Critics reviews

A strong blend of drama and crime as well as an intriguing portrayal of the city and its inhabitants. Dues to Yang’s precise direction and the overall great performances of his ensemble cast, the director manages to tell a mesmerizing story about estrangement, alienation and how relationship can become mental prison, which we have built over time.

The title itself refers to a necessitated jostle, each character attempting to reframe their surroundings, refracting Taipei in a similar fashion to Yang’s elliptical, intuitive filmmaking.

Yang hangs on meditative sequences while letting major decisions—to break up, to run away, to attempt suicide, to begin an affair—simply elide from one moment to the next. By the end, a new novel will be written, and at least one person will be killed. As in Yi Yi or Summer Day, Yang evokes what critics so revere in the cinema of Jean Renoir: Even when the characters are in conflict, or do something monstrous, there isn't a villain in the bunch.

Yang's evident desire to situate these desperate acts within a larger social context looks ahead to his next film, A Brighter Summer Day, but The Terrorizers is an independent and hugely ambitious film in its own right, no mere dry run. Its interlocking stories assign it to the category of the "network narrative," responsible for some of the most overblown, overreaching film art of the twenty-first century, though in Yang's hands the sense of connection takes on the aspect of a threat.

The light-speed jump from totalitarian control to the toothy promise of capitalist free-for-all does not occur without turbulence. Yang's film is one of the most indelible monuments in cinema to the overlooked casualties of this kind of transition, one made by many countries in the last decades of the 20th century.

Always hyperalert to our expectations, Yang was searching for his country's erratic alpha wave in the waning days of the Kuomintang's martial rule. Of course the prognosis is, like other people's lives, unknowable.

There are moments in "The Terrorizers" during which one can see the unique touch of an increasingly confident and singular director. But there are also moments, often captured in the details of all-night discos and shakedowns in cheap hotel rooms, when the film’s trajectory suddenly electrifies into something open, even sloppy, in a way that Yang’s subsequent films largely “grew out of”.

Edward Yang's evocative and deliberately ambiguous third feature... As Taiwanese film critic Edmund Wong has noted, the film offers "a refreshing look at Yang's theme of urban melancholy and self-discovery"—a preoccupation running through Yang's early work that often evokes some of Antonioni's poetry, atmosphere, and feeling for modernity. Well worth checking out.

Yang is doggedly attached to oblique narrative; with its studied compositions, languid violence, and complex use of anticipatory sound bridges, there's no mistaking Yang's third feature for anything but an art film, as it confidently maps a terrain of crisscrossing lives and intersecting obsessions.