Shot by a director who goes by the name of A Gan, The Big Movie is a dazzling spoof in the tradition of Hollywood films like Airplane. This film contains a lot of big movies: hold on to your seats, as an absurdly linked series of sometimes droll, sometimes genuinely hilarious take-offs of famous film scenes rush by in the opening half hour.
A dreamed trip between village and city, between reality and fiction in a chaotic China.
The Go Master is a 2006 biopic by director Tian Zhuangzhuang of renowned twentieth century Go master Wu Qingyuan, better known by his adopted name of Go Seigen. The film, which premiered at the 44th New York Film Festival, focuses on the life of this extraordinary player from his meteoric rise as a child prodigy to fame and fortune as a revolutionary strategic thinker, as well as the tumultuous global conflicts between his homeland and … Read more
Forest fires burn in Sumatra; a smoke covers Kuala Lumpur. Grifters beat an immigrant day laborer and leave him on the streets. Rawang, a young man, finds him, carries him home, cares for him, and sleeps next to him. In a loft above lives a waitress. She sometimes provides care and attention. More violence seems a constant possibility. They find another man abandoned on the street, paralyzed. They carry him. While no one speaks to … Read more
Empress Wan can launch a thousand ships with her charm and fight a hundred soldiers with her sword. But something is lacking in her life and she harbours forbidden desires for her stepson Prince Wu Luan , an introverted young man, who shies away from the palace to indulge in the ancient art of music and dance. When the Emperor dies all of a sudden and his younger brother Li takes over the throne, Wan … Read more
During China’s Tang dynasty the emperor has taken the princess of a neighboring province as wife. She has borne him two sons and raised his eldest. Now his control over his dominion is complete, including the royal family itself.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People’s Republic.
King of the Children is a 1987 drama film directed by Chen Kaige and starring Chen Shaohua. The film was based on a novella of the same name by Ah Cheng. The film was entered into the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.
An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu’er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as “my Grandpa” by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu’er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.
When computer programmer, Leo Fang, is passed up for promotion, he feels it is because he is Chinese, and quits. He takes his Chinese-American family to Mainland China to visit his relatives, the Chao’s for a vacation. The clash of cultures, between the men, wives, and teenagers, leads to some confusion, and misunderstanding.
Based on a novel by the same name written by Gu Hua, a melodrama about the life and travails of a young woman who lives through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
Set in the Shaanxi province of Northern China, In The Wild Mountains is a simple yet insightful tale of village life and how economic changes in the country affect even the most remote regions.
Often cited as China’s first independent feature film, this low-budget drama, filmed largely in the director’s Beijing apartment, depicts the life of a single mother (a topic considered taboo at the time) caring for her mentally challenged son. Shot with a documentary aesthetic that includes interviews with families of mentally challenged persons, the film helped kick-start the Sixth Generation of filmmakers (including Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke) and their ethos of employing documentary realism to … Read more
China’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1991
Winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1990, Xie Fei’s film is a politically daring tale of urban alienation and despair. A former prisoner, played by the great Chinese actor Jiang Wen, arrives back in his native Beijing to find that he has no family or prospects or friends, just his underworld contacts trying to drag him back into a life of crime… Taking the classic crime thriller ‘hook’ – ex-con struggling to go … Read more
The film follows two wayward characters, Chen Sihan (Geng Le) and his girlfriend, Xiaoping (Chang Jieping). On the verge of entering university, both characters are looking for a way to make their fortune. The two travel to the city of Wuhan from their home in Anhui province, in the hope that they can purchase rare mushrooms to sell back home. When they return home, they discover they have been cheated and return to Wuhan in … Read more
An intense drama on the portrayal of brotherhood, BROTHERS depicts the mistrust and feud between two brothers through the eyes of an investigating police officer. Despite their close relationship, Yiu and Shun were separated at a young age due to a decision made by their father. Years later they meet again when the family runs into crisis where Yiu, inspired by his father’s last words, manipulates a series of setups which endangers Shun’s life, so … Read more
The story of a couple (Niki Chow and Eason Chan) who break up one morning and proceed to find their love tested in unexpected and violent ways.
