CINEMA REBORN - MEDIA COVERAGE, HIGHLIGHTS FOR FRIDAY 2 MAY and ORSON WELLES -

 

We had a flying start to our season last night when a near capacity crowd marvelled at George Cukor’s remarkable HOLIDAY. Superb intro by Jane Mills and much chat in the Ritz Bar well into the night. It’s having a second and final Sydney screening today at 2.30pm. Tickets still available at the door. The conversation about Cinema Reborn’s 2025 has gone international with a wonderful preview by David Hudson on the Criterion Collection website. CLICK HERE Meanwhile thanks to Joy Media in Melbourne you can listen to a terrific report on DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS on the station’s Out Takes program. It opens with a discussion of the film between host Conrad and Demetra Giannakopoulos and is followed by a great conversation between Demetra and Janice Loreck who is introducing the film  at its screening at the Lido Cinemas on Friday 9 May.  It goes on at the start of the program. YOU CAN LISTEN HERE And across the nation everyone can tune into the ABC Radio National Screen Show today (Thursday) at 10.00 am and repeated Friday at 9.00 pm)  when Jason Di Rosso will be talking to David Noakes about HOW THE WEST WAS LOST, David’s remarkable film about the years long strike by Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Pilbara that started in 1946 and never really finished. Meanwhile just letting you know that our hottest Friday ticket, no surprise, is Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL.  Here are the opening two paras of Rod Bishop’s excellent program notes: “Orson Welles returned to Hollywood in 1958 after a ten year absence and set about transforming a minor American novel – described by Francois Truffaut as a ‘woefully poor little detective story’ – into an operatic film noir.  ”Crowded, festering main streets and desolate, scary back alleys are the backdrop to Welles’ fictional Mexican border town of Los Robles. There are bars, strip clubs, cheap motels and destitute hotels. His cast are strippers, soldiers, youth gangs, sexual psychopaths, gringos, Chicanos, and good and bad cops. Below the surface, it’s a boiling cauldron of race, oil, sex, drugs, implied rape and murder.” To read Rod’s notes, which are also in our printed catalogue, session times and links to bookings  CLICK ON THIS LINK Tickets also on sale at the Ritz Box Office. Regular Ritz prices. Students $15 and Ritz Movie Club concessions available. Other shows on Friday include MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (12.45 pm), McCABE & MRS MILLER (2.45 pm) FORBIDDEN GAMES (5.15 pm) and DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (9.30 pm). For full program details, all session times, comprehensive program notes,  and links to bookings CLICK HERE CHARITABLE DONATIONS There is still time for our supporters to make tax-deductible donations to support our work. There are significant costs, most notably our screening fees, which have to be met each year and we are always grateful for the financial support we receive that defrays these costs and charges and enables us to keep our tickets at regular prices. If you would like to make a donation you may do so via the Australian Cultural Fund, a service which enables small unincorporated organisations like ours to access this taxation benefit. To make a tax deductible donation, small or large, any time between now and the end of Cinema Reborn 2025 click on this link to theAustralian Cultural Fund

CINEMA REBORN OPENING SCREENING WEDNESDAY 30 APRIL + PROGRAM FOR THURSDAY 1 MAY

 

