J.B. Spins

Xiang Yang is a badly messed-up person. The CCP, the Gang of Four, and Chairman Mao are responsible for messing him up. He started life with...

The Yangtze is truly a river of tears. Throughout history, its floods have been devastating, leading to the deaths of hundred as recently as...

Zhu Zhilang is like a Chinese Willy Loman. He is desperate to be liked and he always believes his next big score is right around the corner....

Nobody tells provincial police detective Ma Zhe to “round up the usual suspects,” at least not in so many words, but that is clearly what hi...

There is only good thing about censors. Since they are crude creatures of their ruling regime, they are mostly dim bulbs and largely out of ...

Usually, is great news when an indie release becomes a sleeper hit. However, it got Li Ruijun’s hardscrabble film banned in China. Obviously...

These teens have no future and they know it. The kind of Chinese films that tell their sort of stories do not have much future either, but n...

They were never really given a choice in the deal,  but the Chinese people were promised prosperity, stability, and happiness, if they gave ...

You know this film must be propaganda, when it is the third installment of the so-called “China Victory Trilogy,” especially when the first ...

In the hit 2019 film and Liu  Cixin ’s original source novella, the Earth made like the Moon did in Space: 1999 , spinning out of its orbit ...

Like nearly every other Chinese mythical figure, Yang Jian (a.k.a. Erlang Shen) makes an appearance in Journey to the West , but he is more ...

It is nice to know a film remotely connected to the reality of life in China can still slip by the China Film Administration (at least it di...

Teenaged Shui Qing’s economically-stagnant industrial hometown was already depressed and depressing. Imagine what it was like after the Xi l...

Qiu Fu specializes in playing the clown in Sichuan Opera. He is definitely a sad clown, having endured hardship and tragedy during the Civil...

They build fast in China. Sometimes that means public works projects come crashing down even faster, like the shoddily constructed schools i...

China experienced a literal “generation gap” when the best and brightest students of the late 1980’s disappeared or sought asylum abroad fol...

The Monkey King (a.k.a. Sun Wukong) is sort of like the Chinese Loki. He is a demigod and a trickster, but he can also be a bit of a screw-u...

The real villllains who made Wang Qiong’s family so miserable are never seen in her debut documentary. That would be the Chinese Communist P...

It was a 2008 blockbuster that helped herald the rise of Mainland China’s homegrown tent-poles, but being at the top of the domestic box-off...

It would be much harder to produce this film in China today than it was in 2015. For one thing, it stars Fan Bingbing, who was the first tar...