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Bookmark this pageAshes Of Time Redux (2008)
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Movie review
From Time Out London
Hong Kong master Wong Kar-Wai has a penchant for tinkering, having returned to the edit room after the first screenings of his luxuriant sci-fi odyssey, ‘2046’, and last year’s kook-heavy misfire, ‘My Blueberry Nights’. Now he has decided to make some minor tweaks to his fourth (perhaps most incongruous) feature from 1994, already an idiosyncratic riff on the traditional Hong Kong martial arts movie.A thin, fiddly yarn about family rivalry and desert-bound emotional intrigue provides the backdrop for Wong’s trademark directorial flourishes, yin and yang characterisations and dialogue that’s full of ‘clever lines’. Christopher Doyle’s photography, with its predilection for deeply skewed angles and OTT colour juxtapositions, feels garish, unhinged and even slightly dated. Add to that Wong’s total denial of genre fulfilment – down to filming the few battle scenes in a thick fug of dust – and it makes for frustrating and unreasonably demanding viewing.
Author: David Jenkins
Time Out London Issue 1986, 11-17 Sept
Cast & crew
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Cast: Jacky Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Brigitte Lin, Carina Lau full cast
Rated: 15
Duration: 93 mins
UK Release: Sep 12 2008
US Release: Oct 10 2008
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