Critics reviews

Without the usual dramatic sensibilities that we see in these types of films, yet with some cinematic trickery that makes it all feel like you’re wandering through the narrator’s mind, Hou Hsiao-Hsien harrowingly and realistically portrays the toxicity and volatility of a broken relationship nearing its untimely end.

[Millennium Mambo] is a rare film that succeeds at sinking its hooks into an audience from the very first reel... Loneliness, ennui, and spiritual emptiness run rampant in the gorgeous, glittery prison of the modern world that Millennium Mambo traps its characters in... and the detached style with which Hou approaches this hazy trip down memory lane forms a fascinating contrast with the emotional resonance its final moments nonetheless achieve.

In Millennium Mambo, Hou sublimates his theme of national identity into an acknowledgment of the unremarkable facts of everyday Taiwanese experience... [The film is a] kaleidoscopic masterpiece.

Hou’s mise-en-scène in Millenium Mambo is the mark of a true auteur. He recycles visual designs from Flowers of Shanghai but makes an entirely different movie, set in a different century, that’s arguably better.

dizzying, dreamlike... [Millennium Mambo] is not an easy journey, but it is a worthwhile one... Shu Qi is mesmerizing in the role. It’s all too easy to be enraptured by her screen presence; she demands your attention even in the film’s most difficult scenes.

[Shu Qi] gives a wonderful performance, in perfect resonance with the minimalism that characterizes the film... “Millennium Mambo” is another great film by a true auteur, and a must watch for all fans of cinema.

Sordid yet transcendent, bathed in neon haze and set to a relentless techno-beat... [Millennium Mambo] is not only the most pop movie the great Taiwanese filmmaker has ever made but, intermittently, among the most astonishingly beautiful.

Millennium Mambo is not a film of memory per se—Hou’s preoccupation with mundane reality, or rather the dead air that comes with a life of precarity and indecisiveness, is highly present. The fun and partying are more of a felt absence than the driving force itself.

Millennium Mambo is a time capsule of these tender years, at once ghost story, souvenir and SOS signal. Like delayed rays of light from a dying star, the film is a transmission from a time that no longer exists.

Hou is in the company of Maurice Pialat or Béla Tarr: he sets up a scene not in order to transform it, but to contemplate and study it, to slowly unfold its levels and implications. Like a master chef, he stirs in the ingredients, the background information, the poetic motifs, the signs of historical and narrative context. It is up to us, as spectators or analysts, to intuit and draw out all these elements.

Millennium Mambo is a film of the future, set in a past that is the contemporary viewer's present, and Mark Lee Ping-bin's cinematography unfurls in a blur of motion and color that clarifies only ephemeral emotions, like the reflecting of a blinking yellow light that hovers over two people making love, or Jack's tinted windshield illuminated a second at a time by tunnel lights, throwing the sight of Vicky sleeping on his shoulder into fleeting chiaroscuro.

A circuitous and depressing film by the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, Millennium Mambo takes place in 2001, but, as the exhausted-sounding female narrator tells us, the events in the film happened "ten years ago", giving a sheen of nostalgia and loss to the proceedings that is hard to pinpoint. Mark Li Ping-bin shot the film, and its visuals are the most striking thing about it. The story is barely there, really, the story is not the point. It's about a mood, a time, a _vibe_, a Taipei vibe.