Ermo

This highly entertaining tragi-comedy is the best film yet about the ups and downs of 'modernisation' in the Chinese countryside. The heroine Ermo is a doughty noodle-maker bent on regaining her social status in the village; she sets her heart on earning and saving enough to buy the largest TV set in the country, even if it kills her - which it begins to look like doing. Wry, sexy and very wittily observed, the film sees China now as a tangle of materialism, amorality and left-overs from both feudalism and communism. Buñuel himself couldn't have come up with a more devastating account of stone-ground passions or preservative-free desires.