Skip to main content

Sheep Without a Shepherd review – perky Chinese thriller that toes the line too carefully

A father uses his obsession with the movies to help his daughter when she is unjustly suspected of murder

It turns out that cinephilia is a productive use of time after all. When his computer is searched, Li Weijie, protagonist of this perky Chinese thriller, has watched 838 films in a year – and he uses his superior knowledge of the seventh art to get his family out of a pickle. Chinese but living in northern Thailand, he scrapes by as an internet technician, but his daughter finds herself at the centre of a murder investigation after she accidentally kills the son of a police chief who was trying to blackmail her with smartphone-filmed rape footage.

A remake of the 2013 Malayalam film Drishyam, this big Chinese hit ultimately doffs the cap to Korean cinema: it is Jeong Keun-seob’s 2013 film Montage that inspires Li when he has to provide his family with an alibi.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2S79fDl

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Degrees of separation: what connects Seinfeld to Steve Bannon?

From the US sitcom to the far-right rabble rouser, we go down the rabbit hole, thanks to the arrival of Jerry’s show on Netflix Seinfeld All 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld ’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro . Motion impossible: fallout It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video , he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mr722c