Jeremy Stone
“Return to Dust” registers inequalities without leaping to judgement
Before any of the human characters appear on screen in Return to Dust, the camera frames the donkey that will pull their cart and till their fields. For me, this evokes a specific cinematic...
‘Radiance’ is a romance film about the use of images
The title of Kawase Naomi’s 2017 film Radiance tells us that light is a subject itself and not only a medium for images of things. This director has always shown an affinity for brightly...
Debut film Are You Lonesome Tonight? 热带往事 is an exciting thriller with moral weight
Director Wen Shipei’s debut feature Are You Lonesome Tonight?, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, is an impressive neo-noir thriller starring Eddie Peng and Sylvia Chang. Peng plays Xueming, an air-conditioner...
Two East Asian filmmakers explore repression and freedom
Talking about film directors as the primary authors of their works can notoriously be misleading, but it seems especially appropriate for those rare filmmakers whose movies are variations on a theme. I’m thinking of...
Two family dramas appeal to the senses
In the first minutes of the new, entrancing film Yanagawa, Lidong (Zhang Luyi) tells a woman that he has been diagnosed with stage four cancer. Her response (“are you talking to me?”) is an...
Nostalgia for the Present: Millennium Mambo
A new digital restoration of the 2001 film Millennium Mambo, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien,
gives audiences a chance to see its lush photography the way it looked on its first release. Now also seems like...
Jia Zhangke talks about his films depicting life in a period of social change
Known to cinephiles in the United States as the most prominent Chinese director of the so-called “sixth generation” working after 1989, Jia Zhangke is also something of a public intellectual in China.
In this book...
