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"There's nothing between us, but I don't want to gossip." Janus Films has released one more official trailer for the next re-release of Wong Kar Wai's beloved romantic classic In the Mood for Love, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The film originally premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and was first released in 2001 in the US. There was already a 4K restoration back in 2020, though now with the pandemic over it's time to give this a proper theatrical re-release. Don't miss it! Janus will screen the 4K restoration along with a rarely screened complementary short film titled In The Mood For Love 2001, which Wkw originally showed during his Cannes 2001 masterclass. Two neighbors, a woman and a man, form a strong bond after both suspect extramarital activities of their spouses. However, they keep their bond platonic so as not to commit similar wrongs. It's described as a "a masterful...

Following news that Wong Kar-wai’s long-awaited Blossoms Shanghai would finally be getting a North American release this year courtesy of the Criterion Channel, Janus Films has another surprise from the director debuting in theaters this week. Following a Valentine’s Day release in Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love 2001, a nine-minute expansion that was only ever screened in a 2001 Cannes masterclass, will be arriving in theaters alongside the 25th anniversary edition of his classic romance. Ahead of the release, beginning this Friday at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Center and July 4 at LA’s Laemmle Royal and Glendale, followed by an expansion, the first footage has now arrived courtesy of a new trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are...

Max’s vast library is packed with blockbusters and classics, but some of its best films fly under the radar. These hidden gems, often overlooked due to limited releases or overshadowed competition, offer unique stories, bold styles, and unforgettable performances.

We’ve ranked 10 lesser-known movies on Max, from intriguing to must-watch, that deserve your attention. Here’s why these obscure picks will surprise and captivate you.

10. The Florida Project (2017) Cre Film

A six-year-old girl and her struggling mom live in a motel near Disney World, chasing joy amid poverty. Sean Baker’s vibrant drama, led by Brooklynn Prince and Willem Dafoe, blends raw heart and colorful grit.

Its unflinching yet hopeful look at childhood feels fresh. We’re moved by its tender, overlooked story.

9. Shiva Baby (2020) Neon Heart Productions

A college student faces awkward chaos at a shiva when her sugar daddy shows up with his wife. Rachel Sennott’s...

With its lush-urban greens and reds, and neon fonts, Evan Wijaya's key art design for Indonesian romantic drama Goodbye, Farewell cannot help but evoke the 1990s cinematography work of Christopher Doyle. The quiet ennui and clutter, the lone illumination source, all do all there needs be done to give you the mood and the tone of Adriyanto Dewo's award winning film.   There is no credit block here, perhaps from it saying "Coming Soon" and being a teaser poster, but more likely, because, well, 2025. This alternate poster is in the same vein and also excellent.  ...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

During the troubled production of Ashes of Time, which was supposed to be his third film, Wong Kar-wai took some time off and did what anyone in his position would do: made another movie. And he did it with a fast-paced, highly improvisatory shooting schedule, writing pages of the script during the day and shooting them at night. The result, Chungking Express, is among Wong’s most exciting films and is an early precursor to the expressive odes to romantic longing that have come to define his work.

The title is symbolic of the film’s lively, anything-goes sensibility, representing the pair of largely unrelated stories that make up its bifurcated narrative. The first story, which takes place mostly at Chungking Mansions shopping complex in Hong Kong, focuses on the lovesick Cop 223 (Kaneshiro Takeshi), who pines over an ex-girlfriend named May. The officer has taken to collecting cans of pineapple...

Hong Kong film critic turned director Philip Yung’s latest feature begins with a harrowing crime committed by an unlikely culprit: One night, without any prior warning or explanation, a troubled 15-year-old boy named Ming (Dylan So) picks up a meat cleaver in the kitchen and then proceeds to murder his mother and sister in cold blood.

Yung explores the before and after of that shocking event through the eyes of Ming’s father, Yuen (Sean Lau), who tries to piece his life back together while also trying to figure out what may have caused his son to carry out such a horrendous act. In that sense, Papa is reminiscent of the director’s 2015 murder mystery, Port of Call, except this time the plot is not about who did it, but why. And even more so, it’s about how to go on living after facing such utter tragedy.

Shifting...

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The worst thing that ever happened to M. Night Shyamalan's was the August 5, 2002 cover of Newsweek magazine. The filmmaker was red hot coming off the surprise box office success of "The Sixth Sense" and a solid double of a hit in "Unbreakable," and about to pack theaters once again with his blockbuster sci-fi/horror opus "Signs." He was the toast of Hollywood, seemingly on the cusp of becoming a smash-crafting industry unto himself. It was a lot for one guy to deal with before the then prominent publication got completely carried away and declared the then 32-year-old director "The Next Steven Spielberg." Afterwards? It dogged him like a curse.

