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?

In a separate bit of intriguing news, Kahan will be at the 50th anniversary screening of Phantom Of The Paradise, for which Paul Williams is an already-announced guest, at the theater where Brian De Palma's movie was filmed: The Majestic Theater in Dallas, on Saturday, October 26th. In fact, with Kahan on hand, this promises to "a very special" screening of Phantom Of The Paradise.

Meanwhile, Matt Zoller Seitz re-watched the film last night:

The 25 YEARS Carlotta Films collector’s poster

To celebrate our 25 YEARS, we have created a collection of limited and exclusive collector's memorabilia . Here is the collector's poster with the anniversary visual created especially for the occasion by the illustrator Thomas Walker aka Tommypocket .

• Poster 40x60 cm
• Delivered folded

Limited to 200 copies

Find the entire collection of exclusive Memorabilia 25 years here .

From an obituary by the New York Times' Amanda Holpuch:

Ángel Salazar, a stand-up comedian known for his wacky routines and an actor best known for playing Chi Chi in the 1983 cult classic “Scarface,” died on Sunday at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. He was 68.

His death was confirmed by a representative, Roger Paul, who said Mr. Salazar had an enlarged heart and was found unresponsive.

He was an established comedian and actor who built his career in New York City comedy clubs after fleeing Cuba when he was young.

He acted in stage plays, television shows and films, including “Carlito’s Way” in 1993, but none of these roles would surpass the renown of his part in “Scarface,” in which he played Chi Chi, a henchman of the drug lord Tony “Scarface” Montana (Al Pacino). In the 1983 film, Chi Chi backs Montana, a fellow Cuban refugee, on his violent campaign to reach the top of Miami’s cocaine trade.

In 2017, more than 30 years later, after the film had secured generations of fans, Mr. Salazar told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., that he still answered to “Chi Chi” and didn’t mind when people brought DVD copies of “Scarface” to his comedy shows to be signed.

Ángel Salazar was born on March 2, 1956, in Cuba. He acted in theaters there before fleeing the country in the early 1970s, swimming across Guantánamo Bay to reach the U.S. naval base there, as he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. From there, he was flown to Miami and then moved to New York, where he was placed in a foster home in the Bronx.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

In New York, he had trouble finding acting jobs, but he could make people laugh and at age 18 decided to test how far that could get him by performing at a comedy club’s open mic night.

“I had 10 minutes,” Mr. Salazar told The Inquirer. “And I think I had one joke. The rest of the time I said, ‘Check it out,’ over and over again.”

Eventually, he was a comedy club regular, and “Check it out” was a staple of his wacky comedy routines, which included costumes, props and impersonations of celebrities such as Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Tina Turner.

About an hour after that screening event comes to a close at the Inspace screening room, a 50th anniversary screening of De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise will take place at the Summerhall Red Lecture Theatre:

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brian De Palma’s rock opera masterpiece.

A Faustian tale of betrayal and obsession playing out in the gaudy halls of a concert hall, this deliriously entertaining musical features the legendary Paul Williams as cynical music producer Swan who tricks naive composer Winslow Leach (William Finley) into sacrificing his life’s work.

Featuring a knockout soundtrack, spectacular production design and De Palma’s characteristic swagger and infectious joy in filmmaking, prepare for a sensory delight.

– Paul Ridd