NYFF: A Family Tour

Murtada Elfadl reporting on the New York Film Festival

Early on in A Family Tour a reporter asks the lead character, a Chinese film director exiled in Hong Kong, why she makes political films. She answers that everything she makes is personal. Over the next two hours the film shows us exactly how the political is never separate from the personal.

The film is autobiographical, the director Ying Liang having lived in exile in Hong Kong since making When Night Falls (2012), a sharply critical look at the biased judicial system in China. He has switched the protagonist’s gender so we are following a female director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and small child...

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Where is Fan Bingbing?

by Nathaniel R

Fan Bingbing in May at Cannes with other female superstars, a month before she disappeared.

We've mentioned this frightening story twice before in news roundups but since it's making another round through more mainstream websites today -- it takes the big ones time with the foreign superstars --  we should update you. 

Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing (I Am Not Madame Bovary, X-Men Days of Future Past), who we always love covering in her Cannes appearances, is STILL missing. The media started suspecting that she'd vanished in July since she isn't exactly shy about public appearances, red carpets and the like...

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TIFF Delivers an Oscar bound-surprise with "Green Book"

by Nathaniel R

Go figure. The winner of TIFF's "Grolsch's People's Choice Award" is a film that literally none of my TIFF airbnb troupe (Joe Reid, Chris Feil, Nick Davis and I) saw during our 10 day stretch in Ontario. Green Book by Peter Farrelly (yes, of Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary fame) took TIFF's most coveted prize. (the runners up were Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma). So we'll have to add it to the Best Picture chart when we update this week (we're looking at probably Wednesday night for across the board updates to reflect all the festival madness).

In the entire 40 year history of this prize, stretching From Girlfriends (1978) through Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), 16 of the winners went on to Best Picture nods at the Oscars. The 40 winners also include 7 future Best Picture winners, 6 future Best Foreign Language Film winners, and 2 future Best Documentary Feature winners. The Oscar correlation is getting stronger all the time, too...

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Posterized: Michelle Yeoh

by Nathaniel R

It's a new season of our series Posterized in which we look back at the entire careers of various actors and directors. Last week Spike Lee joints. Today, Malaysia's finest: Michelle Yeoh. The fifty-six year old Asian superstar is currently grande dame'ing it through the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, giving the movie nearly all of its dramatic bite through her excellent nuanced underplaying of the intimidating and at times outright cruel potential mother-in-law. 

Yeoh's career is harder to track here in the US since not all of her films are released here. Nevertheless, let's do our posterized retrospective. We've pruned just a bit for lack of quality posters or obscurity but this is nearly everything starting with her first leading role in 1985 in Yes, Madam! (which has apparently been retitled Police Assassins), a dual-lead action vehicle with American actress Cynthia Rothrock (of late 80s B movie fame). Anyway... on to the pictorial survey.

How many of these 34 Michelle Yeoh projects have you seen? Was it more than you expected? The posters are after the jump...

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"I thought you were hot as fire..."

I thought you were hot as fire. In fact, you're cool as water."

Great Moments in Screen Kisses #91
Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro in House of Flying Daggers (2004)