Quick reminders of our programmes for the first two days.  Tickets for all sessions may be booked online or in person at the Ritz box office. Cinema Reborn charges regular Ritz prices and the lowest student concessions of any venue. Concessions for Ritz Movie Club members apply for all sessions https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/events/cinemareborn-2025 Some quotes from the extensive programme notes now posted on our website. HOLIDAY (George Cukor, USA, 1938) @ 7.00 pm on Wednesday 30 April and @ 2.30 pm on Thursday 1 May “Despite Cary Grant demonstrating that he could still do the back-flips and somersaults of his vaudeville days, Holiday is less a screwball comedy than a fable, in which, as in My Man Godfrey and Tovarich, a few principled individuals educate the decadent rich. …Whether frenetic with enthusiasm or languishing in despair, (Katharine) Hepburn dominates every scene in which she appears.” John Baxter For information on session times, full program notes and links to bookings https://cinemareborn.com.au/Holiday PÉPÉ LE MOKO (Julien Duvivier, France, 1937) @ 4.45 pm on Thursday 1 May and @ 1.45pm on Tuesday 6 May “Described as ‘one of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing’, by the writer Graham Greene at the time, Pépé le Moko (1937) remains Duvivier’s best-known work. It is set in the Casbah district of Algiers, a maze-like quarter where French police struggle to capture the elusive Pépé, a notorious Parisian gangster hiding from the law. Though he is safe in the Casbah, due to its protective community and his ability to avoid capture, Pépé feels trapped, yearning for his former life in Paris. That sense of imprisonment intensifies when he falls in love with Gaby, a glamorous Parisian tourist. Their romance stirs Pépé's longing for freedom but also seals his tragic fate. Duvivier’s film is about impossible desire and the implacable workings of fate, two themes that run deep in his work.” Ben McCann For information on session times, full program notes and links to bookings https://cinemareborn.com.au/Pepe-le-Moko THE SACRIFICE (Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/France/UK, 1986) @ 7.00 pm on Thursday 1 May and @ 8.10 pm on Monday 5 May “The Sacrifice (1986), Andrei Tarkovsky's third and final film in exile, stands as a powerful testament to the director's enduring preoccupation with nature, spilt milk, rumbling silence, mute children, levitation, mysticism, spirituality and the long, long shot. This is a film about faith and hope and the (possibly) misguided belief that one person’s sacrifice can have a positive impact on others. It is a film worthy of watching and rewatching, as it is a parable that deserves discussion and reinterpretation, especially now that we are far closer to midnight on the Doomsday Clock than we were in 1986. And yet, the anxiety about an impending nuclear war seemed much higher then than now.” Greg Dolgopolov For information on session times, full program notes and links to bookings https://cinemareborn.com.au/The-Sacrifice

CINEMA REBORN IN THE MEDIA - Links to coverage by Philippa Hawker, CJ Johnson, Audrey Man and Grace Boschetti & Zac Tome

 

CINEMA REBORN IN THE MEDIA Cinema Reborn has had some nice media attention in the last few days and you may be interested in exploring the thoughts of Philippa Hawker in The Saturday Paper, CJ Johnson on ABC Sydney radio and Audrey Man writing for UTS Central News. Philippa Hawker’s piece devotes attention to a very interesting selection of our Cinema Reborn 2025 program - Tokyo Pop, Daughters of Darkness, What I Have Written, the Anna Kannava program and Leila and the Wolves. Read Her report  (or buy the paper out today)   https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/film/2025/04/24/cinema-reborn  CJ Johnson, former President of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia is shortly heading off to Cannes as a member of the International Critics Jury (FIPRESCI). On his regular Sydney radio gig with James Valentine on ABC702 CJ gave some attention to Cinema Reborn (“an extraordinary range of fascinating films”). He concentrates his recommendations on Holiday and Touch of Evil. CJ was fulsome about both but especially Touch of Evil. (“It’s one of the best films ever made…one of Orson Welles’s masterpieces... It’s his great film noir…) You can listen here  https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sydney-afternoons/afternoons/105192398 At the one hour mark James Valentine introduces CJ  and at the 1hour 18 minute mark and they talk about Cinema Reborn, until 1.24. Audrey Man is a young journalism student at UTS and has written a report on Cinema Reborn’s origins and its current program. Audrey interviewed Organising Committee members Geoff Gardner and Grace Boschetti for her piece. You can read it at https://centralnews.com.au/2025/04/24/australian-classics-premiere-at-cinema-reborn-festival/ Grace Boschetti & Zac Tomé from Cinema Reborn dropped in to the 3MBS studio at the weekend to talk about Cinema Reborn during the station's weekly program devoted to film music. You can hear the conversation, which runs from the 9 minute to the 16 minute mark at  https://www.3mbs.org.au/programs/film-scores  In case you have missed it…here is Cinema Reborn’s 2025 trailer. It was produced by Organising Committee Member James Vaughan and there’s an image in there somewhere of just about every film in the program.

