Chinese Cinema

Hi Mom 你好，李焕英, (Jia Ling 贾玲 2021) and Last Night in Soho, (Edgar Wright 2021) In movies, traversing time and place has never been easier. Now, there is little need for rattling control panels or to channel lightning into a power-hungry flux-capacitor; everyone assumes time travel is part of modern…

Dante Lam’s latest propaganda piece for the Chinese military, following 2016’s Operation Mekong and 2018’s Operation Red Sea (one wonders if he wanted to call it Operation Rescue, but someone explained to him that that name was already taken), was supposed to anchor the 2020 Chinese New Year box office…

The big hit of this past Mid-Autumn Festival season on Chinese screens was Cloudy Mountain, the latest in a series of disaster films that double as propaganda pieces that praise the resourcefulness of the Chinese people and bureaucracy (not necessarily in that order) in responding to the cataclysmic side effects…

Reviews: Memories Look at Me (2012) — November 14, 2012 The Calming (2020) — September 24, 2020

Out today from indie distributor China Lion Films, streaming through iTunes and Fandango, is one of the better Chinese films to see an American release in this plagued year 2020. Spring Tide is the long-awaited second feature film from director Yang Lina. I caught her first fiction film, the moody…

This story was first published in Coronadiet’s old site on March 26, 2020. Many aspects of Bi Gan’s filmmaking as seen through Kaili Blues (2015) are reminiscent of the style and techniques of 6th generation Chinese filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke. Broadly speaking, these directors tread the middle ground between…

Perhaps, Love is a Luhrmann-esque musical drama about a love triangle that unfolds during the filming of a fictional musical in Mainland China. Beneath the surface of a traditional melodramatic love triangle, it grapples with more profound questions like whether art imitates life or life imitates art, on many different…

I am, as I suspect many people are, afflicted with an unquenchable fondness for movies about food. Close-ups of meat sizzling, the sound of tea being poured into a china cup, the crispy crunch of vegetables being chopped, it all triggers some kind of ASMR-like pleasure center deep in the…

Review: The Wild Goose Lake (2019) — September 23, 2019 Capsule Review: Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) — June 7, 2014