Shyamalan didn't handle this particularly well. Leaving aside how you feel about M. Night's movies, he followed up the mild disappointment of "The Village" with the strangely hostile "Lady in the Water,...

As much as we might deny it, fetishisation is real, it can be harmless but it can also be incredibly damaging, and when correctly rendered onscreen a particularly uneasy viewing experience. As a huge fan of films which explore topics that make us uncomfortable, Naomi Christie’s forthright AFI thesis film Object of Desire, a dark comedy ignited by the Vietnamese-American writer/director’s ceaseless experiences and observations of the hyper-sexualization of Asian women and associated disturbing links to sexual violence, instantly drew my interest. However, despite many well worn approaches to the subject, Christie’s film doesn’t depict the coercion of women who are forced into this line of work, but rather those who choose it as a way to turn the tables by financially exploiting the perpetrators of ‘yellow fever’ objectification. Object of Desire lets us tag along with its seen it all crew of empowered women...

With Wong Kar-wai being one of the names that are always mentioned when people all around the world refer to Asian cinema, we thought it would be interesting to do another ranking, and having his movies, a number of which are definitely masterpieces. As such, we asked Amp writers who have seen at least 8 of his features to rank them from worst to best. Notably, the two first titles got the same amount of votes and the third had just one vote less. In case you are wondering, the number one was the one who got most first places in the vote. Here is what the votes of Adriana Rosati, Rhythm Zaveri, Rouven Linnarz, Panos Kotzathanasis, Andrew Thayne and Jean Claude resulted in.

11. My Blueberry Nights (2007)

A young lonely woman takes a soul-searching journey across America to resolve her questions about love while encountering a series of off-beat characters along the way.

Film industry luminaries have paid fulsome homage to Indian DoP Santosh Sivan, this year’s recipient of the annual Pierre Angénieux ExcelLens in Cinematography award conferred during the Cannes Film Festival.

Hosted by professional cinema lens manufacturer Angénieux at Cannes, the award pays tribute to a renowned cinematographer and recognizes an emerging talent. Estonian-u.S cinematographer Kadri Koop will receive the Angénieux special encouragement honor.

Sivan has shot 55 feature films, including “Roja,” “Thalapathi,” “Dil Se” and “Iruvar” for Mani Ratnam, Cannes selection “Vanaprastham” for Shaji N. Karun, “Meenaxi” for M.F. Hussain and “Bride and Prejudice” for Gurinder Chadha, amongst many others. He has also shot more than 50 documentaries and directed 17 feature films including Sundance selection “The Terrorist” and Venice and Toronto selection “Asoka,” produced by and starring Shah Rukh Khan. Sivan is the first Indian member of the American Society of Cinematographers.

The DoP is the first Asian recipient of the Angénieux award,...

Whereas his last project “Happy Times”, a blend of comedy and tragedy, garnered favorable reviews but to this day remains one of the director's smaller features, Zhang Yimou's next movie, the wuxia drama “Hero” marked a huge success for its director, both critically and commercially. Even today, “Hero” is one of the fan favorites among the many films by Zhang, and together with such features as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” started a renaissance of the genre, to which the Chinese filmmaker has contributed many other stories, albeit with lesser success. In the 2002 film he tells the story of the founding of China's first dynasty, which resulted in the unification of the country after seven warring states had fought for many years to rule it entirely. Apart from being visually stunning, even by today's standards, “Hero” is a timeless story about the passions of men and how they can manipulate...

The ever-busy Japanese character actor Tadanobu Asano — currently having a moment as one of the stars of Disney’s hit samurai series Shōgun — has joined the cast of Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s upcoming culinary thriller Morte Cucina. The actor and director last collaborated two decades ago on the romantic crime film Last Life in the Universe (2003), which was Thailand’s official submission to the Oscars that year and won Asano the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival.

Set in contemporary Bangkok, Morte Cucina follows a talented young female chef named Sao who has a chance encounter with a man who sexually abused her when she was a teen. “Using her talents in the kitchen, Sao sets her plan of revenge in motion — achieving a rather unexpected result,” the film’s logline reads.

The project’s producers are keeping the nature of Asano’s role under wraps for now,...

The two of them wait for the rain to pass together, since Su Li-zhen does not want to take Chow Mo-wan's umbrella, fearing that the neighbors will realize they were together. When the rain stops, she asks him to part ways, since her husband has returned. He agrees.

Both of the cinematographers, Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, present shots that appear as if the camera is peeking in on the action while it frequently moves in slow motion. This tactic finds its apogee in this scene, as the protagonists are being watched initially from behind a corner and then from a barred window. Furthermore, when he touches her hands, his move is presented in slow motion.

