Zhuo-Ning Su

The style-substance ratio here is still not ideal, but the film offers enough of both for an appealing, intellectually, and emotionally tickling experience.

It’s a heady hall of mirrors that keeps revealing, or at least suggesting new depths and angles. But while this kind of intense creative exercise no doubt deserves respect, ultimately one has the uneasy sense that things don’t really add up.

Rheingold is a smooth watch that coasts on the fun, eclectic nature of its source material. If this may not be the return to form for a Cannes- and Berlin-winning filmmaker some anticipated, it’s a rousing good time nonetheless.

It’s tonally and thematically so fragmented, the context simply isn’t there.

Plotted with limited imagination and directed with atypical flatness, Mr. Six features a strong central performance and shares its humanistic concern with Hu Guan’s previous work but is nevertheless an artistic underachiever.

In the end, like a breath of stylized, impassioned hot air, L’attesa evokes feelings associated with bereavement effectively but has nothing substantial to add to the whole psychology of loss.

There’s no question that this sweet, nostalgia-laced ode to life in the countryside has its heart in the right place, but a lack of nuance and creative risk-taking greatly hampered the delivery of its message.

Holland keeps things going at a reasonable pace but, caught by a TV-esque practical blandness, seldom achieves something distinctly cinematic in terms of scale or style.