Streaming on Prime Video - Rod Bishop recommends "one of the best television series of the year" - THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH (Justin Kurzel, Australia, 2025)

Jacob Elordi

Turning a book as detailed as Richard Flanagan’s Booker prize winner into a film or a television adaptation isn’t easy. There’s a lot to get in. 

But this exemplary and extraordinary five-part screen version comes pretty close.

Even Flanagan’s brooding literary style is successfully created through an alchemical combination of Justin Kurzel’s hypnotic direction, Shaun Grant’s restrained screenplay, Sam Chiplin’s atmospheric cinematography; Jed Kurzel’s aching score and the note-perfect work from the cast. 

Following the structure of Flanagan’s novel, Shaun Grant splits the life of the central character Dorrigo Evans into three timelines.

Early in the Second World War, stationed in Adelaide, Dorrigo (Jacob Elordi) strays from his wealthy fiancé Ella (Olivia DeJonge), to have an affair with his uncle’s younger wife Amy (Odessa Young) before he ships off to Syria. 

Later captured in south-east Asia, he serves time as a surgeon and an Australian prisoner of war in the notorious hell-hole of the Burma Railway (aka The Death Railway). At 77 years of age in the late 1980s, Dorrigo (Ciarán Hinds), now long married to Ella (Heather Mitchell), is still a surgeon, but has become a celebrated and reluctant war hero, permanently haunted by the hidden demons of post-traumatic stress.  

Kurzel and Grant don’t blink from showing three of the major horrors Flanagan describes in his novel. There’s a beheading, somehow ritualistically portrayed and excused by a Japanese soldier as some sort of an aesthetic, energizing gift to the Emperor. There’s an operation to amputate a gangrenous leg using little more than a knife, a saw, a spoon and some string; and then a vicious hours-long beating to death of Dorrigo’s great friend Darky Gardiner (Thomas Weatherall) while the POWs are forced to watch.

Richard Flanagan

Not all of Darky Gardiner’s story from Flanagan’s book has made it to the screen, however. In the book, the 77-year-old Dorrigo Evans talks with his brother Tom Evans (not in the television series), and Tom tells him he once had an affair with his next-door neighbour’s wife Mrs Jackie Maguire, “a blackfella, you know”. The offspring, an illegitimate boy brought up by “a family called Gardiner”, later “died during the war. My only son and I never met him”. Very late in his life, Dorrigo learns Darky Gardiner, his loyal mate in the jungle, so viciously and callously murdered by the Japanese, was his nephew.

The Burma Railway was designated as a war crime committed by the Japanese and 32 of their military were sentenced to death. A total of 90,000 south-east Asians died during construction (Malaya Tamils, Javanese, Burmese, Thai) and 12,000 Allied soldiers (British, Australian, Dutch, New Zealanders and a Canadian).

Dorrigo Evans, as confused and messy in love as he is working to prevent death from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, cholera and murder by the Japanese, is a triumphal creation from Flanagan. The writer’s father was on The Death Railroad, under the command of the legendary surgeon Sir Ernest Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, whose medical work and leadership capacities clearly inspired the character of Dorrigo.

If this all sounds like too hard a watch, you’d be missing out on what will undoubtedly be recognized as one of the best television series of the year. From anywhere. 

Ciaran Hinds

On Blu-Ray - David Hare waxes lyrical about UGETSU (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1953) and DONOVAN'S REEF (John Ford, USA, 1962)

This week’s haul after a week of delays.

Well, Ford and Mizo were contemporaries. And among the greatest masters. But their commonality probably ends there.

