by Jason Adams
The latest crime-thriller from director Yi'nan Diao of Black Coal Thin Ice fame is hitting the streets of New York running on March 6th when The Wild Goose Lake opens at Film Forum -- for the rest of you, here in the US anyway, it's supposed to have a national roll-out from there. The film's already played a slew of international fests (Team Experience voted it one of the best Unreleased Films of 2019 with our annual awards) -- it premiered at Cannes last spring and by fall it was playing the New York Film Festival, which is where I saw it and reviewed it, calling it...
(Hey that's me!) The story's a Noir standard, kind of Fritz Lang's M meets The Warriors...
A crime boss (Hu Ge) in the crowded city of Wuhan (an area that's been in the news lately) accidentally kills a cop, setting off a series of events that leads to both the cops and all of the different gangs chasing him down. It may be a standard story filled with mostly stock characters (an exception is Lun-Mei Kwei's performance as, basically, The Girl -- she is superb), but it's told with so much outrageous visual aplomb that I still get flashes of this pretty pretty thing here all these months later.
Keep your eyes peeled for it is my point, and here's the trailer: