The Flight of the Red Balloon

"Like his 2004 film Cafe Lumière, Hou Hsiao-hsien''s sublime new movie The Flight of the Red Balloon finds the director in a foreign country paying homage to another filmmaker," writes Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE. "With Lumiere, Yasujiro Ozu was Hou''s reference point and Tokyo his canvas; here, Hou reimagines Albert Lamorisse''s classic 1956 short The Red Balloon as a Parisian family melodrama."

"A remarkably rich, rewarding, and restful experience, Hou''s latest is a film like no other - in the simplicity of its lines, colors, and framing, and in the complexity of how those elements compound and contextualize its emotional subject matter, The Flight of the Red Balloon can, in my mind, be in comparison to the works of Matisse," writes Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. "Despite this elevation, the film, miraculously, doesn''t feel like an artist''s grand summation, but rather just another in a long line of purely wrought canvases; it never calls attention to its own technique or turns its endless flow of lovely, complicated compositions into recognizable set pieces, and instead allows its three principal characters to navigate its spaces with ease."

Updated through 4/5. Posted by: dwhudson    Source