Resurrection review – fascinating phantasmagoria is wild riddle about new China and an old universe

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In Bi Gan’s ambitious alternate reality, where humans can live indefinitely, a reincarnating dissident dreamer travels through history in different guises Bi Gan’s new movie in Cannes is bold and ambitious, visually amazing, trippy and woozy in its embrace of hallucination and the heightened meaning of the unreal and the dreamlike. His last film Long Day’s Journey Into Night from 2018 was an extraordinary and almost extraterrestrial experience in the cinema which challenged the audience to examine what they thought about time and memory; this doesn’t have quite that power, being effectively a portmanteau movie, some of whose sections are better than others – though it climaxes with some gasp-inducing images and tracking shots and all the constituent parts contribute to the film’s aggregate effect. Resurrection is, perhaps, a long night’s journey to the enlightenment of daybreak; it finishes at a club called the Sunrise. It is also an episodic journey through Chinese history, finishi...
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Streaming: the best holiday romance films

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Netflix’s featherweight A Tourist’s Guide to Love follows a familiar arc, but there’s more to fall for in classics from Summertime to The Green Ray

There’s nothing new under the sun in A Tourist’s Guide to Love – though there’s an awful lot of that sun, brightening every postcard shot in this featherweight Netflix romcom, and for viewers starved of warmth after a long, dreary winter, that’s enough of a lure. It follows a familiar arc: reeling from a breakup, a perky travel executive (Rachael Leigh Cook) takes a trip to Vietnam for notional work reasons, only to be swept off her feet by her charming local tour guide (Scott Lý). The film hits every holiday-romance beat you expect, but it hardly needs to shake things up: cinema has a proud and comforting tradition of stories in which a trip somewhere sunny and far away proves just the ticket for a character whose life has hit the skids.

My favourite example of the form – the fine wine to the budget lambrini of A Tourist’s Guide to Love – remains David Lean’s Summertime (oddly available to stream only on the free, ad-supported service Pluto). Its story of a buttoned-up, middle-aged American secretary splurging her savings on a long-desired trip to Venice and finding, with a suave Italian antique dealer, the kind of spontaneous romance she’s never known, is the platonic ideal of the genre: bathed in sunshine and Technicolor, the character blooms before our eyes, but the happy ending is compromised and complex, and richer for it.

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