Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first film set entirely in present-day Taiwan, Goodbye South, Goodbye concerns two low-level gangster brothers – easygoing Gao (Jack Kao) and impulsive Flathead (Giong Lim) – who, along with their girlfriends Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh) and Ying (Kuei-Yin Hsu), navigate the rural outskirts of Taipei trying to earn enough money to open a…

The lingering effect of the past on the present is once again Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s thematic focus in Good Men, Good Women, which jumps back and forth between contemporary Taiwan, the immediate past, and the 1940s and ‘50s to tell a fractured tale of personal and national treachery. Lian Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) is an actress…

I’ve always found Rutger Hauer to be an awesomely menacing actor, and The Hitcher – Robert Harmon’s preposterous thriller about a kid named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) who picks up a hitchhiker (Hauer) in Texas and winds up being terrorized by the stranger – does nothing to dispel that notion. The film, written by…

Mere months after the U.S. release of Zhang Yimou’s Hero – a film which was made in 2002 but then inexplicably left on a shelf for two years by Miramax – the acclaimed Chinese director returns with House of Flying Daggers, a significantly superior samurai epic about an ardent love triangle between a fetching assassin…

Maddeningly uneven but mildly amusing, David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees – a philosophical examination of the meaning of life disguised as a droll screwball comedy – had me simultaneously laughing at its good-natured wackiness and revolting against its faux-weighty intellectualism. Earnest environmentalist Albert (Jason Schwartzman) is fighting urban sprawl by working to protect marshland…

Keren Yedaya’s Or (My Treasure), winner of the Camera d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a dour screed against prostitution that views the profession as merely a crime perpetrated against desperate, downtrodden women; never, even in its most tender, incisive moments, does it consider the fact that women frequently choose this line of…

Calling a thriller “Hitchcockian” has become such a common film criticism trope that the label scarcely signifies anything anymore (except, I guess, that it’s a good thriller). Cédric Kahn’s Red Lights is the latest recipient of this largely meaningless designation, and while it never approaches the chilling artistry of Vertigo or Rear Window, it’s still…