Sight and Sound and Fury: Paul Fonoroff’s Powerful ‘Chinese Movie Magazines’
In Chinese Movie Magazines, Paul Fonoroff highlights the capacity for humans to embed their desires and history in the most innocuous-seeming of creative efforts.
Michael Buening
Shedding Light on the World in Edward Yang’s ‘A Brighter Summer Day’
This extraordinarily tender yet epic and incisive portrait of mid-century Taiwan is one of film’s great fumblings towards an elusive truth.
‘The Lonely City’ Makes a Case for Empathy and Kindness
Olivia Laing mixes art criticism and memoir; effectively synthesizing these two modes of writing so that the personal elevates the analysis, with a sizable emotional heft.
Death and Childhood Hover Over Guy Maddin’s ‘My Winnipeg’
The comic mythologizing of Winnipeg becomes conflated with an urge for Maddin to mythologize himself.
Many Faces of Lady Whirlwind: ‘The Angela Mao Ying Collection’
Angela Mao is wholesome and badass, a personality that, when brought to her fight scenes, immediately marks her as a star—although the scripts she was given don't often give her the chance to maximize that stardom.
‘Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China’ Is both Trivial and Expansive
There is nothing hidden about the world of these stories, and Yu Hua’s writing is defined by its plainspoken voice and depiction of quotidian lives.
Ambitious and Ludicrous Satire: ‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman: The Complete Series’
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman looks more like an Andy Warhol production on cable access than a nationally syndicated Norman Lear sitcom.
Kinuyo Tanaka’s Kaleidoscopic Performance in ‘The Life of Oharu’
In The Life of Oharu, Kinuyo Tanaka faithfully adapts the picaresque genre in her portrayal, using each episode to depict different aspects of her character in a manner that is both kaleidoscopic and realistic.