Twenty years on from Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, we return with Wang Bing to the factory floor, but this time he doesn’t muster the formal strategies or the narratological scope that once allowed him (and us) to imagine broader implications for China’s future.
Stonewalling is an attentive, engaged character study, an uncommonly candid (for China) women’s picture, and a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications.
The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be to pull together its more interesting elements into a coherent whole.
No Bears generally spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than it does building out an increasingly convoluted plot to support them.
Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt.
If Kurosawa is less interested in narrative dynamics, it’s because he’s focused on an acute understanding of societally and sociologically conditioned behavior.