In another cinematic tactic, the scene is not presented in chronological order, with the most important moments inserted randomly in the timeline, as is the case with Li-zhen's crying and her exit.

Maggie Cheung...

Beginning Friday, March 22, a new 2K restoration of My Heart Is That Eternal Rose, Patrick Tam's underseen and visually daring late-80s action-romance, opens for a one-week NY exclusive theatrical run at Metrograph In Theater.

Tam, perhaps the Hong Kong New Wave's most daring cine-modernist and a crucial influence on Wong Kar-wai, teams with Dp Christopher Doyle, a regular Wong collaborator, for a high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as three friends bound together by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, a synth-heavy score, luxuriously expressionistic imagery, and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, My Heart is That Eternal Rose exists somewhere at the intersection between Wong's cinema of longing and John Woo's cinema of wrathful vengeance. One of the unheralded masterworks of Hong Kong filmmaking. A Kani Releasing release.

The digitization and restoration of My Heart is...

With a premise that is as simple or as complex as you’d like it to be, Monkey Man anoints Dev Patel as a new action director and star. Filmed on location in Mumbai and Indonesia in the height of the Covid pandemic and saved from a Netflix direct-to-streaming deal by Jordan Peele and Universal, this film about reinvention bursts with the same frenetic energy of a Danny Boyle or John Woo picture, with Patel––co-writer, director, star, and sometimes camera operator––throwing everything he has at the screen, and then some.

The plot, on one level, is a simple revenge tale unfolding for reasons revealed at the narrative’s midpoint. Inspired by the Hindu myth of Hanuman Patel’s unnamed Kid embraces this persona in wrestling matches that have left him battle-tested before he undergoes a profound spiritual awakening. The training comes in handy when he plots his big...

Ang Lee who is known for his work on Marvel’s Hulk, directed 2012’s adventure drama film Life of Pi, based on Yann Martel’s 2001 novel of the same name. The movie starred debutant Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Rafe Spall, Adil Hussain, and Gérard Depardieu in significant roles. The story follows two survivors of a shipwreck who are on a lifeboat stranded in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days.

Upon its release, the movie received critical acclaim with an appreciation for Lee’s direction, screenplay, music, visual effects, and cinematography. The movie was nominated for eleven awards at the 85th annual Academy Awards and managed to win four out of them. Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, a comment from a veteran cinematographer about Life of Pi has resurfaced on the Internet.

Life of Pi Christopher Doyle’s strong opinions on Ang Lee’s Life of Pi winning Best Cinematography...

It’s that time of the year again when the coveted golden statuette will be handed out to the best films and performances in Hollywood. The Oscars 2024 will take place on March 10th and as always, a bunch of brilliant films and talented stars are vying for top honors. While the Academy Awards have given audiences many memorable moments over the years, they have been equally known for various controversial incidents.

Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars 2022

The most recent event in memory happened in 2022 when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for his comments on Jada Pinkett Smith’s appearance. The actor’s first Oscar win for King Richard following this incident, was sadly overshadowed. Looking back, there have been many other occasions at the Oscars that have sparked controversy.

Here Are 5 Controversial Oscar Wins That Challenged Will Smith’s Slap 1. Marlon Brando Refused The Best Actor Award...

The title of Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong cheekily references a phrase you might have seen printed on the packaging for an action figure way back in 1997, the year of the film’s original release. But it also refers to the young, wannabe triad member with the unlikely name of Autumn Moon (Sam Lee), as well as to the production circumstances of the film itself. Its declarative label is somewhat excessive, though, as there’s no mistaking where and when Moon’s misadventures take place: Chan’s quirky, gangster-adjacent flick, so infused with washed-out and blue-filtered imagery, presents a portrait of Hong Kong that bears more than a passing resemblance to Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle’s early collaborations.

From its handheld shots racing through open-air markets, to its use of expressionistic step-printed slow motion, to the way its perspectives on the city take inspiration from the cramped...

A holy grail of restorations is premiering soon. As part of Film at Lincoln Center’s Desire/Expectations: The Films of Edward Yang the 4K restoration of the late, legendary director’s 1996 feature Mahjong will world-premiere.

Along with all of his features, the series also includes the anthology film In Our Time, which he contributed to, as well as The Winter of 1905, directed by Yu Wei-cheng and scripted by Yang, and nine minutes from Yang’s unfinished animated martial arts film The Wind (2002–2005), whose production was halted after his death.

