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No other director has exposed, analyzed and interpreted love relations as profoundly and as maturely as Eric Rohmer. His cycles `Six Moral Tales' and `Comedies and Proverbs', based on his own screenplays, are the best examples of how cinema can be at the same time `talkative', philosophic and incredibly effective. Rohmer's movies prove that cinema can fully explore love without being melodramatic, naive or predictable. `Chloe in the Afternoon' (`L'amour l'après midi') is the sixth and the last of his moral tales and tells the story of Frédéric, a married lawyer who loves his wife but feels tempted to have an affair with seductive Chloe, a friend of old times who reenters his now bourgeois life. As in the case of many of his other films, Rohmer's screenplay is in itself worth-reading, with intelligent dialogues and interesting ups and downs in the love triangle, but his directing of the three actors, emphasizing their ambiguities (Frédéric's principles and impulses; Hélène's apparent self-assurance and hidden anguish; Chloe's solitude and tricks), is also very impressive. `Chloe in the Afternoon' is a good reflection on the dilemmas of monogamy and the traps of possessiveness. One more to the admirable list of Rohmer's movies about love (8/10).

There are two scenes in `Yi Yi' that could express this movie's essence. The first is a dialogue between two teenagers: when Fatty says that cinema is about happiness and sadness, Ting-Ting asks why then we go to the movies, if life itself is like that. In another scene, the 8 year-old Yang-Yang says he wants to show other people what they can't see, so he take pictures of their backs. The truth of `Yi Yi' is in both messages: on the one hand, it is a movie about life as life itself, about ordinary existence in a urbanized, middle-class, modern family in Taiwan (as much universal as any other family can be today); on the other hand, it is about different perspectives of day-to-day experience, and how people manage to interact despite their often irreconcilable personal interests, half-truths and dilemmas. Against the backdrop of today's mainstream cinema, intoxicated by spectacular plots, effects and characters, director Edward Yang's movie is a quiet blessing, with its deliberately slow though never boring pace, its Ozu-like use of the camera (as a neutral, fixed and often detached eye capturing daily life), and its delicate use of silence and glass reflections to better immerse us in the characters' doubts and choices. Few movies portrayed ordinary family life in such an authentic and convincing way (8/10).

Zhang Yimou is a great director; his `Jou Dou' and `Raise the Red Lantern' are masterpieces. For no other reason, ‘The Road Home', with its naive love story and use of easy cinematographic formulas, is a bit of a disappointment. No doubt some of Yimou's qualities are here, such as his capacity to give life to characters with admirable dignity and tenacity (as Zhao Di), and his acute eye for exquisite landscapes and for color. But `The Road Home' does not go beyond this combination of nice cinematography (of a hilly Chinese village during springtime and winter) and a simple romantic plot (the young woman who takes care of her blind mother falls in love with the village teacher). The clichés and predictable formulas are frequent: the grandiose and melodramatic musical score emphasizing emotion; the slow-motion camera for ecstatic moments; the repetitive close-up of Ziyi Zhang's beautiful and inebriated face; the artificial plot obstacles adjourning the promised love. Though beautiful in its images, `The Road Home' lacks vigor and originality: it is too much style for little content (6/10).