Reviewed by David Levinson

CHATTING in a café in Paris during Linklater's Before Sunset, the focus between Jessie and Celine slowly cocoons from one throwaway philosophical gesture to another. At one point, after discussing the rising urban terror climate, Celine mentions how a trip abroad helped empty her of spiritual clutter. The conversation then inevitably topples into Buddhism and the elimination of desire, and the two manage to nicely articulate something that's plaguing about its ethos: what do you do when you reach the very apex? There's a thin line between living in a sealed bubble of bliss and Prozac-induced inertia...

MUBARAK ALI files an appreciation of Martin Scorsese's surreal and dexterous “After Hours”.

IT TAKES A certain level of sadism to get the most out of Martin Scorsese's surreal composition on the horrors of big-city nightlife, and perhaps that's why After Hours has remained one of his perennially underrated films. The film represents a withdrawal from the Scorsese-De Niro pairings that became fashionable post-Taxi Driver, into a more modest affair, and it's in this breaking free of convention and expectation that the film conveys the kind of passion usually evident when a major Hollywood director goes back to his 'quirky' Indie roots – a film-geek fanaticism that is absent in Scorsese's later studio films. It won him Best Director at Cannes, and constitutes his best attempt in working with the medium as a form of art, while remaining highly engaging and asserting intrinsic Scorsese obsessions. And it's light years away from his last film, the mammoth hot-air balloon, Gangs of New York.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

I SUPPOSE if A Very Long Engagement wasn't an Audrey Tautou film, I might of hated it. Even then, I would have played the bloke card, being too man enough to admit harbouring stray thoughts outside the sticky realms of that bathroom companion, FHM – an alpha male bible well known for its sermons on the ideal female form. A leggy blond she's not, and yet with her button-sized nose, gaping doe eyes, awkward poise, and café latte complexion, it occurred to me, without a hint of blasphemy, that this was the girl.

Reviewed by Aaron Yap

"MOVIES don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative!": Kevin Williamson's nugget of slasher self-reflexivity from Scream seemed like a smart psychological and socially astute barb at the time. But now there's Saw, the stakes in cinematic art-imitates-life-and-vice-versa irony have risen to a new level: it's not that movies make psychos more creative, it's that they make budding screenwriters more inventive, demented and ultimately, illogical.

Tsai Ming-liang/Taiwan/1994; R1
Fox Lorber, US$14.95 | Reviewed by Tim Wong

A CINEMA of silences, Tsai Ming-liang's Vive L'Amour takes high modernism to atmospheric, almost existential extremes in its long pauses and titillating moments of nothingness. Dreamy, serene, and charged with a slow burning eroticism, it ponders three dislocated souls – a real estate agent, a street merchant and a timid homosexual man – weaving in and out of time, place, and the urban sprawl of contemporary Taiwan.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

PRIMED OUT in strokes of retro neon, urban high-rise and strategically-placed red objects, the Hong Kong in Throw Down might as well belong to a post-war 60's Ozu film. In fact, rather than preoccupy itself with endemic Trans-Asian tensions – a washing cycle of many of grudge where either the Chinese disliked the Japanese, the Japanese loathed the Koreans, or all three just didn't get along – the film instead embraces the legacy of its neighbour in two forms: through the art of Akira Kurosawa, and the discipline of Judo.

ALEXANDER BISLEY files an appreciation of Spike Lee's New York story, “25th Hour”.

SPIKE LEE stylishly captures the zeitgeist of contemporary New York in this lyrical near-masterpiece, the first film explicitly set post 9/11. As the title suggests, it's the last day of a condemned drug dealer Monty Brogan (Edward Norton); he ties up the loose ends of his life before seven years in the slammer for dealing drugs. (How he came to this point is explained in flashbacks). He spends time with his father James (Brian Cox), girlfriend Naturelle Riviera (Rosario Dawson), best friends Wall St trader Francis Xavier Slaughtery (Barry Pepper) and English teacher Jacob Elinsky (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and Russian mobster associates Kostya Novotny (Tony Siragusa) and Uncle Nikolai (Levani). A scene in a cool nightclub brings the characters, and complications of the plot, together. Lee and his crew get the feel of the club just right.

Florian Habicht/NZ/2003; R0
Pictures for Anna, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by John Spry

WITH Woodenhead, Florian Habicht has created a visual snapshot of the Northern portion of New Zealand and integrated this with a "cut and paste" folk story from around the world. The story revolves around the two main characters (one could even say caricatures) who, while attempting a very simple task of travelling from one town to another end up loosing themselves in a greatest hits of well known folk stories. They move through and around such stories as Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks and even Jack and the Beanstalk.

Shohei Imamura/Japan/1966; R1
Criterion, US$29.95 | Reviewed by Tim Wong

AS J. Hoberman explains in his essay for the Criterion release of The Pornographers, Shohei Imamura's films were often rendered in America as "exotic soft-core porn". Imamura himself could not deny a persistent fascination with the lower depths of Japanese culture, and this film's brazen title hardly suggests otherwise. But in this dark, cunning, Fellini-esque black comedy, the unspoken "niceties" of voyeurism, incest and rabid prostitution become, if anything, acts of desperate liberation.

Jackie Chan/Hong Kong/1985; R4 (SE)
HK Legends (Universal), NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Tim Wong

THERE ARE moments in Police Story that simply defy logic, if not the ordinariness of the title. And as deceptively straightforward as this film sounds, nothing can quite prepare you for the chaos that lies ahead. This is, of course, none other than a work of Jackie Chan – both in front and behind the camera – and is every bit as manic as his array of late 80's stunt spectacles. Lately Mr. Chan has, one feels, succumbed somewhat to the effects of aging and common sense, so a film such as this is at once both a remarkable feat and an object of nostalgia. It is also deeply irresponsible.

Reviewed by David Levinson

TO BE HONEST, I actually felt guilty watching this movie. And not the needling kind, either. You know – the one that sidles up to you like a sick dog, a pathetic whimper after having eaten lots of candy or laughed at a midget or listened to an R. Kelly song. What I'm talking about here is guilt that penetrates, God-is-watching guilt (as far as appropriate metaphors go ...), the kind that somehow makes you feel like a less of a human being for having even been there.

A former student, SÁNDOR LAU catches up with screenwriter and academic Dr. Shuchi Kothari to talk rolling cable, vanilla orchids, and the scars of history.