Also featuring the recently restored A Confucian Confusion, a proper run of Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day, Taipei Story, That Day, on the Beach, and Terrorizers, see the lineup and schedule below, with tickets on sale Thursday, November 30 at noon and an Flc Members pre-sale starting Wednesday, November 29 at noon.

The Winter of 1905

Yu Wei-cheng, 1982, Taiwan, 90m

Mandarin with...

Exclusive: Golden Globe winner Emma Corrin (The Crown) and Cesar nominee Lucie Zhang are set to star in Jenny Suen’s English language feature debut Peaches, which Coco Francini (Fingernails) will produce and Oscar winner Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton will executive-produce for Dirty Films.

Set in contemporary Hong Kong, the movie will follow two spoiled best friends who scam sugar daddies for a living. When they discover a Hermes Birkin bag they were gifted is a fake, their “boyfriends” and crimes catch up with them.

The film is an adaptation of Vera Chitylova’s 1966 Czech New Wave comedy Daisies.

Paris-based MK2 Films, whose slate includes Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall and Cannes Un Certain Regard winner How to Have Sex, is handling international sales and discussed the project with buyers at last week’s AFM. The film will start production early next year in Hong Kong.

Ten years after he attended the Tokyo International Film Festival for the screening of The Grandmaster, Tony Leung returned to the festival on Thursday to conduct a masterclass.

The Hong Kong acting icon, dressed in a black tailored suit and fashion-forward Kolor sneakers, was met with warm applause at a packed house at Tokyo’s Hulic Hall. Festival programmer Shozo Ichiyama began proceedings with Leung’s early years as an actor, namely his work with Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien on the classic A City of Sadness, which Ichiyama considered one of his personal favorites. A City of Sadness was notable as it was set in Taipei, and Leung, at the time, had no experience working outside of Hong Kong and couldn’t speak Mandarin.

“It was the start of my career, and I wanted to challenge myself,” Leung said through an interpreter on why he took on the role, given...

Kristina Klebe is raising funds for her new movie Nyx on Indiegogo, which combines elements of a psychological thriller, relationship drama, and horror film. The plot follows Mia Nox, a renowned pianist who suffers a spinal injury and finds herself in a wheelchair, leading to a dark and complex story about love and art. Nyx aims to shed light on spinal shock syndrome, a little known condition resulting from high-impact trauma that can have physical, psychological, and emotional effects.

Kristina Klebe is currently raising funds for her new movie Nyx on Indiegogo. The movie is described as having "the visuals of a psychological thriller, the naturalistic acting of a relationship drama and the sound design of a horror film." Klebe will serve as writer, director, actor, and producer on the project, while the other members of the film's cast consist of Byron Clohessy, Robert Clohessy and Kim Director. As per Klebe's pitch:

"So,...

Hong Kong cinema is associated with action films which most often bring to mind male protagonists. Most undeservedly so since, thanks to the characteristics of Hong Kong martial arts films, women have been successfully surmounting their male counterparts with training, agility, and wits in them for many decades. The masters, such as King Hu and Tsui Hark, were well-aware of it. They were among the ones who discovered outstanding artists whose roles were ahead of their times and set out new directions for the development of popular cinema.

Hong Kong is not just about action cinema, but also brilliant comedies and dramas, and sharp tales with social overtones, in which fascinating, complex female characters are also present. The Hong Kong Heroines section brings back strong heroines and the great roles of stars, including Cheng Pei-pei, Sylvia Chang, Cherry Ngan, and Maggie Cheung. The section presents Hong Kong cinema from the...

It is said that to enjoy some movies, one has to leave their brain at home. This happens to be a common phrase that is often used in order to defend many Bollywood potboilers, which are headlined by fifty-something, steroid-bodied superstars. The storyline of Netflix’s new comedy-thriller Head To Head, from Saudi Arabia, is a hundred times more ludicrous than all those Bollywood movies. Yet you perfectly enjoy it with your brain perfectly attached to your body, as it’s supposed to be.

Five years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined watching a Saudi movie, let alone reviewing it for work. But with the rise of Netflix, every kind of movie from every corner of the world has become accessible to us. Sure, with the streaming giant taking the reins of production, a lot of the movies are being presented to us with a particular Netflix filter on them.

In the end, it was always going to come down to those youngsters.

China’s First International Film Festival, which has now 17 editions, prided itself on providing a platform on which the county’s next generation of filmmakers can reveal their talent. Fittingly, then, the event is attended by a predominantly young audience. They travel in large numbers to the city of Xining, set in China’s mountainous central region, fringing the Tibetan Plateau, and they really do feast on the program of independent films.