Picking up again on Ford’s madcap reverie after decades of shit video incarnations is to join in this most sublime meditation of paradise on earth. If there’s any closeness in mood with Mizo generally, it’s perhaps the last few seconds’ throwaway giggle from Tanaka’s prostitute, Oharu as she recalls her great beloved and her entire life and everything else in Mizo’s incomparable filmography as she giggles and totters down the street, beyond focus and forever into eternity, as Sarris used to say.

These two discs are beyond catnip for the dedicated collector. The source for Criterion’s Ugetsu is the 2017 Film/Foundation et al 4K scan from two prime 35 elements (but no existing o-neg.) Criterion’s Blu from that year is still good but the makeover for 4K and limited HDR gives the image a nudge further into the sublime, like Oharu’s giggle.

The Ford was previously around in very blah PAL discs taken seemingly from dog-eared faded exhibition prints. The new Kino which unusually includes a Blu disc as well as the UHD is a brand new scan of the o-neg and what can only be described as a totally flawless new encode following a prime Technicolor IB for colour reference, down to the superbly rendered grain field. There are shades of green in this vision of Fordian madcap paradise that defy description. IIn saying this I agree with my colleague Mark Gross this is one the five or six greatest colour films ever made.

What more can I say about a Ford movie in which old hands from his long career turn up and parody themselves to the balcony - Dorothy Lamour, John Wayne, Cesar Romero and Mike Mazurki ( who three short years later will play off his “Tunga Khan” against the hard drinking Ann Bancroft/“Doctor Cartwright” in Ford's farewell picture, Seven Women.

Go out and buy, earthlings and engage yourselves with two visions of Paradise and Paradise apprehended.

CINEMA REBORN - ORDER THE PRINTED CATALOGUE

CINEMA REBORN’S PRINTED CATALOGUE WILL BE ON SALE THROUGHOUT THE SEASON

Our printed catalogue has become something of a collector’s item and this year’s edition will be a welcome addition to the series. Over its 140 pages every film screened at Cinema Reborn is reviewed by scholars, critics and cinephiles from around the world. Some of the material is also published on our website and you can access it at https://cinemareborn.com.au/ 

The Cinema Reborn catalogue is edited by Anne Rutherford and designed by David McLaine. Editorial assistance by Simon Taaffe. Additional Research by Zac Tomé. Among contributors are John Baxter, Adrian Martin, Ben McCann, Greg Dolgopolov, Grace Boschetti, Tony Rayns, Vic Smith & Elizabeth Schaffer, Adrian Danks, Dylan Rowen, Daniel Bird, Janice Tong, Rose Murray, David Noakes, Lucia Sorbera, Bruce Hodsdon, Laleen Jamayanne, Jane Mills, Bill Mousoulis, Frankie Kanatas, Helen Goritsas, Rod Bishop and Anna Dzenis.

In Editor Anne Rutherford’s view Cinema Reborn is more than a festival.  “It’s a cultural project that aims to revive and foster lively discussion around cinema. I want to acknowledge the generosity and professionalism of all the writers who have contributed to that discussion in these pages.”

In addition to the comprehensive notes on each film the catalogue also includes a number of short essays, reprinted material, interviews with film-makers and specialist commentary. This material includes contributions by Augustin Sotto on Lino Brocka, Tessa Parel on Metro Cinema and pop culture, David Noakes discussing How The West Was Lost with Anne Rutherford, Vilmos Zsigmond, Tim Grierson, Robert Christgau, Chris Galloway and David Stratton on McCabe & Mrs Miller, Ray Argall discussing the restoration of The Miniskirted Dynamo and film restoration more generally in an interview with Zac Tomé, Bruce Beresford on Julien Duvivier, Alena Lodkina on The Sacrifice, James Steffen on Sergei Parajanov, Jane Mills on the Stella Dallas collaborators and Marshall Deutelbaum on Orson Welles soundscape in Touch of Evil.

