I hadn't seen any Johnnie To film in probably 15 years or so, and back in the day it was only on DVD. I enjoyed this, but I have to say, I still don't fully understand the To cult. The screenings at MOMA have been sold out each of the last three nights. When To finished his introduction, a gaggle of young people leaped from their seats and surrounded him. Don’t get me wrong: the movie itself is pretty entertaining.…

What a beautiful movie. So great to see Hou working through so much of his signature style in what was still early in his career. Like most of his movies, he's interested in the way memory shapes our understanding of the past. But this film is more personal than his later political films. Here, he’s not interested in the distortions or the intensifications of facts as he would become later; here, I think he’s interested in the way memory is…

Hou’s work was a turn-of-the-century obsession for me, but I haven't devoted much of my intellectual energies toward him in quite a long time now, so it was an interesting experience to return to this film more than two decades after I last saw it. Back in the day, I think I may have undervalued his early work because I saw it mostly as an early stage in an evolutionary development toward his high intellectual historian/philosopher apotheosis in City of…

This is the movie of an older man. A man of an earlier generation. And I mean that as a compliment, of course. Because this seems wise in its idiosyncratic style and preoccupations. It’s a movie steeped in nostalgia and resignation—but also the sage acceptance of the dominance of those two phenomena as we age (but also a yearning to move beyond them, to revive or reclaim one’s youth). It's a movie wondering about whether we can recover or unravel…

2004 Screening Notes: I was surprised how much I liked this. I thought it was a lot better than Elephant, mostly because it had all the aesthetic plusses of Elephant, but because it was about nothing, it had none of that film’s ponderously self-important minuses. Some of these long, meandering, Bela Tarrish tracking shots through the hilly, scrub-brush desert were just amazing. I could watch stuff like that all day. Near the end, the film achieves a mysteriously poetic abstractness…

2004 Screening Notes: I chanced upon this on Channel 13. I hadn’t seen this one in twelve years or more, but it’s always (secretly) been a guilty pleasure of mine. The movie’s weaknesses seem obvious: whenever Allen depicts upper-class people having intellectual discussions, everything seems artificial and strained: (e.g., all the talk about opera and German philosophy) and yet I don’t laugh at these sections. Most sensible intelligent moviegoers tend to like a movie’s good parts and dislike its bad…