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This essay was commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image for the impressive Linda Lin Dai retrospective they mounted in 2011. The essay can also be found at the ACMI website here. With the impact of Communist ideology on Chinese cinema after 1949, “the star” being replaced with “the film worker”, it was up to
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More gracefully and more effortlessly than any film I’ve seen, Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, newly released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, captures the spiritual tug-of-war between France’s formidable aesthetic tradition and France’s place in a networked world economy. Three siblings deliberate the fate of their inheritance – not money, but objet d’art in a
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It seems critics are incapable of writing about Bong Joon-ho without talking about genres. Sometimes he’s called a master of genres, other times he’s praised for reinventing them, mixing them, or transcending them. Critics love to count them off: to date, there’s the quirky comedy (Barking Dogs Never Bite), the police procedural (Memories of Murder),
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Preston Sturges has a knack for comedic dialogue so absurd that it’s borderline Brechtian. Consider Barbara Stanwyck’s famous quip against the hapless Henry Fonda in THE LADY EVE, “I need him like the ax needs the turkey!” – a line that at first you think makes perfect sense, before you realize how grotesquely weird it
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In Spring 2007, Erin Hill and I, then editors of the UCLA-based online journal Mediascape, conducted a poll to determine the “Top 100 American Films by Women Directors.” It was conducted, published, and promoted to counter the American Film Institute’s “10th anniversary edition” of their famous “greatest 100 American films” list. Over a decade and
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Brian Hu 