“Strange things keep happening these days,” muses Jiang Ziya (Bo Huang) halfway through this extravagant adaptation of Xu Zhonglin’s 16th-century myth-and-fantasy novel Investiture of the Gods. By this point, we’ve already seen a woman kill herself with a hatpin before being possessed by the spirit of a white fox; a gurgling, pistachio-coloured demon baby is found naked in the woods; and a conjuror who can make his head float free of his body when threatened with decapitation. Strange days indeed. Ziya is one of three immortals sent to arrest the…
Tag: Period and historical films
The Battle at Water Gate Bridge review – gung-ho Chinese war epic takes on Uncle Sam
War is hell and so is a certain type of war movie: bloated, self-important and glassy-eyed with solemn patriotism. Directed by action veteran Tsui Hark, The Battle at Water Gate Bridge is the giant follow-up to China’s colossal military epic and domestic box-office smash, The Battle at Lake Changjin. It revives the tale of how, during the Korean war in the unimaginably cold winter of 1950, the Chinese army took on the US forces in Changjin county in North Korea and forced Uncle Sam to retreat towards the 38th parallel,…
One Second review – Zhang Yimou’s censored love letter to cinema reels you in
In 2019, this film from Chinese director Zhang Yimou was pulled from the Berlin film festival because of, ahem, technical problems. The real reason, widely speculated at the time, was likely to have been politically motivated: the Chinese Communist party’s displeasure with the film’s portrait of the Cultural Revolution. Now, re-edited and partially reshot, it’s finally getting a release. And with all the tinkering and tweaks, what censors haven’t been able to expunge is the torment and suffering on the face of Zhang Yi’s political prisoner; this is a deeply…