China
Shanghai Dolls, Kiln Theatre review - fascinating slice of history inadequately toldMonday, 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... Read more... |
Brief History of a Family review - glossy Chinese psychological thriller feels shallowSaturday, 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... Read more... |
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... |
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