China

Shanghai Dolls, Kiln Theatre review - fascinating slice of history inadequately told

Monday, 14 April 2025

The writer Amy Ng has made a sterling effort in digging up the true story behind her new play at the Kiln, Shanghai Dolls, but sadly has not yet found the best way to project this interesting material. The Dolls are two women who meet in...

Brief History of a Family review - glossy Chinese psychological thriller feels shallow

Saturday, 22 March 2025

Brief History of a Family is a psychological thriller with a story familiar to anyone who has seen Ripley, Saltburn or Six Degrees of Separation. A clever young man with low social status infiltrates a far more privileged family, with devastating...

Snow Leopard review - clunky visual effects mar a director's swansong

Saturday, 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...

London Film Festival 2024 - Nickel Boys, crime and punishment and Ukraine

Saturday, 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...

Black Dog review - a drifter in China

Friday, 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...

Only the River Flows review - damp noir

Friday, 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...

Red Eye, ITV review - Anglo-Chinese relations tested in junk-food thriller

Monday, 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...

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...

The Last Year of Darkness review - a loving portrait of a Chengdu gay bar

Tuesday, 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...

Blu-ray: Blackhat

Wednesday, 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-...

Marina Abramović, Royal Academy review - young performers stand in for the absent artist

Saturday, 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...

Joy Ride review - pioneering horniness

Sunday, 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...

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