For years, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s work was hard to find in the United States. Now that the movies are streaming, all you need to do is pay attention.

The New York Times
Date: May 28, 2020
By: Ben Kenigsberg

Through the 1980s and ’90s, American fans of the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien regarded his movies as, essentially, too brilliant to be released: Although his films showed at festivals and occasional screenings in major cities, distribution companies in the United States largely shied away, even when his titles turned up on best-of-the-decade lists. Maybe Hou was simply too challenging, too singular and too uncommercial for any distributor here to touch, cinephiles scoffed. The longtime advocate J. Hoberman chalked it up less to difficulty than to regional bias: He speculated that if Hou were French, his films would draw crowds.

The shutout came to an end. Hou’s “Millennium Mambo” sneaked into one New York theater late in 2003, and from then on all his features have opened formally. His most recent, the elliptical martial-arts movie “The Assassin,” played widely in 2015. Still, it’s probably fair to say that Hou’s style — for all its visual elegance and influence on other filmmakers — requires some acclimation. Two of his best films from the 1980s can be easily streamed.

Stream “The Time to Live and the Time to Die” (1985) on Amazon Prime; rent or buy it on iTunes.

Stream “Dust in the Wind” (1986) on Amazon Prime; rent or buy it on iTunes.

Much of the acclaim for Hou rests on the implicit challenge that his movies pose to conventional narrative filmmaking. They are less rooted in story than in motion, space and time — the fundamentals of cinema. Hou relays important plot details in passing. Flashes forward and backward occur without immediate signposting. The physical arrangement of characters in a scene — as well as the lighting and depth of field — can be as significant as their actions. Hou’s great “Café Lumière,” a professed homage to the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, is a wistful ode to cities not as places where people mingle, but as sites of missed connections and passing trains.    [FULL  STORY]