You can almost tell when Wayne Wang makes films that he probably considers closer to his heart: they come in pairs. Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), was accompanied by Dim Sum Take Out, a short film made ...Read More

Wayne Wang, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" (2007).

There's a scene about halfway through Wayne Wang's 2007 film The Princess of Nebraska that's the complete stylistic opposite of the ending of his 1982 masterpiece, Chan Is Missing. You'll be forgiven if it reminded you of those Christopher Doyle-filmed ...Read More

Wayne Wang, "The Princess of Nebraska" (2007).

Just wanted to point you folks to an interview with Wayne Wang I conducted for my American Pop column over at AsianWeek. Reviews of his two latest movies coming shortly... Read More

An Interview with Wayne Wang.

A sampling of topics from my e-mail and IM conversations of the last seven days: - the Joker as the Übermensch - Gotham = Baghdad - "Is Batman a Jack Bauer-like Republican vigilante figure, who takes the hatred of the world upon himself ...Read More

From the Wiretaps.

Almost five hours of movies (Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy 2: The Golden Army and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight) and four hours of sleep later, I find that I can barely string together a coherent review. (This is also a ...Read More

Guillermo del Toro, “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” (2008) / Christopher Nolan, “The Dark Knight” (2008).

A link, instead, to an American Pop entry. Read More

Timur Bekmambetov, “Wanted” (2008).

I have an entry on the director Wayne Wang on one of my other blogs, American Pop. It's called The Saga of Wayne Wang and will probably inaugurate a whole series of reviews (if not a full-on retrospective) of his ...Read More

Entry on Wayne Wang.

Horror movies, as any Comp Lit freshman would tell you, are often allegories of something or other. They can, on occasion, be a little more direct and literal in their targets, as seen in works like George Romero's Land of ...Read More

Xavier Gens, “Frontier(s)” (2007).

Jia Zhangke's brilliant new film is no ghost story, but it's nevertheless filled with figures of the walking dead. It's titled Still Life (Sanxia haoren) perhaps an apt title for a movie filled with movement and travel, but towards an imminent ...Read More

Jia Zhangke, “Still Life” (2006).

It hardly seems fair to compare Yung Chang's excellent debut documentary, Up the Yangtze, with work by a master filmmaker like Jia Zhangke, i.e., Still Life (2006), but the comparison is inevitable: Chang's movie is set further downstream, in Fengdu ...Read More

Yung Chang, “Up the Yangtze” (2007).

Barry Jenkins' Medicine for Melancholy is an uncommonly fine film, and easily one of the best I've seen this year so far. Indie romances don't always sit well with me, probably even well before Natalie Portman gave Zach Braff her ...Read More

Barry Jenkins, "Medicine for Melancholy" (2007).

There's a tiny whiff of the exotic about Lance Hammer's powerful debut film Ballast -- a drama set in the Mississippi Delta, with a non-professional cast -- but that fact works in its favor. Otherwise, the story's nothing we haven't ...Read More

Lance Hammer, "Ballast" (2007).

Alexander Sokurov's latest film, Alexandra (Aleksandra), derives its understated humor from its narrative premise: an elderly woman from St. Petersburg visits her grandson, an officer stationed in an army base in Chechnya. This, in and of itself, is already humorous ...Read More

Alexander Sokurov, "Alexandra" (2007).

Speaking of immobility, Bela Tarr's latest film, The Man from London, is also worth seeing, but good god, it's slow -- slow even for Bela Tarr. The movie has a classic noir setup: ordinary station guard witnesses a crime, comes ...Read More

Bela Tarr, "The Man from London" (2007).

I struck gold with my Movie #2 of the San Francisco International Film Fest yesterday with Roy Andersson's queasily funny comedy You, the Living (Du Levande), a film I'm already anxious to see again. There is no narrative (although the ...Read More

Roy Andersson, "You the Living" (2007).