Criterion honors the sheer gorgeousness of Johnnie To’s eccentric noirish story of friendship and midlife crisis.
Kwan’s metatextual melodrama is one of the finest films from Hong Kong’s ’90s golden age of cinema.
The present-day subplot adds little but sentiment to a film shot through with cliché characters, a predictable plot, and undisguised reverence.
Stephen Fung’s pop-up graphics and jazzy fight scenes feel part of an unwieldy mix in which the director just throws whatever half-baked conceits up on the screen he feels like.
The film invites comparison to Stephen Chow’s work, but Stephen Fung and his crew have no interest in Chow’s meticulous choreography or eye for stark composition.
Tsui Hark’s surreal wuxia gets problematic transfer, but lives to tell the tale.
Tsui Hark’s new film is a consummately bizarre crowd-pleaser that throws everything at the viewer.
Ashes of Time doesn’t starve for hyperkinetic genre calisthenics.
Poised as a gritty study in urban loneliness, Lost in Beijing instead becomes lost in clichés.
Johnnie To’s film is a compelling amalgam of aesthetic showmanship and human movement.
This is disaffection for disaffection’s sake, as imagined by a student of Robert James Waller.