Brighton Rock
An updated version of Graham Greene’s thriller of the same name. The background of mods and rockers might be a little jarring for lovers of the book (or indeed the 1947 film starring Richard Attenborough). Nevertheless, Rowan Joffe’s debut feature as a director (Joffe wrote the screenplay for 28 Weeks Later and The American) is taut and atmospheric and features some exceptional performances from John Hurt and Helen Mirren. Newcomer Andrea Riseborough is exceptionally good as Rose, a vulnerable young woman who becomes a pawn in a turf war, and Sam Riley as Pinkie, the young thug who callously manipulates her, exudes both style and conviction.
The Way Back
A road movie by Australian director Peter Weir that sees a group of escapees from a Russian gulag make a dangerous journey to freedom. Some less than perfect casting, including Colin Farrell as a Russian mobster (doing little more than providing the film with an A-list lead), do the movie no favors, but there are strong supporting performances from the likes of Ed Harris and Saoirse Ronan. Magnificent photography by Russell Boyd makes up for some of the improbabilities of the story (which is “inspired” by actual events), with more attention given to developing the film’s epic and melodramatic impact than to relating the practicalities of the characters’ survival.
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
Martin Lawrence is back in yet another iteration of the Big Momma franchise. The humor deriving from one person in drag wearing a fat suit has worn very thin, so this time Brandon T. Jackson has been brought in as Agent Malcolm Turner’s son Trent. Trent witnesses a murder, and has to get into drag and a fat suit to hide in an upmarket girls’ school.
Life Is Miracle (最愛)
Also released under the title Til Death Do Us Part, this film is directed by Gu Changwei (顧長衛), an accomplished cinematographer with credits for major films such as Farewell My Concubine (霸王別姬, 1993) and Ju Dou (菊豆, 1990). Life Is Miracle deals with the taboo subject of AIDS in rural China, but manages to do so in a manner that is both glossy and maudlin at the same time. Aaron Kwok (郭富城) and Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) are both suffering from the dreaded “fever” and have been deposited by their respective spouses in a colony of patients on the fringe of town. In their slow dance toward death they discover physical passion and true love.
Will You Still Love Me (妳是否依然愛我)
A film by director Yeh Hung-wei (葉鴻偉), Will You Still Love Me follows the tumultuous romance between artist Ming Li and his model girlfriend Ya Chien, who is also being pursued by mobile salesman Tie Min. Megan Lai (賴雅妍), who came to prominence in CTV’s super-successful The Story of Time (光陰的故事), has the leading role. The quality of the acting is uneven, and the whole project feels like a TV soap transferred with little imagination to the big screen.
Kites: Brett Ratner Remix
An Indian film by Bollywood director Anurag Basu about passion and bank robbery, Kites opened in the US as the largest distribution of a Hindi film to date. Includes the genre’s obligatory dance routines. The director’s reputation and the presence of Hrithik Roshan, arguably the hottest man in Indian cinema, gives Kites huge commercial momentum. Roshan plays a man living on the edge, just one step ahead of the police, bounty hunters and others, all of whom want him dead. The only thing keeping him going is his passion for Natasha, played by Japanese-Uruguayan-Mexican model Barbara Mori. In a mix of English, Hindi and Spanish.
Saru Lock: The Movie
An action comedy based on a Japanese TV series. Sarumaru Yataro (Ichihara Hayato) is a regular teenager, but as the son of a locksmith, he has acquired exceptional lock-picking skills. While he uses these skills to check out a variety of beautiful women, he finds himself drawn into a police investigation.
Magic Journey to Africa
The title of this film pretty much says everything you need to know about the plot: A little girl called Jana makes a magic journey to Africa. She meets some magical beasts, including a winged horse, a talking lizard and lots of cute little animals. This is a Spanish production, though spoken in English, and seems to have been made as a kind of enhanced home-video. Acting, dialogue and pretty much everything else about the film are wooden and amateurish, and it is a wonder that local distributors have bothered to put it on the market at all.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and