Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A boy experiences first love, friendships and injustices growing up in 1960s Taiwan.
Edward Yang's four-hour masterwork is among the greatest films ever made. Its plotting is extraordinarily intricate — weaving gang politics, family dynamics, colonial displacement, and adolescent longing into an epic tapestry that never feels overloaded. The ensemble acting, largely from non-professionals, achieves a naturalism that is staggeringly convincing. Yang's cinematography — long takes, deep-focus darkness, bodies caught in doorways and corridors — creates a world of oppressive beauty. The film is wholly singular: no other film feels quite like this, blending slow cinema with the sweep of a social novel. The ending is gut-punch devastating and thematically coherent, though its emotional impact relies heavily on accumulated weight rather than any formal surprise in execution, landing it just slightly below the film's otherwise exceptional ceiling.