Jean Renoir inherited his acute feel for the poetry of landscapes -- from the famous Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, his father. Emotive impressions of place, captured by a slowly panning camera, underlie the movement of his narratives. Renoir's genius lay in fusing environments and narr
It was only a matter of time before Chen Kaige, the child of a film director and an actress, pissed off the authorities in China. His fascination with sex, opium, costumes, and the individual in society exposed him as a romantic and a maverick. Chen's characters burst at the seams with personality. P
In 1999, when Ann Hui was asked how she'd been spending her time, she replied that she'd been teaching. Was she on the faculty at the London Film School (her alma mater), or perhaps at some prestigious American university? No. Surprisingly, Hui was not working in film at all -- instead, she was payin