Cinema News: The humanist beauty of ‘Yi Yi’ at 25

September 05, 2025 | View in browser

A boy and a sleepy man have a meal in a McDonald's.

By Mark Olsen

Staff Writer

Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

This week I come to you from Toronto, where I have joined a cadre of LAT colleagues to cover the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. We will be bringing the festival to you via our photo and video studio, as well as with on-the-ground coverage.

Among this year's world premieres is Chandler Levack's "Mile End Kicks," based on her experiences as a young music journalist in Montreal and starring Barbie Ferreira. For my preview piece on this year's festival I spoke to Levack, who has experienced TIFF from all angles, as a film student, a journalist, working for the organization itself and now as a filmmaker.

"I think it still sets the tone for the cultural conversation in cinema," said Levack. "The ways that I've seen movies at TIFF with those audiences and the way that those films hit me and affected me, they've been really the most profound cinematic experiences of my life."

We also brought you coverage from Telluride, with Glenn Whipp interviewing Jeremy Allen White on playing the Boss in "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere" and Josh Rottenberg speaking with director Chloé Zhao about tackling Shakespeare's life on the stage and off in "Hamnet." The Telluride team also ran down their favorite performances at the festival.

And as a further reminder of why it matters to go to festivals, two of my favorite films from South by Southwest earlier this year — Jay Duplass' "The Baltimorons" and Chad Hartigan's "The Threesome" — are hitting theaters this week and next. Both are emotionally sincere comedies that are in danger of getting overlooked in the sweep of newer titles, and more than worth the effort of seeking out.

'Yi Yi' in 4K

Winner of the directing prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, "Yi Yi" would also become the Taiwanese writer-director Edward Yang's last feature before his death in 2007 at age 59. In celebration of the film's 25th anniversary, the L.A. premiere of a new 4K restoration will play on Saturday at the Egyptian Theatre. The film has recently made multiple lists of best films of the 21st century.

Beginning with a wedding, ending with a funeral and covering a lot of ground in between, the story follows a middle-class family in Taipei over one year.

In a 2000 review, Kenneth Turan wrote, "Most of all, 'Yi Yi' deals with the conundrums of romance, the wonder and perplexity of mutual attraction, what it springs from and where it goes. It's a delicate film but a strong one, graced with the ability to see life whole, the grief hidden in happiness as well as the humor inherent in sadness. Its subject, to borrow a phrase, is the dance to the music of time we all have to participate in."

Revisiting the film in 2011, Dennis Lim noted, "A work of remarkable delicacy and assurance, so detailed and fully inhabited that it seems to renew itself and its connection to the viewer with each encounter, it stands today as a reminder not only of Yang's mastery but also of just how few filmmakers possess the wisdom and generosity that humanist cinema of this sort truly requires."

Two earlier films by Yang, 1994's "A Confucian Confusion" and 1996's "Mahjong" were recently released together as a single set by the Criterion Collection.

Luc Moullet retrospective

On Tuesday, Mezzanine will launch its first-ever retrospective with eight screenings from the French filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet, some in new 4K restorations. A few of these films screened earlier this year at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and it's wonderful for local audiences to see them again, particularly following the response they generated over the summer from a series at New York's Film at Lincoln Center.

Among the films in the series are 1976's "Anatomy of a Relationship," in which Moullet himself appears; 1971's "A Girl Is a Gun," a western pastiche starring Jean-Pierre Léaud; 1987's "The Comedy of Work"; and 1966's "Brigitte and Brigitte."

Points of interest

Godard X 4

For reasons known only to the Great Projectionist, there are four of Jean-Luc Godard's 1960s films playing around town this week. (Which makes it a very good week.)

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On Sunday, Vidiots will play 1965's "Alphaville," an astonishing mash-up of the detective noir and sci-fi adventure film. Creating a dystopian world out of smartly deployed then-contemporary Parisian architecture, the film stars American actor Eddie Constantine as Lemmie Caution, a character he had already played in a series of French movies, alongside Anna Karina, one of the definitive icons of the French New Wave.

As Kenneth Turan wrote about the film in 2014, "'Alphaville' was in part about the importance of love and human connection in a world where technology was warping interpersonal contact. Those issues have not gone away, they've gotten stronger and more pressing with the passage of time."

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the New Beverly will show a double-bill of 1965's "Pierrot le fou" and 1963's "Le petit soldat." Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Karina, "Pierrot" is about a married man who throws his bourgeois life away to run off with a young woman. The movie merges politics, romance and a pop sensibility.

Writing about "Pierrot le fou" in 1968, Charles Champlin said, "Although his work can often be maddening elusive (and maddeningly, obscurely allusive, too) there is a continuous excitement in the awareness that Godard works ceaselessly to make the movie do new things, convey new states of being and convey especially the uneasy present states of our emotional and intellectual being."

Rife with anger over the French-Algerian war, "Le Petit Soldat" was completed in 1960, withheld from release for a number of years and didn't make its way to Los Angeles until 1968. It is now most notable as Karina's first appearance in a Godard film.

On Thursday, the Academy Museum will have a 35mm screening of 1967's "Weekend," a satirical allegory of social breakdown that ends with a card declaring the "end of cinema." And while it was not quite that, it did mark the end of Godard's monumental run of 1960s filmmaking, as his subsequent work marked a radical shift in style and tone.

'Who's That Girl' in 35mm

On Friday the American Cinematheque will screen 1987's madcap "Who's That Girl" in 35mm as a tribute to director James Foley, who died in May at age 71. The movie will be preceded by an introduction by screenwriter Kirsten "Kiwi" Smith.

Starring Madonna in a follow-up to "Desperately Seeking Susan," the film has her playing a newly released convict who convinces one of her attorneys (Griffin Dunne) to help her find the person who actually committed the crime she was wrongly convicted of. Soon a Rolls-Royce and an exotic cougar are also part of their journey.

In an email, Smith noted she first became aware of Foley when Madonna's song "Live to Tell" was on the soundtrack to his film "At Close Range." She soon learned that he also directed the music videos for her songs "Papa Don't Preach" and "True Blue."

"Then I went to opening night to see their screwball comedy 'Who's That Girl,'" Smith added. "While it doesn't quite reach the heights of their north star inspiration 'Bringing Up Baby,' it did motivate me and other teenage fans to seek out and fall in love with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, because she told us to. Madonna was teaching us about cinema even as her critics loved to announce she was failing at it.

"'Who's That Girl' is peak '90s Madge — she made a screwball comedy when people told her not to, she created a bold, outrageous character, wrote a fab soundtrack and took a risk with Foley, the young filmmaker of her choosing. Because of Madonna, not only did I learn James Foley's name, but I became a lifelong fan of his work."