FINANCIAL TIMES REVIEW MENTIONS DE PALMA
At Financial Times, Danny Leigh reviews Wei Shujun’s "eerie" Only The River Flows:
Fittingly, as pure cinema, Only The River Flows is a knockout: eerie and dreamlike. An overture of kids at play is a marvel. Another scene is a dead ringer for gaudy maestro Brian De Palma. And, oh: it never stops raining.But Wei also tethers his film to everyday realities. China’s former one-child policy takes a key supporting role. If the movie is a philosophy lesson in unknowable truth, it also has cynical police chiefs who just want someone locked up fast.
Released in China last year, the film became a domestic box-office smash: no minor feat for an art-house movie shot on 16mm film that opens with a quote from Albert Camus. In the west, it might be tempting to see crowds flocking subversively to a portrait of flawed authority. But those flaws are safely three decades in the past. Anyway, a simpler pleasure may well have been more influential. Having seen the movie, Chinese audiences then thronged social media to debate the plot, a modern forum for an age-old question. No, but seriously, whodunnit?