Score: A Film Music Documentary (PG13)
94 minutes, limited screenings at The Projector
This 2016 documentary features interviews with more than 50 composers, including Heitor Pereira (Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, 2022), Hans Zimmer (Dune, 2021, for which he earned an Academy Award for Best Original Score), Danny Elfman (Edward Scissorhands, 1990) and directors such as James Cameron and Steven Spielberg.
In addition to interviews covering different aspects of creating music for films, the documentary features behind-the-scenes footage, showing composers working with orchestras and directors.
The screening of the film is a collaboration between The Projector and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, which is presenting E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial – Film With Live Orchestra.
Held at the Esplanade Concert Hall on Jan 26 and 27, the screening of Spielberg’s beloved 1982 adventure will take place with the orchestra performing the Oscar-winning score by John Williams. Tickets from $20 are available at www.sso.org.sg
Where: Golden Village x The Projector at Cineleisure, Level 5, 8 Grange Road
MRT: Somerset/Orchard
When: Feb 4 and 12, various times
Admission: $15 for standard ticket prices. SSO Friends Season Pass holders enjoy $2 off
Info: str.sg/gjJ5
Only The River Flows (PG13)
101 minutes, now showing at The Projector, 4 stars
It is 1995 in China. In a village, by the river, the corpse of a poor, elderly goose farmer is discovered. Local police chief Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) comes to investigate.
His politically driven superiors pressure him to find someone to hang for the crime because if left unsolved for too long, the case will sully an otherwise stellar departmental record. The stress of the chase finds the cop swimming in the waters of identity, memory and forgetting.
Adapted from acclaimed author Yu Hua’s 1987 short novel Mistakes By The River, the film was nominated in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
Beijing-born director and co-writer Wei Shujun’s third feature is remarkably self-assured for a film-maker who has never done a crime drama, much less one that features an unreliable narrator. Wei has adapted the conventions of the noir detective story for rural China in the 1990s without making it feel forced.
John Lui
Johnny Keep Walking! (PG13)
117 minutes, now showing, 3 stars
In this shrewd and briskly entertaining corporate satire, Chinese writer-director Dong Runnian (Mr Six, 2015) delivers a critique of the Byzantine bureaucracy, “voluntary” overtime, nepotism, scapegoating and corrupt bosses that define the modern workplace.
During a round of layoffs, lowly factory technician Hu Jianlin (Da Peng) is mistakenly transferred to the company’s headquarters in the city.
Through a series of farcical misadventures, he not only survives his ill-qualified promotion, but the middle-aged bumpkin also blunders his way further up the management hierarchy under the new name John – more befitting of an “international enterprise”.
The movie has been a massive box-office hit in China by clearly striking a chord with the country’s current generation of aggrieved white-collar professionals.
Whang Yee Ling