The print catalogue will be on sale at the Cinema Reborn Information Desks in the Lido and Ritz Cinemas foyers. Price is $10 (cash only). Catalogues may be ordered in advance and paid for and collected from the desk. Catalogues are also available by mail via bank transfer to our account ($15 including postage). To reserve for collection or to order a mailed copy send an email to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com

CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Cinema Reborn has established a page to enable our supporters to make tax-deductible donations to support our work. Our organisation is run by a group of film industry professionals, working critics, curators and film conservation specialists. All work in an entirely voluntary capacity. Nevertheless there are significant costs, most notably our screening fees, which have to be met each year and we are always grateful for the financial support we receive that defrays these costs and charges. If you would like to make a donation you may do so via via the attached link established by the Australian Cultural Fund which enables small unincorporated organisations like ours to use a service which would otherwise not be easily accessible. To make a donation any time between now and the end of Cinema Reborn 2025 click on this link https://artists.australianculturalfund.org.au/s/project/a2EMn00000FDsl8MAD/cinema-reborn-2025

CINEMA REBORN MAILING LIST

Please forward this email to any friends who may be interested in our presentations of restored cinema classics. Invite them to join our mailing list by sending an email to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com

Vale Donald Crombie - A link to an audio recording of tributes paid by Malcolm Smith, Peter James, Damien Parer, Bruce Moir and Murray Forest

The director of Caddie, The Irishman, Cathy's Child, Who Killed Jenny Langby and many more died aged 82 on 25 March. 

In the Sydney Morning Herald Justin Kurzel wrote a wonderful obituary which begins with these thoughts: "Donald Crombie was my first film hero. Although my childhood was littered with sports heroes, I didn’t have any creative heroes. I fell in love with cinema in the 1980s by sneaking into my parents living room on Saturday nights when the ABC aired an Australian film. I hid behind the couch and watched these complex, grown-up stories, mostly from the new wave of Australian directors such as Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi and George Miller.

"Crombie was right there with them, an integral part of this group of filmmakers. His films such as Caddie, Cathy’s Child and The Irishman played a crucial role in shaping Australia’s cultural renaissance, fostering a new-found sense of confidence and identity."

Several short audio tributes to Donald Crombie were recorded by colleagues who were attending a lunch shortly after his death.   The speakers are Malcolm Smith, Peter James, Damien Parer, Bruce Moir and Murray  Forrest.  The audio was recorded by Malcolm Smith and the link is to the site of the Australian Media Oral History Group.

You can listen to it if you click here

Helen Morse, Jackie Weaver, Caddie

CINEMA REBORN 2025 - SOME PERSONAL FAVOURITES FROM JAMES VAUGHAN, BRUCE BERESFORD and ALENA LODKINA

James Vaughan recommends our closing film THE FALL OF OTRAR.

James is a Sydney-based writer and filmmaker. His debut feature, Friends and Strangers (2021) was named in Sight and Sound as one of the 50 best films of 2021. James is a member of the Cinema Reborn Organising Committee

James writes:  “Ardak Amirkulov's breathtaking 13th century epic is also an elegy to Kazakh history, depicting the annihilation of the Islamic East Asian civilization of Otrar by the advancing armies of Genghis Khan.

“The film was co-written and produced by Russian auteur Aleksei German, but its release was disrupted by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost forgotten but not lost, this recent 4K restoration was completed thanks to Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation, Cineteca di Bologna and The Hobson/Lucas Foundation. Both Sydney and Melbourne screenings will be introduced by Robert Hughes, Assistant Curator, Australian Cinematheque, QAGOMA.

“The Fall of Otrar is a film of mesmerising textural richness—a cinematic Bayeux Tapestry that engulfs the viewer with hypnotic intensity. Though not for the faint-hearted, its vision of state-sanctioned terror and sadistic violence resonates with grim urgency in 2025. Do not miss a rare chance to encounter this masterpiece on the big screen.”

