China
Snow Leopard review - clunky visual effects mar a director's swansongSaturday, 23 November 2024
Pema Tseden's final film Snow Leopard is a Chinese Tibetan-language drama that addresses wild animal preservation. It serves as a kind of allegory for the circumstances that preceded the 53-year-old director's death from a heart attack last year. In... Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - Nickel Boys, crime and punishment and UkraineSaturday, 26 October 2024
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves... Read more... |
Black Dog review - a drifter in ChinaFriday, 30 August 2024
We root for the rootless Outsider in classical western cinema because the places the Outsider fetches up in are scary dumps of the first order – maybe a medieval grub-hole, a Wild West deadfall or some cantina full of aliens that Harrison Ford drops... Read more... |
Only the River Flows review - damp noirFriday, 16 August 2024
An old woman, inexplicably known as Granny Four, is murdered by a river on the outskirts of a Chinese rural town. A respected detective is put in charge of the investigation, with the weight of his department’s reputation on his shoulders. But this... Read more... |
Red Eye, ITV review - Anglo-Chinese relations tested in junk-food thrillerMonday, 06 May 2024
Aircraft hijacking is a ghoulishly popular theme in films and TV, but Red Eye brings a slightly different twist to the perils of air travel. This time, North China Air’s Flight 357, from London to Beijing, hasn’t been hijacked, but it has become the... Read more... |
3 Body Problem, Netflix review - life, the universe and everything (and a bit more)Tuesday, 26 March 2024
From Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and DB Weiss, in cahoots with Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem is Netflix’s daring attempt to dramatise Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem. A mind-bending sci-fi epic spanning multiple decades, while... Read more... |
The Last Year of Darkness review - a loving portrait of a Chengdu gay barTuesday, 12 March 2024
Yihao is a disaffected 20 year old living in Chengdu, capital of Sichaun Province. A thriving centre for business and commerce, Chengdu looks like any other modern city. You could mistake it for downtown Chicago except that, apart from the Walmart... Read more... |
Blu-ray: BlackhatWednesday, 06 December 2023
The Boxing Day release of Michael Mann’s first feature in eight years, Ferrari, finally follows up Blackhat, a Chris Hemsworth-starring cyber-thriller dismissed on its 2015 release in a manner he hadn’t experienced since The Keep (1983). This two-... Read more... |
Marina Abramović, Royal Academy review - young performers stand in for the absent artistSaturday, 23 September 2023
One of the most cherished memories of my 40 plus years as an art critic is of easing my way between Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay. They were standing either side of a doorway at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, leaving just enough room for... Read more... |
Joy Ride review - pioneering horninessSunday, 06 August 2023
This Seth Rogen-produced, Family Guy writers-co-scripted gross-out comedy with four Chinese-American women fully lives up and down to its description. With Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim as debuting director, it’s also another demographically... Read more... |
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, Design Museum review - a deep sense of loss permeates this showTuesday, 11 April 2023
Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei has created an extremely beautiful installation at the Design Museum in which the disparate elements play their part in creating a powerful overall message. On one level the exhibition is about design, but it also... Read more... |
Turandot, Royal Opera review - spectacle and sound wow in this significant revivalTuesday, 21 March 2023
Nearly 40 years old, Andrei Serban’s Royal Opera Turandot feels like a gilded relic (I felt like a relic myself on learning that my writer neighbour wasn’t born when I saw Gwyneth Jones as the ice princess in 1984). Yet so too, outwardly, did... Read more... |
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