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100A gem made by a filmmaker who loves life, and knows how to capture its ebb and flow and sweet complication.
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100This is not a children's picture, although it touches on the imaginative powers and emotional resilience of children. It's another slice of Hou's distinctly poetic realism, and as such, also a kind of tribute to Paris -- the Paris of both today and of the older film.
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100Hou's first film made outside of Asia is his most emotionally turbulent, yet he remains, like the balloon, outside looking in, a compassionate but distant observer capturing it all with a graceful restraint and floating beauty that ultimately carried me away with it.
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100Flight of the Red Balloon is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.
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100Because it's one of the most beautiful films ever. Because it's a work of art on the order of a poem by Yeats or a painting by Rothko.
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91Juliette Binoche is outstanding as a wildly untogether single mother who parks her son with a French-speaking Chinese nanny while she whirls and worries.
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90It's both happy and sad. That's exactly the way to describe Hou's marvelous film as well.
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90In The Flight of the Red Balloon, the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien uses Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 masterpiece "The Red Balloon" as a springboard for his own masterpiece--a distinctively modern and allusive one, yet so tender and plaintive that you understand what Hou is up to on a preconscious level.
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90The camera is so unobtrusive and the acting so naturalistic that it takes a while for a narrative to emerge. When it finally does, you're surprised to find you're deeply invested in the characters.
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90In the end what elevates Mr. Hou’s films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling.
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90What Mr. Hou has done is borrow power and some gentle intimations of a state of grace from one of the most enchanting images in movie history.
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88Hou intends to celebrate the classic 1956 children's film "The Red Balloon," and he has done a beautiful job. In fact, he may well have created a future classic of his own.
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88A meditation on art, life, loneliness and the links between friends and strangers, the movie has a grace and humor that's wonderfully inviting.
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88The subject is the privileged state of childhood itself - how we're all lucky to have had it and how it so easily floats away from our grasp.
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88For all its fuss and fury, Flight of the Red Balloon succeeds magnificently.
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83Too much of this film is attenuated and vague, but it has moments of deep melancholy.
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80This eloquent study of loneliness and postmodern drift likely will be received with more admiration than rapture by the helmer's followers. But Juliette Binoche's turn as a harried single mom and pic's enlivening portrait of domestic rupture make this a highly accessible Hou.
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75Fans of Hou know just what to expect from his slow, contemplative films - and they won't be disappointed.
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75Flight was commissioned by producers overseas, and it feels similarly, impeccably slight.
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70There's not much story here, but the characters are substantial: a single mother (nicely played by Juliette Binoche) who runs a local avant-garde puppet theater and is preoccupied with such matters as a downstairs tenant who refuses to pay rent or leave, her neglected but mainly cheerful son, and his Taiwanese nanny, a filmmaker in her spare time.
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67The balloon will resurface throughout, but far more interesting, and substantial, is the slow reveal of Simon's domestic situation.
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67Ultimately, though, it's hard not to feel like Hou is saying more explicitly and expansively in nearly two hours what Lamorisse managed to convey in only one-fourth as much film.
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63Not surprisingly, we're left with characters that feel only half sketched and fail to resonate on their own -- but onto which much can be read by Hou's most ardent fans -- in a poetic looking film that's ultimately as inflated and empty as the balloon itself.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 21
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Mixed: 6 out of 21
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Negative: 8 out of 21
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