Only the River Flows
All-Time Favorites
•
1h 41m
Directed by Wei Shujun | 102 mins | 2023
After a woman’s body is discovered on a river bank in rural southern China, police investigator Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) finds that it’s only the first layer of a deepening mystery, bound up in the hidden life of the nearby community. Based on Yu Hua’s short novel "Mistakes by the River", Wei’s bleakly atmospheric neo-noir is laced with gallows humor and touches of the surreal, its grungy 16mm photography a hand-in-glove fit for the ’90s setting.
Up Next in All-Time Favorites
-
Summer of 85
Leaving September 1
Directed by François Ozon | 101 mins | 2021
Shot on Super 16 and set on the French Riviera, Ozon’s hot and thorny tale of summer lovin’, with its soundtrack of sunny ’80s hits, is nevertheless tugged along by an undercurrent of tragedy. Aspiring writer Alexis, 16, meets David... -
Will-o'-the-Wisp
Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 67 mins | 2022
A queer musical fantasia unlike anything in recent cinema, Rodrigues’s 2069 love song finds an ailing monarch flashing back to his erotic youth as a fireman during a time of climate crisis, in which his beefcake blaze-battler (Mauro Costa) is tran... -
A Vanishing Fog
Directed by Augusto Sandino | 77 mins | 2021
For Colombia’s Indigenous Muisca people, Sumapaz Páramo, a tropical plateau located high up in the Andes, was a sacred realm. It is here that Augusto Sandino sets his haunting, mystical debut—the first film to have ever been shot in this now-endangered...
