The Hole

Rafael Zen

A very intuitive cinema emerges when Ming-Liang reaches a creative process that won't stop overflowing daily scenes with apocaliptic gray places. Leaning upon images instead of a propper plot, he develops the mood his storytelling requires: mundane, decadent, lost within its own faith - but grasping for hope in the form of music dream and poetic escapes

petit astronaute

(35mm, but it looks like it a 16mm: can anyone verify?) I was a bit disillusioned with the film, that has a somewhat lazy narrative — I wonder if the 69 minutes long TV cut (for Arte) is not a more cohesive one. Despite the unevenness of the film, the songs are irresistible and a genuine stun, and the hole rests toujours a mistery.

EdieEmm

More than the transcendent sound design, the frame-by-frame onslaught of almost-unbearable cinematographic beauty, the scathing hyperrealism, the lush textures and sumptuous palette, the bewitching magic of the plot (and the musical numbers! Gah!), I'm grateful for the plausibility of all those reasons so I don't have to admit that, really, it's that Tsai somehow made it through to my wary, walled-up little heart.

João Eça

Tsai obviously rejects emotional cinema, producing instead conceptual forms. The problem is that his ideas about reality are basic, and his films end up being the most boring and empty I've watched since Béla Tarr. The dream sequences, for instance, could have been thought by a child. What we have in this film are bodies, but cinema is about characters and not flesh. After 10 or 20 minutes, no one cares anymore.

Tyler Aikens

It's films like these whose popularity with the MUBI crowd forces me to reevaluate the credibility of my own taste. Not a bad movie by any stretch, but "greatest musical ever"? Say whaaaa?

Crap Monster

I wholeheartedly agree with MTeller. Something about this particular work seems so surrealistic yet clouded in realism. A Professor of mine back in undergrad put it best, in that it almost seems like Sci-Fi in its other-worldly presence.

Kamran

Sometimes unsettling or surreal, atmospherically charged, eccentric and sexual, perverse, dark yet illuminating. 84/100 - Great.

Adriano Rocha

An apocalyptic vision that scares for being so realistic, interspersed with a dreamlike vision that releases tension of the film. Excellent.