My So-called Love

2008

Raised in a broken family, Cat runs away from home as a teenager to escape her stepfather. In high school, she begins living with boyfriend Liam, but puppy love eventually ends in betrayal. While Liam is in the army, Cat, feeling lonely and poor, meets an older man through the Internet; Xiao Gu is looking for sex, Cat is looking for money. From lust comes love, until Cat discovers Xiao Gu is actually married. After […]

Crazy Sex

1976
February 27, 2019

Shaw Brothers super director Li Han-Hsiang was particularly masterful in two genres: erotica and classic Chinese tales. He combined these two loves in this two-part examination of lust. The first story is a more modern tale of sex, lies, and videotape. The second features an elderly jeweler’s adventures with his unsatisfied wife, a handsome neighbor, and the neighborhood bordello.

Lost in Beijing

2007

A look at modern-day life in China’s capital centered on a ménage-a-quatre involving a young woman, her boss, her husband and her boss’s wife. Massage girl Pingguo (Apple) (The stunning Fan Bingbing) lives in a cramped apartment with her bad-tempered window cleaner husband Kun (Tong Dawei), barely eking by on their minuscule pay. When Pingguo gets railed by her boss Lin (Tony Leung) one afternoon, Kun, who is washing the windows of the building, witnesses […]

Red Sorghum

1987

An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu’er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as “my Grandpa” by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu’er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.