Moody Chinese Noir - The Chinese Cinema

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Moody Chinese Noir

A collection of 6 posts

Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun, 2023)

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Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun, 2023)

The Shadow Play (Lou Ye, 2018)

The Shadow Play (Lou Ye, 2018)

At this point the best advice I can give you, the prospective viewer of a Lou Ye movie, is this: don’t see it in a theatre, and if you must, sit as far away from the screen as possible. Possibly contemporary cinema’s most extreme abuser of the close-up,

The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan, 2019)

The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan, 2019)

One of the most anticipated Chinese titles of this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival is Diao Yinan’s follow-up to his Berlin winning 2014 film Black Coal, Thin Ice. Like that film, The Wild Goose Lake is a moody Chinese noir, full of morose characters trapped in a world

Savage (Cui Siwei, 2019)

Savage (Cui Siwei, 2019)

Cui Siwei’s directorial debut is not, unfortunately, a remake of the classic blaxploitation film Savage (tagline: “On the streets, or in the sheets, he’s. . . SAVAGE!”). Instead, it’s another moody Chinese noir, this one headed by two excellent actors and set in a snowy mountain wilderness. Chang Chen

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, 2018)

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, 2018)

Thinking of a series of dreams Where the time and the tempo fly And there’s no exit in any direction ‘Cept the one that you can’t see with your eyes Wasn’t making any great connection Wasn’t falling for any intricate scheme Nothing that would pass inspection

Mystery (Lou Ye, 2012)

Mystery (Lou Ye, 2012)

The first film Lou Ye was able to make in China following a five-year filmmaking ban he received for submitting his Summer Palace to Cannes without government permission back in 2006 (he made a couple films in the intervening years outside the Mainland). It’s a slick, clever neo-noir melodrama,