In a word, stunning. After an eight-year absence, world cinema’s foremost aesthete, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, returns with a vengeance. Shu Qi, Director Hou’s leading lady of choice, stars as a 9th-century enforcer, taught to kill by the nun who raised her and later contracted to take out her former husband-to-be. Viewers …

Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien evokes Albert Lamorisse’s fey little half-hour fantasy of 1956, not merely in the last three words of the title, but in very intermittent and unintegrated appearances of an actual red balloon, the size and strength of a beach ball, every bit as autonomous as Lamorisse’s, albeit …

Imagine, if you will, a movie about the brothels of Shanghai in the late 19th Century. (Take a moment. Think about it.) Whatever you might imagine, whatever you might expect, whatever you might hope for, it would almost certainly bear no resemblance whatsoever to the vision of Hou Hsiao-hsien. For …

Hou Hsiao-hsien reimagines the gangster genre in the form of a Taiwanese slice of life, an anti-drama, an anti-melodrama, that eases, glides, sneaks into its moments of animosity and violence. Or better say slices of life, plural, to emphasize the unconnected, random, desultory quality. What passes for a narrative has …

Before we get to the film's title, before we get to one of Hou Hsiao-hsien's patented group portraits in flux around a table, we are introduced to his heroine in a dreamy slow-motion single take, with the camera tagging along behind her, unable ever to catch up, as she strides …

Before we get to the film's title, before we get to one of Hou Hsiao-hsien's patented group portraits in flux around a table, we are introduced to his heroine in a dreamy slow-motion single take, with the camera tagging along behind her, unable ever to catch up, as she strides …

Not top-rung Hou Hsiao-hsien. In fact bottom-rung Hou Hsiao-hsien, with surprisingly lackluster color from his trusty cameraman, Mark Lee Ping-bin. The idea of pairing up the same actor and actress (Chang Chen and Shu Qi, both excellent) in three separate stories, set in three separate eras, sounds a good one, …