggeringly lackluster compared to Dunkirk's, but cinematography (that opening shot!) and score elevate this otherwise dull and painless film.

9. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

   A few months ago, I left the theater feeling ambivalent after seeing Three Billboards, and that ambivalence has grown to strong dislike. I find myself totally disagreeing with how the film handles its character arcs, and it's not just a storytelling flaw – it tells a fundamentally reprehensible message. The film flows fluidly but the style is nothing noteworthy, and the eponymous town does the exact opposite of 'the city functioning as a character'. I do concede that there is one great storytelling decision in the middle, but that is far from able to save the film for me.