There were 98 films screened across the festival’s nine-day run, 27 features and 71 shorts among them. There were Q&a sessions with the audience that often ran well into overtime, such was the enthusiasm shown for everything from a gritty but life-affirming three-hour drama about a migrant woman trying to forge a life in a big city (Qin Tian’s Fate of the Moonlight) to a...

The '90s were an exciting but strange time for cinema. More franchise films were being made, more chaotic filmmaking styles were being employed, and there was a resurgence in the indie film scene with many promising new artists rising up. Many great movies came out during this period from great filmmakers, but one director had an exceptional run of films that could be considered some of the greatest of the decade. That director is the Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai.

The films made by Kar-wai during this decade would define his unique style of filmmaking and cement him as one of the greatest artists in filmmaking. They include such masterpieces as Days of Being Wild, Chunking Express, Fallen Angels, and Happy Together, each film bearing his iconic style and moving storytelling. To further prove how important he was to the decade, here are four reasons why Wong Kar-wai was...

Acclaimed Thai auteur Pen-ek Ratanaruang is reteaming with veteran, Asia-based cinematographer Christopher Doyle for a subversive psychological thriller set in the colorful world of Thai cuisine.

Bangkok-set film Morte Cucina follows a talented young female chef named Sao who has a chance encounter with a man who sexually abused her when she was a teen. “Using her talents in the kitchen, Sao sets her plan of revenge in motion — achieving a rather unexpected result,” the film’s logline reads.

Morte Cucina is co-written by Pen-ek and Kongdej Jaturanrasamee (Hunger, Faces of Anne). It will be Pen-ek’s first feature since his noir crime thriller Samui Song, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2017. The project reunites the Thai auteur and Doyle for the first time since their 2003 project together, Last Life in the Universe, which was Thailand’s official submission to the Oscars that year, and also won its Japanese star,...

With sun-drenched shots of the Italian countryside, the Call Me By Your Name aesthetic immerses audiences in its European setting. A heartwarming love story set in Northern Italy in the 1980s, Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name was the breakout movie of Timothée Chalamet in the role of lovesick Elio Perlman. It received four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Chalamet — he became the third-youngest actor to receive the honor — and it won in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. Surprisingly, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s sumptuous visuals didn’t receive a nomination for Best Cinematography.

Since most movies about two people falling in love focus on the performances and the actors’ chemistry above anything else, the cinematography often takes a backseat in the romance genre. Call Me By Your Name stands out for having great performances and great cinematography. However, it's not unique in that regard. From...

Marking her third Dn appearance, Director Meredith Hama-Brown finds parallels between grief and otherworldly encounters in her latest music video for Loscil’s Sol. Hama-Brown reflects the rhythmic pulse of Loscil’s song with a combination of powerful, lucid 35mm cinematography and warm, retro-looking VFX as she weaves together the story of a woman (played by Mari Yamamoto) who in the wake of losing her partner has a mysterious alien encounter in her backyard. By combining these two profound and transformative experiences, she is able to draw an astute philosophical observation on what it means to face the mysteries of life. Dn caught up with Hama-Brown for the premiere of Sol and to talk over its creation, how she embraced light and lasers to construct a version of a UFO that hadn’t been seen on screen before, and the practicality of incorporating Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Doyle’s signature visual effect.

by Simon Ramshaw

Few production companies hold the same strength of trademark from its creator than Wong Kar-wai’s Jet Tone Films. While many of us know the celebrated Hong Kong filmmaker for his sumptuous romantic works like “Chungking Express” and “In the Mood for Love”, his career as a producer for other directors holds some of the same trail-blazing intrigue he brought to Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s. Set up in 1991, Jet Tone Films has been responsible for funding Wong’s oeuvre and has recently expanded overseas to collaborate with Japanese and Thai directors (Sabu and Nattawut Poonpiriya respectively) alike. But in this period of blossoming experimentation in the 1990s, Wong set prolific Hong Kong actor Eric Kot Man-Fai a challenge to direct a project about first love, and thus, the sprawling, affectionate “First Love: Litter on the Breeze” was born.

on Amazon by clicking...

