Fah talai jone (Tears of the Black Tiger) Reviews
Top Critic
Has lots of pop energy and an admirable poker-face when it comes to its Douglas Sirk-ian storyline. And even though it's essentially a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from a zillion other movies, you really haven't seen anything like it.
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| Original Score: B-
The movie is fun to watch, with an attractive cast.
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| Original Score: 3/4
You've never seen and never will see anything quite like Tears of the Black Tiger.
It's safe to say you've never seen a film like this before.
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| Original Score: 3/4
An enjoyably energetic genre romp.
A parody of and winking homage to the history of Thai melodrama, Wisit Sasanatieng's uproarious filmmaking debut exuberantly combines pop and kitsch with a wholesome belief in the thrills of bad art.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
[Director] Sasanatieng engages the viewer's emotions fully in the squaring away of the eternal triangle, involving young people who emerge as three-dimensional individuals even though they are archetypal.
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| Original Score: 5/5
The result is something so old it's new, so corny it's funny. And while Tears of the Black Tiger is nothing more than entertaining, at least it's that.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's watchable, but eventually wears you down with its over-the-top cleverness.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What the story lacks in snap, it makes up for in sincerity. [The film's] melodrama is so poker-faced and its gore so explicit (if phony-looking) that it's hard to tell whether you're dealing with the Thai Todd Haynes or the Thai Sam Peckinpah.
What makes Tears a must-see are its day-glo colors, stylized gunfights, music that sounds as if Ennio Morricone had written it for one of Leone's spaghetti Westerns, and hyperbolic dialogue.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Director Wisit Sasanatieng uses every trick imaginable to create surreal postmodern nostalgia. Has he wound up with pure camp, or a cult classic? As he clearly understands, the best B-movies are both.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The uncut Tears of the Black Tiger is more powerful than the cut version, not least for the way it shows that [director Wisit] Sasanatieng, even amid all the craziness, takes care to tie up even the loopiest plot details.
There may be crazier movies than this Thai cowboy melodrama of betrayal and forbidden love, but I can't think of one that is quite so mad about its own craziness.
| Original Score: 3/5
Goodness knows there are enough winking genre references in Tears of the Black Tiger to fill an encyclopedia of film, but does anyone care, short of self-congratulating movie critics?
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| Original Score: 2/4
Nothing is too crazed, corny or freakishly florid for Tears of the Black Tiger. Together with cinematographer Nattawut Kittikhun, Sasanatieng dyed his images through digital postproduction, pushing colors to impossible hues of eccentric radiance.
It's no buried postmodern masterpiece, but it certainly is a jaw-dropper: a delirium-inducing crash course in international trash.
Wisit's amazing film goes so far beyond kitsch that it enters Powell and Pressburger territory.
Yes, it's quite a mix, but the result is a mongrel many will adore.
