Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien • 2001 • Taiwan
Starring Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Duan Chun-hao

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s neon-splashed reverie is a dreamlike drift through the night world of early-2000s Taipei. From the year 2011, the wayward Vicky (Shu Qi)—a bar hostess caught between a jealously possessive boyfriend and a gangster—looks back on her life ten years earlier, rendered in flashback as a transfixing, narcotic haze of trancy techno, sumptuous slo-mo, and ravishing iridescent imagery, tempered by an undercurrent of inescapable ennui.