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Reviews
Schastlivye dni (1991)
Early work of a superb talent
This is a masterpiece.
The film captures the icy, timeless beauty of Petersburg as well as its eerie atmosphere at the time of the Soviet collapse. Balabanov's mastery of the visual language of Russian avant-garde movies of the twenties is striking. He creates a perfect movie, where every scene is vividly true in its absurdity.
Wo hu cang long: Qing ming bao jian (2016)
Good Wuxia
Not a masterpiece like the first, but a solid movie. It lacks the magic elegance of Ang Lee's film, but, although the original language is English, it feels somehow more authentically Chinese.
In a world were evil is real and eternal, an unavoidable aspect of human destiny, the baddies are more than caricatures, tragic figures themselves. I may add that I have a feeble for Asian "femmes fatales", so that the duo Blind Enchantress (Eugenia Yuan) and Mantis (Veronica Ngo) proved irresistible.
Add to that a couple of technically memorable fight scenes, some good jokes and the movie, despite its recurrent clumsiness, raises unmistakably above mediocrity.