Often regarded as the feature which ignited what ultimately was titled the Taiwanese New Way, Edward Yang’s “That Day, on the Beach” set the tone for his works and was also the logical next step from his short films, both in terms of narration and aesthetics. As the feature has recently been restored and screened in many international festivals, together with his other works such as “Yi Yi” and “A Bright Summer Day”, audiences can experience for themselves how the themes of this director expanded over time, and also his keen eye on developments, on the political, social and economic level, which would shape the lives of many people, even outside Taiwan. Given the pressures on young people to become mature even quicker nowadays in the age of digitization, Yang’s nostalgic and often skeptical look at his country perhaps has become increasingly relevant, besides being a showcase of...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHale County This Morning, This Evening.RaMell Ross—whose 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening was among the best releases of the 2010s—will direct an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winner The Nickel Boys, which will star Aunjanue Ellis. In another major production announcement, Kantemir Balagov will make his English-language debut with Butterfly Jam, produced by Ari Aster. (Ela Bittencourt wrote about Balagov’s WWII-set sophomore feature Beanpole for Notebook.)’Tis the season. Yorgos Lanthimos is also about to begin filming his next movie—the un-Googleable And—in New Orleans. The cast includes Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, and, for Stars at Noon fans, both Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn.That’s not all. James Gray is on board to direct and substantially revise the screenplay for a “young John F. Kennedy” biopic.

Remakes are as old as the movies themselves, and despite a certain stigma, there's nothing wrong with a remake. In fact, on several notable occasions, remakes can be just as good — if not better — than their forbearers. Horror remakes, in particular, can yield great results — David Cronenberg's remake of "The Fly" and John Carpenter's remake of "The Thing" are both considered some of the best horror movies of all time. But in the early 2000s, studios got horror-remake-happy, and the fruits of these efforts were also quite rotten. More often than not, the horror remake boom of the early 2000s yielded watered-down, lackluster imitations of what had come before.

But not always. Sometimes, an inspired filmmaker comes along and works magic. What makes a good horror remake? That feels like an almost impossible question to answer, and I want to paraphrase United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart...

"It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered ... to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away."

So reads the opening chyron at the beginning of Wong Kar-Wai's smoldering 2000 pseudo-romance "In the Mood for Love," a film about two attractive, well-dressed people who spend a lot of time in restaurant booths staring at one another with longing in their eyes, only to turn away from each other and go their separate ways. 

The two people in question are Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, two of the biggest movie stars in the world. Leung looks irresistibly dashing with his impeccably combed hair and clean suits, and Cheung's hair and dresses are so dazzling they can only be the result of a supernatural effort. These two characters ache to have an affair and spend the entirety...

For those who have watched Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 feature “Chungking Express” his following feature “Fallen Angels” is at times considered something like an addition to the prior story, especially since the director himself has stated he wanted to include it as the third segment in “Chungking Express”. However, Wong Kar-wai decided to go in a different direction, resulting in the decision to make this a stand-alone feature, which, nevertheless, is in many ways, story-wise and aesthetically, connected to “Chungking Express”. In the end, “Fallen Angels” explores some of the same themes as the director’s 1994 feature, for example the image of the city as a maze of obsessions, while also dealing with the darker side of extreme emotions, leading to isolation and rejection, thus adding another layer to his view on the dichotomy of man and metropolis.

“Fallen Angels” is screening at InlanDimensions

The story revolves around three main characters.

Exclusive: Metro International has pre-sold UK rights to feature Late In Summer to Lionsgate UK.

The period drama is due to star Emily Watson (Breaking The Waves) and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Farming) alongside Harriet Walter (Succession) who has newly joined the cast.

Set just as WWII draws to a close, the film will chart how a brief encounter leads to a love affair that ignites a dormant passion in a lonely farmer’s wife and an American GI. With the world around them conspiring against their relationship, it’s not long before the realities of their existence force them to make a very difficult decision.

Debbie Gray produces through Genesius Pictures. BAFTA-nominee Timothy Spall (Mr. Turner) has joined as executive producer. Novelist Talitha Stevenson will make her directorial debut from her own script. Her creative team includes revered cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In the Mood For Love...

As post-production continues on Blossoms Shanghai, Wong Kar Wai has been dabbling in NFTs and, once again, revisited In the Mood for Love—this time not with his eyes and ears but with his… nose. Jet Tone Films have announced “In The Mood For Love – Rouge” and “In The Mood For Love – Noir,” a collaboration between Wong and Noritaka Tatehana to recreate the scent from his classic romance. Conceptualized by the director, this collaboration offers a limited collection of unique artwork pieces designed by Tatehana and handcrafted in Japan.

Read Wong’s introduction on the process below.

If I were to describe In the Mood for Love as a scent, what would it be? My take is that it would be the smell that flooded the senses of Chow Mo-Wan when he buried his secret in the stone walls of Angkor Wat; fresh grass in the morning, damp earth on the walls,...

This past March, the cinematographer Christopher Doyle was under Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai, waiting to return to Hong Kong. “They take us floor by floor, apartment by apartment, name by name to the school around the corner for testing… then they march us back,” he wrote in an email. While waiting to return to Hong Kong, he was finalizing a book of poetry and collages. He had recently finished a feature in the south of China; before that he shot “Love After Love” for director Ann Hui.

