Tony Rayns
Jia Zhangke
By Tony Rayns | | 50 Best FIlmmakers Under 50, CS50, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Tony Rayns Jia Zhangke wasn’t the first indie filmmaker in China, but he’s been way more influential than such predecessors as Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Wu Wenguang. Partly because his early films—Xiao Wu (1998), Platform, Unknown Pleasures (2002): the “Shanxi trilogy”—caught moments of transition in Chinese society better than other movies did, and…
Read More Currency | I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke. China)
By Tony Rayns | | CS44, Currency, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Tony Rayns Full disclosure: I did the English subtitles for Jia Zhangke’s new film, and may yet get paid for doing them. I wasn’t in Cannes for the international premiere, but a magazine editor of my acquaintance tells me that “some smart people” who saw it there “think it’s just a by-the-numbers commission piece.”…
Read More Columns | Letter to the Editor
By Tony Rayns | | Columns, CS42, From Cinema Scope Magazine
12 March 2010 Shelly Kraicer’s attack on Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death in Cinema Scope # 41 is the most wrong-headed thing I’ve read in the magazine since some guy assured us that Miike Takashi’s Visitor Q was a validation of the nuclear family. Since the Japanese Right is currently trying to prevent…
Read More The Decade in Review | Tony Rayns
By Tony Rayns | | CS42, The Decade In Review
Seven hundred words aren’t many to fillet the best from a decade, especially when you’d like to use some of them to discuss how archival DVD releases are helping to demolish the institution of film criticism. Maybe we can get to that topic in a future issue, but for now—best crack on. In September 2004…
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