In all honesty this is the most minor Diaz work in some time, but its total materialism does make it of a piece with the last two films - Season of the Devil & The Halt - even if its lacking those two works inspired polemics. And while this isn't an allegory for the Duterte administration either, its nice to see Diaz working outside of genre again, even if it does share some of the clumsy writing and structuring of The…

I'd personally maintain that, discounting the semi-fictional 24 City, that this is the best of Jia's documentaries and certainly one of his best films overall - yet naturally as a talking head documentary there is little much to say that isn't already stated outright in the film itself. Initially positing itself merely as a chronicling of a literature festival in Jia Zhangke's own hometown, literature and precisely China's own relationship to literature as the years roll on becomes the gateway…

"I got beat up. I'm the victim here."
--
"Cross the room if you've ever been blamed for something you didn't do."

Many months before the films North American release, I joked that Good Time looked like "a modern-day Phil Karlson picture" so I was doubly pleasantly surprised when I found that this film approximated that feeling. In his annual love-letter to Cannes, Mark Peranson called the film "a kind of Dionysian New York Gesamtkunstwerk....immersion without identification." Where Good Time…

This is like, some kind of weird, conservative fantasy. If watching this served any good purpose, it's a possibly vital reminder that the Clinton era was not as progressive as many of us might like to remember - the latter half of the 20th century in America through the eyes of a reactionary, nearly 50 years of social tumult regarded as just a brief phase of unrest before everything returns to 'normal,' - the Vietnam War, Black Panthers, and social…