In his essential Jerry Lewis essay “The Jerriad: A Clown Painting,” film critic B. Kite discusses the lineage of classic clowns like Chaplin, Keaton, and…
Released in 1997, Tsai Ming-liang’s The River extended what would become a de facto family trilogy in which the same actors reprise identical roles within…
In many ways, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour follows (or establishes, given its chronological situation within his filmography) many of the director’s most characteristic tendencies. From…
Typically regarded as a key director of the Taiwanese Second New Wave, Tsai Ming-liang and his debut theatrical feature Rebels of the Neon God exhibit,…
It may surprise you that Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang’s first feature-length film, Boys, has a quite significant relationship to British social realism. Made in 1991,…
For a world-renowned auteur, it’s surprisingly difficult to find information about Tsai Ming-liang’s early television work. It’s not clear if this is due to general…
Prior to the solidification of Tsai Ming-liang’s career, which is arguably realized with his first Lee Kang-Sheng collaboration (in the television commissioned project Boys), there…
In 1989, following the success of a prime-time Chinese Television System soap called Endless Love, which he worked on as a writer, Tsai Ming-liang directed…
In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he revealed…
Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play is a vicious work that descends into the depths of corruption in both a private enterprise (the events…
Lou Ye’s 2014 film Blind Massage marked a transition for director, one that took him into broadly more commercial territory for the first time. Based…
Despite Lou Ye’s reputation for pushing the boundaries of Chinese censorship guidelines – due to his often frank and incisive takes on politics, gender, and…
Love and Bruises, which Lou Ye made during his five-year, government-imposed ban from filmmaking in China, is a tale of l’amour fou set, appropriately enough,…
A film built upon gay male hypersexualization overlaid with some hamfisted prose, Spring Fever turns the sadness of being gay and Chinese into a dry…
Lou Ye’s Summer Palace is an exasperating experience, full of interesting ideas and an incendiary political backdrop but falling victim to clichés of poeticized romantic longing.…
Purple Butterfly is a film of dreamy realism, sometimes insoluble and suffused with a haze that is, at once, sepulchral yet sultry — a film about…
The year 2000 was a watershed year for Chinese-language cinema. Milestones like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and In the Mood for Love and Yi Yi…
The most striking aspect of Weekend Lover, the directorial debut of Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye, is its palpable sense of existence as a…
The literal translation of Don’t Be Young’s Chinese title, “Wei Qing Shao Nu,” means “Emotional Young Lady”— and it is, in many ways, a more than…