Based on an Eileen Cheng short story, “Love After Love” (currently streaming on Mubi) charts the decline of wealthy playboy George Chiao (Eddie Peng), coupled with the corruption of Ge Weilong (Sandra Ma), who will ultimately become his wife. Set in Shanghai largely before World War II, it is a hypnotic, feverish look at a privileged world disappearing faster than anyone realizes.

With over 120 films to his credit,...

Revered cinematographer Darius Khondji loves to shoot on film but has made his peace with digital, he revealed in a masterclass at Cannes on Thursday.

“It’s just so sexy to shoot on film, the texture is beautiful, it looks great on skin tones,” Khondji said. Khondji said that digital can be very beautiful too but it can make make cinematographers lazy. Khondji’s first experience of shooting digitally was on Nicolas Winding Refn’s Amazon Prime Video series “Too Old to Die Young.” He initially thought that the series would be shot on film, because Refn asked him to shoot it while at a Kodak lunch in Cannes.

The cinematographer eventually reconciled to the idea of shooting digital after conversations with Refn and running several tests with digital cameras.

“He convinced me that it would be very experimental and frankly, we could really be very free on it,” said Khondji.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Titane (2021).Actor Vincent Lindon has been announced as the president of this year's Cannes competition jury, leading a group that includes Rebecca Hall, Deepika Padukone, Jeff Nichols, and Joachim Trier. The festival has also added several pleasant surprises to the lineup: films by Serge Bozon, Albert Serra, Louis Garrel, Patricio Guzmán, and more.Subscribe to our limited-edition, print-only Notebook magazine by April 30 to secure your copy of Issue 1, featuring a conversation between Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Yoshitomo Nara, a carte blanche contribution by Christopher Doyle, and much more.Recommended VIEWINGAbove: I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) .Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation has launched a virtual screening room for restored films, called the Restoration Screening Room. The fun begins with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1945 film I Know Where I'm Going!, which will be available for...

Nattawut “Baz” Poonpiriya kills it once again with his hotly-anticipated feature, “One for the Road.” The Thai director first attracted attention with his 2017 high school testing heist, “Bad Genius” (now available on Netflix!) — the highest grossing film of the year in his homeland. Now, in his 2021 feature, he’s joined forces with legendary Hong Kong producer Wong Kar-wai to spin a nostalgic tale with a modern twist.

“One for the Road” is screening at Udine Far East Film Festival

“One for the Road” kicks off at New York bar. Boss (Tor Thanapob) is an attractive, but noncommittal bartender; he treats his customers with more than just drinks on the regular. One night, an old friend from Bangkok, Aood (Ice Natara) asks him to return. It turns out that Aood has cancer, and furthermore, has a strange request: he wants to revisit all of his exes again before he dies. Boss...

Although the question of which Wong Kar-wai film is the best could last eternally, for this particular writer, there is no doubt that “Chungking Express” stands on a level above the rest, with the recent restorations actually cementing the fact in the most eloquent fashion. Let us check the reasons why.

“Chungking Express” is streaming on Mubi Malaysia

Cop 223 has been rejected by his former girlfriend, May, on April Fool’s Day. Since then, he has been buying one can of pineapple every day with an expiration date of May 1, his birthday, and in an utterly baseless assumption, he believes that if she does not call by the time he has bought 30 cans, their love will expire. In this scenario, he will eat all the cans. Eventually, he meets a woman with a blonde wig who tries to solve her own, much more dangerous issues, and the two of them start sharing their solitude.

For those who have watched Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 feature “Chungking Express” his following feature “Fallen Angels” is at times considered something like an addition to the prior story, especially since the director himself has stated he wanted to include it as the third segment in “Chungking Express”. However, Wong Kar-wai decided to go in a different direction, resulting in the decision to make this a stand-alone feature, which, nevertheless, is in many ways, story-wise and aesthetically, connected to “Chungking Express”. In the end, “Fallen Angels” explores some of the same themes as the director’s 1994 feature, for example the image of the city as a maze of obsessions, while also dealing with the darker side of extreme emotions, leading to isolation and rejection, thus adding another layer to his view on the dichotomy of man and metropolis.

“Fallen Angels” is streaming on Mubi Malaysia

The story revolves around three main characters.

Marking the third time Ann Hui adapts a novel by Eileen Chang (after “Love in a Fallen City” and “Eighteen Springs”), “Love After Love” is based on the short story “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier”, a work that the director herself admitted was quite hard to bring to the big screen, particularly due to its dialogue-heavy nature. Nevertheless, Hui managed to gather an all-star team, including actors like Ma Sichun, Eddie Peng and Feye Yu, Dp Christopher Doyle and Ryuichi Sakamoto who handled the score. Let us see how the movie fares however.