Xiao Yu (Zhou), a barista and cake maker in a teahouse-café by Westlake in Hangzhou. Since a car crash long ago, she had been leading a peaceful life with her kind-hearted best friend and fellow car crash survivor Tong (Yim) who is unabashed in admitting that his feelings for Xiao Yu have developed into love. One day A Qin (Chen) celebrates his birthday alone in her café. Xiao Yu’s curiosity sparks off their dialogues and … Read more
“The World” is a theme park on the outskirts of Beijing, sixteen kilometers from the Chinese capital, designed around scaled representations of the world’s famous landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa.The site is seen here not from the visitors’ point of view but through the eyes of a few of its staff, lonely people, communicating poorly, a bit disillusioned with life, glittering for the tourists but dull and restricted … Read more
A moving true story about volunteers protecting antelope against poachers in the severe mountains of Tibet.
Sent into a drunken tailspin when his entire unit is killed by a gang of thrill-seeking punks, disgraced Hong Kong police inspector Wing (Jackie Chan) needs help from his new rookie partner, with a troubled past of his own, to climb out of the bottle and track down the gang and its ruthless leader.
2046 is the sequel to Wong Kar-Wais’ successful box-office hit In The Mood For Love. A film about affairs, ending relationships, and a shared love for Kung-Fu novels as the main character, Chow, writes his own novel and reflects back on his favorite love Su.
This love story is disguised as a road drama and a crime story with all the twists and turns along the way. Aptly directed by Shi Runjiu, with engaging cinematography that matches the feel of the story, All The Way involves many stories of many people surrounding one goal—find the guy who’s got the goods.
The wife of a prominent psychiatrist can’t find her marriage certificate one day. This “jiehunzheng” is all important. Without it, the family officially has never existed, including the daughter. The couple go on a wild goose chase through the Chinese bureaucracy, meeting catch-22 all the way….they need a certificate to get a new one, etc. They even journey back to the People’s Commune where they met, now the site of modern private enterprises where nobody … Read more
An actor becomes increasingly introverted and psychotic and his entire family attempts to intervene. Jia, an actor and former drug addict, battled his addiction to marijuana and heroin for five years from 1992 to 1997.
With World War 2 looming, a prominent family in China must confront the contrasting ideas of traditionalism, communism and Western thinking, while dealing with the most important ideal of all: love and its meaning in society.
A seventeen-year-old country boy working in Beijing as a courier has his bicycle stolen, and finds it with a schoolboy his age.
Stunningly shot on real locations, Song of Tibet is much as its title sounds – a wistful, sometimes clunky melodrama with lots of ethnographic detail that’s a modern take on the ethnic-minority pics that China has cranked out since the ’50s. Helmer/co-scripter Xie Fei’s eye for colorful realism has always been stronger than his grasp of human drama, and this is no exception. Pic centers on a Tibetan woman, Yixizhuoma, and her turbulent marriage to … Read more
A young woman who has lost her first love begins a relationship with his best friend, and the two of them attempt to create a baggage-free future.
Chen Mo, a young man fresh from the countryside who’s scrambling to make a living selling flowers on the streets of Beijing, meets Mei Ting, a masseuse-hairdresser who, having repulsed the aggressive advances of her boss, has no place to live.
During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor’s beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.
This Hong Kong drama parallels the stories of two young couples, splicing them with dream sequences and a framing story set at a coffee bar where friends have gathered to talk.
In pre-communist China, two sisters lead very different lives. One is a famous performer while the other is a political activist. In 1935 a runaway tongyangxi, Zhu Chunhua, takes refuge at an itinerant Yue Opera troupe performing at a Shaoxing village. The head of the troupe, A’Xin, intends to send the girl away, but Yue Opera teacher Xing, seeing her potential, takes Chunhua in as a disciple and trains her. Chunhua signs a deal with … Read more