Bruce Beresford recommends Pépé Le Moko:

Bruce received an Academy Award nomination for the script of Breaker Morant (1980) and was nominated as Best Director for Tender Mercies (1982). Driving Miss Daisy (1989) won four Academy awards including Best Film. His most recent film is The Travellers (2024-25)

Bruce writes:"I remember my first viewing of Pépé Le Moko . Although it is a fairly familiar tale, a gangster on the run, the treatment was strikingly different to the American and English films I’d seen in this genre. The romantic story, set in the exotic Casbah in Algiers (largely reproduced in atmospheric studio sets) was dominated by the charisma of Jean Gabin in the eponymous role…Duvivier’s deft visual handling of long dialogue scenes was a delight. I realised, all those years ago, that a real director has to choreograph the movements of his cast and choices of camera positions and lenses, just as dancing and fight scenes have to be meticulously planned. To explain – it’s often apparent to me, when I watch feature films or the now ubiquitous streaming series, that the director simply lets the actors work out a few moves as they deliver the dialogue; then the cameraman films the sequence in one or two wide shots, followed with close ups on the principle players. This mass of footage is turned over to the film editor and it will invariably result in a moderately effective scene. However, Duvivier (along with directors such as Jean Renoir, Martin Scorsese, Carol Reed, Luis Buñuel and quite a few others) evaluates every scene in the film for its place in the completed work, not as a sequence unrelated dramatically to what follows and precedes it.”

Alena Lodkina recommends The Sacrifice

Alena wrote and directed the feature films, Strange Colours (2017) and Petrol (2022), which screened Venice, Locarno, New Directors/New Films, MIFF and the Sydney Film Festival. 

Alena writes: “There is a diary-like quality to The Sacrifice.The camera careens through an alien, hostile world in a desperate attempt to find connections. There is no truth, Alexander despairs, and aTV soon announces the coming of a nuclear holocaust. The dead tree erected on Alexander’s whimsy and watered by his son Gossen (the Little Man) suggests it’s got more to do with innocence and faith.This deranged watering is crucially not Sisyphean, for we are asked to consider the possibility of miracles, that the tree really may bloom. An inversion, I think, of one ofAlexander’s other grandiose statements:there isn’t death, there is only fear of death. We can hear an echo of Tarkovsky’s poet father Arseny, as quoted in Mirror: ‘don’t be afraid of death’. Like the protagonist of Solaris, the son returns to the father, literal, artistic and metaphysical

Notes by Bruce and Alena are short extracts from essays to appear in the Cinema Reborn printed catalogue. For details of screening times, program notes and links to bookings in both cities click on this link for the Cinema Reborn website. https://cinemareborn.com.au/

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison recommends you quickly track down a new film by Xiaogang Feng WE GIRLS (China, 2025)

Yes, he’s back! Xiaogang Feng was China’s most successful director. His films were printed in IMAX. They did top dollar business at home and English sub-titled disks were in all the Asian grocery stores. 

We heard  about a Xiaogang Feng theme park and saw him appear in Stephen Chow‘s Kung Fu Hustle and Guan (Black Dog) Hu’s 2015 Mr. Six Xiaogang Feng’s work was frequently exceptional - Aftershock, Assembly, If You Were The One(s) - and Wo bu shi Pan Jin Lian/I Am Not Madam Bovary, which was where the trouble seems to have started.

That one had the state machinery battling Fan Bingbing as a single woman trying to protect her good name. It was a corrective to Zhang Yimou’s conformist 1992 Qiu Ju da guan si/ The Story of Qui Ju.. The release was held up and there were rumors of demanded edits. Zhang Yimou, fresh from his triumphs with the Beijing Olympics, had a string of substantial budget A features in global distribution, while in an alarming change of pace, Feng Ziaogang was working on series TV, sequels and Only Cloud Knows, a bland romance shot in New Zealand.