“Love After Love” is screening at Asian Pop-up Cinema

Weilong is a young woman from Shanghai, who has come to Hong Kong to finish her education away from her strict father. Facing intense financial issues, however, she ends up at the gates of Madame Liang’s mansion, her father’s sister who was excommunicated from the family...

Initially a 2006 stage play by award-winning playwright Haresh Sharma, Christopher Doyle-lensed “Fundamentally Happy” had a successful festival run in 2015 and 2016, screening in cinemas all over the world, before finding its way to Mubi Malaysia this year.

“Fundamentally Happy” is streaming on Mubi Malaysia

The film unfolds like a stage play, taking place in a single location, a two-storey terrace house, where the two protagonists, Eric, a 30-year-old social worker who has flown back to Singapore because of his father’s death, and Habiba, an old neighbor he has not seen for years, meet. Initially, their discussion follows the rules of a reunion between two individuals who have cherished each other in the past, mostly through trips down memory lane. Soon, however, Eric’s real purpose for visiting is revealed, having to do with Habiba’s husband, Ismail, whom he claims had been molesting him for years when he was a child.

Other contenders include biopic ‘Anita’, ‘Drifting’ and ‘Raging Fire’, the final thriller by the late Benny Chan.

Soi Cheang’s crime thriller Limbo leads the pack for the 40th Hong Kong Film Awards (Hkfa) with 14 nominations, as the event prepares to return as an in-person ceremony following last year’s cancellation as a result of the pandemic.

The black and white crime noir, which premiered in Berlinale Special in 2021, secured nods including best film, best director and for actors Lam Ka Tung[/link], Cya Liu and Fish Liew. The thriller centres on a veteran detective and rookie copy who team up to catch a serial killer.

St Moritz-set thriller stars Argento as a woman whose former life as a secret agent catches up with her.

Paris-based WTFilms has taken world sales rights on French director Jérôme Dassier’s spy thriller Let Her Kill You starring Italian star Asia Argento and award-winning French actress Jeanne Balibar.

Taking inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days Of The Condor, it revolves around a mysterious espionage case.

Argento stars as a woman whose former life as a secret agent catches up with her when she discovers her isolated chalet home in the mountains of Switzerland...

Marking the third time Ann Hui adapts a novel by Eileen Chang (after “Love in a Fallen City” and “Eighteen Springs”), “Love After Love” is based on the short story “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier”, a work that the director herself admitted was quite hard to bring to the big screen, particularly due to its dialogue-heavy nature. Nevertheless, Hui managed to gather an all-star team, including actors like Ma Sichun, Eddie Peng and Feye Yu, Dp Christopher Doyle and Ryuichi Sakamoto who handled the score. Let us see how the movie fares however.

“Love after Love” is available from Fortissimo Films

Weilong is a young woman from Shanghai, who has come to Hong Kong to finish her education away from her strict father. Facing intense financial issues, however, she ends up at the gates of Madame Liang’s mansion, her father’s sister who was excommunicated from the family when...

For those who have watched Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 feature “Chungking Express” his following feature “Fallen Angels” is at times considered something like an addition to the prior story, especially since the director himself has stated he wanted to include it as the third segment in “Chungking Express”. However, Wong Kar-wai decided to go in a different direction, resulting in the decision to make this a stand-alone feature, which, nevertheless, is in many ways, story-wise and aesthetically, connected to “Chungking Express”. In the end, “Fallen Angels” explores some of the same themes as the director’s 1994 feature, for example the image of the city as a maze of obsessions, while also dealing with the darker side of extreme emotions, leading to isolation and rejection, thus adding another layer to his view on the dichotomy of man and metropolis.

Fallen Angels is screening at Five Flavours Asian Film Festival

The story revolves around three main characters.

Twenty years ago, on July 1st 1997, the UK handed-over sovereignty of Hong Kong back to China, with a fifty years grace period, before Chinese laws would take effect. With this being the case, Shanghai-born Hong Kong resident Wong Kar-wai went to great lengths to ensure his latest work, “Happy Together”, was released before this date, although his reasons may not appear clear at face value.

“Happy Together” is screening at Five Flavours Asian Film Festival

Tony Leung Chui-wai and Leslie Cheung star as Lai and Ho respectively: a gay couple travelling across Argentina, somewhat lost of direction, winding up in Buenos Aires in low paid jobs. Their hope is to reach the Iguazu Falls in the north of the country, but the lack of funds and the constant bickering in their on-off relationship prevents them from ever reaching a happy ending. As their time in Buenos Aires continues, the pair...