Crimson River [非常目击] (2020)

Crimson River is another in the iQiYi Light On series of TV crima dramas. Unlike most of the recent series which are set in large urban areas, this is set in a town on the Wu river (a tributary of the Yangste river) near the Three Gorges. A woman's body is found in circumstances which…

Black Coal, Thin Ice [白日焰火] (2014)

One of the best Chinese films of the last decade. It is shot in a cold and dismal Harbin where even the garish neon lights only make the city look colder and more dismal. It opens in 1999 when Detective Zhang Zili's [Liao Fan] wife is divorcing him and body parts are appearing in coal…

Burning Ice [无证之罪] (2017)

Burning Ice is a 2017 precursor of iQiYi's Light On series of TV dramas which now includes The Bad Kids and Kidnapping Game. It's really quite good. Set in the icy northern city of Harbin, criminal Sun Hongyun is killed in a way which resembles previous murders by a serial killer known as the Snowman.…

Baober in Love [恋爱中的宝贝] (2004)

Baober in Love is a striking - both thematically and visually - satirical portrait of life in early twenty-first century Beijing. Liu Zhi [Huang Jue] is a successful executive in a beautiful apartment and a loveless marriage with RanRan [Qiu Qiu]. One day Baober [Zhou Xun] finds a videotape made by Liu bemoaning his lot…

Chinese cinema in the new Millennium

This note looks at Chinese cinema in the new Millennium from 2000 to the COVID crisis of 2020. In this period, in contrast to the 1980s and 1990s, there was an absence of great cinematic movements: there has been no Seventh Generation. This has perhaps impacted on the academic study of Chinese cinema as much…

Outcry and Whisper [喊价和耳语] (2020)

Festival International Jean Rouch 2020 A documentary outlining the difficult lives of many women in today’s China. The film looks at a number of different women including a factory worker in Jiangsu who has been engaged, through a matchmaker, to a man from her home town who she hardly knows, a labour activist who has…

Kidnapping Game [十日游戏] (2020)

This is a another crime-related TV series produced by iQiYi in the Light On series which includes The Bad Kids. Game designer Yu Hai [a lugrbrious Zhu Yawen] has put all his money into developing a new game but his investor Shen Hui [Liu Yijun] suddenly decides to pull out. This would mean that Yu…

Kekexili: Mountain Patrol [可可西里] (2004)

Set in 1996, a voluntary patrol, led by Ritai [Duobujie], attempts to stop the widespread poaching of antelope by armed gangs. Set on the Kekexili plateau (mainly in Tibet), 4,700 m above sea level, the film is based on a true story. When one of the patrol is killed by the poachers, a Beijing newspaper…

A Murderous Affair in Horizon Tower [摩天大楼] (2020)

A Murderous Affair is another in the recent number of (relatively) short crime-driven Chinese TV series. But, like the clunky English title (Skyscrapers in Chinese), this works less well than The Bad Kids. The series revolves around the death of Zhong Meibao [Angelababy aka Yang Ying] in her plush apartment in Horizon Tower (shot in…