Xiaogang Feng’s new Xiang Yang · Hua/We Girls has just had what they call “ a soft launch” here. The film is arresting from the first shot, which takes the camera into a 2010 Chinese women’s prison that could give a few pointers to the Salvadorian one where Trumpy sends people with green cards, the one I keep on seeing on TV news. That's pretty scary.

Arrested for phone sex work, Liying Zhao is put in charge of mute fellow new inductee Ju Wang. Raising a hearing impaired child has given her knowledge of sign language -  viz some comedy of her mistranslating the girl’s abusive responses. The cell boss inmate tells them no one is allowed to go to sleep before she does because their snoring might keep her awake.

More favorable treatment is given their squad when they need to train to perform for the prison’s Qingming Festival celebration  - not unlike the Army Entertainer Unit in Feng’s  Youth.  It’s not long before there’s a punch-up in the squat toilet and surveillance camera freeze frames of their solitary confinement.

Abruptly, we go to the pair’s same-day release, disturbingly free of parole supervision  - an envelope with their prison record and a small amount of yen. The apparently severe supervisor also slips her home phone number into the packet. “Doctors and wardens are the two professions that don’t want to see their customers again.”  The steel wall doors, opening to throw light onto the duo, is a deft touch.

Met by the three-wheeler driver from the gang where she learned her lock picking skills, Ju Wang has the only person who has ever shown her any kindness, stub out a cigarette on her hand. This film keeps on setting up expectations that it reverses.  Without shelter, she breaks into a sticker covered abandoned car and traffic wardens steal her last cash. Desperate to recover her child from the orphanage and provide her with a Two Hundred Thousand Yen cochlear implant, Liying Zhao’s character does no better at honest work. 

Together, the luckless pair do find ways to survive, renting a leaky apartment in a condemned building overlooking the rail tracks and performing simple-minded scams. They revive the Sacha Guitry gag of the the passer-by who recognises the girl who was begging, passing herself off as deaf the day before, now claiming to be blind.

Salvation presents itself with the prospect of royalties from a world-wide-net commercial using Ju Wang’s thieving skills but she refuses, outraging her associate, who sees her daughter facing adoption. The film explains why, with the re-introduction of the grim Lao Gie baby-farming character, mixing Fagin, the Godfather and a dash of Stanley Kowalski. Characteristically, he is given a back story which makes him a victim, like the ex-prisoner girls.

 It is a distinct change from the director’s preceding work but you can still see his preoccupations. They keep on mentioning "A World Without Thieves." This is a film that never lets you stay comfortable with what you're watching.  The script defies anticipation and keeps on swinging from outrageous excesses of melodrama to convincing documentation. 

Unsympathetic authority figures prove to have plausible motivations. Touches take on new significance - scenics of the passing train, Ju Wang’s criminal back ground, the glimpse of the abandoned daughter through the institution fence which repeats the photo that Liying Zhao had pinned over her cell bunk bed and comes up again in a telling montage.  Editing is particularly deft, as is camerawork, which is strikingly different from the images of Feng Xiaogang’s earlier films, though the greenish tone of Chinese laboratory work is still evident in the early scenes. The two leading performances are stellar.

Hard-charging popular entertainment, We Girls has had a modest success on its home turf  but this one is also a determined depiction of dysfunctional society. The China here is run down and hostile, even more so than in I Am Not Madam Bovary. Both offer implausibly sunny endings. It remains surprising that the new film got through censorship and was exported.

I rate this better than Parasite, though We Girls was never going to pick up another diversity Oscar. It would fit uneasily in a festival and is unlikely to play with the Dendy-Palace audience. However, anyone with a more than casual interest in film should home in on it immediately. The first night session pulled an attendance of round twelve, I was the only gweilo but also the only bloke. I asked the couple of C-Pop girls still there at the end of the titles for their take. They said they thought it was good and giggled. 

Move fast. This one is unlikely to get past Thursday.