There are some filmmakers that pop up on your radar again and again – but it takes you a very long time to get around to watching any of their films. There are just too many interesting filmmakers and too many films to check out – and if you’ve got a great local repertory cinema with a well-curated programme, you may even think, “Hey, sooner or later they’ll get around to something by this director on their programme.” Or, indeed, Criterion releases some of the director’s films, so you order them, and once they’ve arrived you put them on your shelf, next to the other Criterion films you’ve not yet got around to watching.

And then years pass, because in the meantime there are so many other films to watch, other directors to check out, other Criterion releases to get excited about and other cinema programmes featuring yet more films and filmmakers to keep you busy.

Until, in this case, your favourite local repertory cinema puts on a series of films from the Taiwanese New Wave, and you finally get to see two films by Edward Yang (well, actually three, though one of these was one episode in the anthology film In Our Time) for the first time – not on TV, played from a Criterion disk, but on a movie screen, as the God of Cinema intended. So this is a bit of a cheat in terms of being a Criterion Corner entry – but I assure you, Yi Yi (2000) has been sitting on my shelf for a long time, and A Brighter Summer Day (1991) is on its way as I write this. And I am already looking forward to revisiting both films in their Criterion releases.

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