Strange Tales - The Chinese Cinema

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Fantasia Festival 2025

Reviews of Rewrite, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, Holy Night: Demon Hunters, and Sham

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NYAFF 2025 Part Two

Reviews of Muromachi Outsiders (aka Samurai Fury), Deep in the Mountains, The Informant, and The Stone.

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NYAFF 2025 Part One

Reviews of three films from Hong Kong (Possession Street, Behind the Shadows, Smashing Frank) and Chinese director Vivian Qu's latest, Girls on Wire

The Best Non-Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far)- Part Two (1-50)

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The Best Non-Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far)- Part Two (1-50)

The Best Non-Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far)- Part One 110-51

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The Best Non-Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far)- Part One 110-51

The Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far) - Part Three: 1-39

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The Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far) - Part Three: 1-39

The Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far) - Part Two: 79-40

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The Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far) - Part Two: 79-40

The Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far) - Part One: 110-80

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The Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century (Thus Far) - Part One: 110-80

The Raquel Report: iQIYI's Queen of Triads, Snipers, and Wild Agents

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Contemporary Chinese (Streaming) Cinema

The Raquel Report: iQIYI's Queen of Triads, Snipers, and Wild Agents

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Contemporary Chinese (Streaming) Cinema

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2024 Festival Compilation

As I've done for the last couple of years, here is a collection of the reviews I wrote this year for InReview Online's coverage of various film festivals from around the world (Rotterdam, Cannes, the New York Asian Film Festival, Venice, Toronto, and the New York

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2023 Fall Festival Compilation

As I put together in 2022 and again for last Spring, here is a collection of the reviews I wrote for InReview Online's coverage of various film festivals from around the world. For publication here, the reviews have been re-edited and occasionally expanded. Check out the rest of

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2023 Spring Festival Compilation

As I put together last year, here is a collection of the reviews I wrote for InReview Online's coverage of various film festivals from around the world so far this year. Check out the rest of the festival coverage at the site, they've got a lot

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2022 Spring/Summer Festival Compilation

The Best of the Martial Arts Films (Sandra Weintraub, 1990)

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The Best of the Martial Arts Films (Sandra Weintraub, 1990)

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Notes Towards a Voting Guide for Chinese Language Film in the 2022 Sight & Sound Poll

It’s Sight & Sound Poll season, that time once a decade when the venerable British film magazine polls critics and filmmakers from around the world to create a list of the Great Films of All-Time. Last time around, the poll made headlines when Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo replaced longtime

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Both Sides Now: Women in Chinese Film at the DC Chinese Film Festival

This weekend, the (Washington) DC Chinese Film Festival [http://www.dccff.org/schedule.html], in partnership with The One International Women's Film Festival, presents a mini-festival focused on women in Chinese Cinema called “On Both Sides of the Camera” focusing on Chinese films by and/or about women.

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Notes on Filmspotting’s Contemporary Chinese Cinema Marathon

A few weeks ago, Adam and Josh at the Filmspotting [https://www.filmspotting.net/] podcast invited me to help curate a selection of 2010s Chinese-language movies for them to talk about on their show. I was more than happy to help, as I’ve been a fan of the show

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150 of the Best Chinese-Language Films of All-Time

I’ve been doing some cataloguing lately, trying to organize my books and movies and make some kind of plan for how I’m going to attack the Chinese Cinema over the next year or so. Three and a half years ago, I started a chronological Johnnie To project [https:

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The 50 Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century

When Film4 published a list of their “100 Must-See Films of the 21st Century [http://www.film4.com/special-features/top-lists/100-must-see-films-21st-century] ” and only bothered to include two Chinese films (Yi yi and In the Mood for Love , of course), I countered with this list on letterboxd of 100 Must-See Chinese

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Chinese Cinema Today

A couple months ago I was asked to write this brief overview of the state of contemporary Chinese language cinema for the Estonian arts magazine Sirp [http://www.sirp.ee/]. You can read this essay in Estonian on their website [http://www.sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/film/merineitsi-kasvaja-ja-varisevad-maed/], and here, with