A key masterpiece in the To oeuvre, The Mission is pure cinema. When gangland boss Lung is threatened with assassination, he turns to old associate Curtis, who rounds up a crack team of gunmen as a bodyguard force. Three ambushes and the dead time of gangster bonding between lead to an unexpected coda. This is the director’s master class on how movement and stasis define space. The film’s form and content are one: protecting and controlling the space of violence around Lung. To’s principle of action-stillness reaches its purest expression here: the shopping mall set piece illustrates how montage, precise framing, and rhythmic control create an impression of action-velocity from a series of elegant still shots. (S. Kraicer)
Madly in love with Monica, a neighbour of his, Andrei, a shy teenager, calls to an erotic phone line to find out how he could seduce a girl in the elevator, which is also going to spice up his parents marriage. Elevator love stories in the outskirts of Bucharest.
A tale of a creatively paranoid cop named Bun, whose delusions spark creativity, whose madness unleashes freedom. When a cop mysteriously disappears, his partner falls under suspicion. Young Inspector Ho investigates and turns to his idol Bun, retired from the force after his crazy methods degenerated into unstable lunacy. Bun sees things: call them delusions or breathtakingly accurate intuitions. To and Ka-fai take these visions and incorporate them into the film’s graphic play with a formal audacity. Lau’s performances for To consistently offer quiet brilliance, subtlety, depth, and great range. Black comedy and gritty policier collide in a wild, hilarious, and disturbing entertainment. (S. Kraicer)
On his way to a business meeting, Tudor has an unexpected break of 30 minutes. Long enough to drink o coffee, talk about his daughter and take a picture.
A hair tragically destroys a love-story between HIM and HER. An ironical outlook on the human tragedy. Without dialogues and apparently filmed in a sole long shot.
A film posing as a re-constructed analysis of a series of home movies shot by Gerard Fleury before he disappeared looking for the right shot to complete a film he was working on about the Normandy village of Le Thuit. The footage shows his family and household staff walking around the grounds playing games. Guerín intercuts this real footage with fake b&w footage of the same location and adds color scenes which purport to show the activity that may have occurred off-camera.
An impression of the harsh reality of gypsy `survivors’ in a village near Bucharest, who find an oil well near a refinery and start using it to provide fuel for heating. The local police intervene… Without commentary, the camera follows the people from a distance, accompanied by the music of the Romanian gypsy orchestra Taraful din Clejani.
A film composed by photographic images, silent, which reflects the photographic work of Guerín before the En la Ciudad de Sylvia shooting. As he defines it, an experiment from a photography.
A visual experiment featuring two of the characters of the avanguardian writer Urmuz. The documentary is composed of scraps of memories of the people who are currently living on the street where the author used to live: Apolodor street; followed by two of his absurd stories shaped in a state of fiction around its two main characters, Stamate and Ismail.
At the seaside, on the beach, two people experience extreme situations. A beautiful western mother asks a gypsy boy to look after her 4 year old baby; a husband and father fights ennui by flirting with the same beautiful foreigner while teaching her how to swim. But the story takes a different course when the beautiful mother disappears in the waves.
A delightful jeu d’esprit combining yearning romance, gentle action (of the pickpocketing kind), hints of romance, and cinematic dazzle, Sparrow surprises and beguiles. A band of four elegantly proficient Hong Kong pickpockets encounter an irresistibly, dangerously seductive woman. She leads them on a tangled caper whose ultimate purpose is as formally elegant as it is emotionally resonant. The inspiration is French, but much more Demy than Melville. Virtually a musical without songs. And the final, glorious slow motion umbrella sequence is a Berkeley dance number in its physical verve, choreographic complexity, and dedication to maximum visual pleasure. Champagne sparkle with a tender heart. (S. Kraicer)
The first personal film of Johnnie To, Loving You sets the standard for what follows. A professional cop but neglectful husband, suffers a gunshot wound in the head. The Chinese title of the film, a super cop without taste refers to an odd symptom of his injury: the loss of his sense of taste and smell. In convalescence, he discovers, slowly and subtly, how to revive his relationship with his wife. Then the criminal who shot him returns to exact a revenge that expands, operatically, to gloriously disturbing pyrotechnical excess. An satisfyingly mature emotional resonance to the relationship between husband and wife gives this cop and crook drama surprising emotional depth. (S. Kraicer)
2003, Fehlfarben, Berlin: When reality caught up with you, you’ve got no friends left, not even alcohol. German Punk at it’s best, that’s what it felt like, in 1982. There will never be another Auschwitz, but bombs on Belgrade… Time is mingled, decades displaced. Accompanied by a karaoke soundtrack, those were the days.
Two killers, two bosses, two molls, doubled fates. This is the end of the Hong Kong hero film, the genre made popular by John Woo in the 1980s. To deconstructs the genre with camera motion and abstracted color, turning the guy with a gun story into a classically symmetrical celebration of structure. When ice-cool Leon Lai and cowboy-tough Lau Ching-wan’s rival gangland bosses form an alliance, the two gunmen become superfluous. Their game playing turns to alliance and then tragedy, as they discover they are paired avatars of outmoded individual heroism. A textbook example of To’s ability to infuse formalist play with emotional effect: every betrayal and sacrifice packs a wallop. (S. Kraicer)
A period opera-comedy based on a Chinese folk legend, featuring a complicated love triangle of ambivalent gender. Female outlaw warrior Zheng Wu Yen and a Fairy Enchantress who moves between male and female personas vie for the affections of the Emperor Qi. When enemy kingdoms attack, Wu Yen saves the day, then must decide her romantic fate. Brilliant, goofy comic performances animate farcical interludes that mask an underlying romantic despair; free-floating gender play and Rabelaisian anarchic play offers one solution to the pull of tragic fate. This crazed nonsense comedy at HK speed attacks reality and sanity, in a kinetic blur of unreason as an antidote to terror. (S. Kraicer)
In this movie there’s no car chases, there’s no one with a gun in his hand, nobody screaming, no one saving nobody; no one is abandoned, no one falls in someone’s arms; there’s no colors; no one makes a confession; no one looks at the clouds through the window of a plane; in this movie there’s no endless horizon nor the sea.
Huge high-rise residential buildings are built in a circle around a kind of park in the middle of which are swimming pools, restaurants and bars. This is, where the so-called Deutschländer live, for the most part Turks who worked abroad, mostly in the Federal Republic of Germany, for many years. The have saved up for years, in order to enjoy their retirement here. But they haven’t really arrived back in Turkey ‚ too much time has passed by. So they remain among themselves, these re-immigrants. For many it is no longer possible to return to the homeland‚Ķ
Arriving in Tokyo, Yoichi meets older Michio, who gets him a job in the yakuza-owned nightclub where he works. A country boy with guts but no grasp of big-city rules, Yoichi immediately makes an enemy of club manager Matsuo, at the same time impressing mob boss Otani with his courage. Intervening when he sees Matsuo mistreating his lover, Yuko, Yoichi gets a knife wound and a discarded gangster’s moll for his troubles. Recruited by Otani to collect gambling debts, Yoichi and Michio witness the absence of passion between the boss and his girl, Miya. Moving in on Michio, Miya confides in him that Otani is a junkie, driven to drugs by his increasing lack of nerve.
