Lee Jutton

1 week ago | medium.com | Lee Jutton

This piece was originally published by Film Inquiry on June 20, 2025. One thing is for certain about the genre-defying cinematic oeuvre of Tsui Hark: it has energy. After all, you don’t feel invigorated by the violent nihilism of Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, the madcap action comedy of Peking Opera Blues, or the martial arts madness of Once Upon a Time in China and its sequels, you must be sleepwalking through life, or at the very least cinema.

1 week ago | filminquiry.com | Lee Jutton

One thing is for certain about the genre-defying cinematic oeuvre of Tsui Hark: it has energy. After all, you don’t feel invigorated by the violent nihilism of Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, the madcap action comedy of Peking Opera Blues, or the martial arts madness of Once Upon a Time in China and its sequels, you must be sleepwalking through life, or at the very least cinema.

4 weeks ago | medium.com | Lee Jutton

This piece was originally published by Film Inquiry on May 29, 2025. The earliest complete surviving feature film directed by an Iranian woman, The Sealed Soil examines the clash between long-standing traditions and encroaching modernity in one small village, where a young woman stubbornly resists the pressure to be married off.

1 month ago | filminquiry.com | Lee Jutton

The earliest complete surviving feature film directed by an Iranian woman, The Sealed Soil examines the clash between long-standing traditions and encroaching modernity in one small village, where a young woman stubbornly resists the pressure to be married off. Written and directed by Marva Nabili, the film was made without the official sanction of the pre-revolutionary Iranian government and has never been screened in its native land despite achieving critical acclaim elsewhere.

1 month ago | filminquiry.com | Lee Jutton

It’s hard to name a country that has evolved more rapidly in the twenty-first century than China, and it’s impossible to name a filmmaker who has chronicled that evolution more perceptively than Jia Zhangke. Whether documentary (I Wish I Knew, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue) or fiction (A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart), Jia’s films explore how globalization and industrialization have changed life in China and how its people have navigated those changes.