Cyclo

Tran's film is a startling achievement: brimming with moments of exquisite tenderness and shocking brutality -- sometimes simultaneously -- and each invested with an almost perverse beauty.

With its finely shaded portrayals, Cyclo, which took the Golden Lion at Venice last year, is another superb picture from Hung, a world-class filmmaker if ever there was one. [01 Aug 1996, p.F2]

Despite its seamy nature, Cyclo abounds with touching small moments, acts of kindness and acts of charity. [01 Aug 1996]

Hung skillfully evokes the oppressive congestion, squalor and heat of Ho Chi Minh City. (Amazingly, given the controlling nature of Vietnam's socialist government, the warts-and-all movie was shot on location.) But he is less successful at developing the character of his characters.

An extraordinarily imaginative director, Tran fashions Cyclo into a sensualist nightmare.

Violent and sometimes shocking, this is nevertheless superbly acted, brilliantly shot piece.

That Ho Chi Minh City is as rotten as the old Saigon, only more cynical and decrepit, is no great revelation, and we learn little of how ordinary people live or how society is organised in Vietnam today. [24 Mar 1996, p.12]