I Don't Want to Sleep Alone.

J Hoberman in the Voice on Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, now screening at the IFC Center through Tuesday: "Albeit closer to ballet than drama, this urban nocturne is one of Tsai's most beautiful and naturalistic films - at least in terms of its rich, humid, almost viscous ambience. The narrative, however, is pure fable—complete with a mysterious ending that leaves the protagonist and his lovers bobbing like a cork on a sea of chaos."

"On the subject of angles, Mr Tsai may be modern cinema's reigning genius of camera placement, with an ability to turn simple, homely spaces into zones of psychological mystery," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Films like Rebels of the Neon God, The River and What Time Is It There? (to name my own favorites) are plain, vivid and realistic, yet at the same time they are works of high artifice, threaded with visual motifs and sneaky metaphors."

Updated through 5/12.

"[R]arely [has] a filmmaker encouraged such active engagement with stillness," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "There may not be much radically new in Tsai's approach to camerawork and storytelling, yet the film's distinct naturalism feels worlds away from his previous, almost metaphysical stylization."

"Sleep Alone is a full pendulum swing from the garish watermelon porn of Tsai's previous The Wayward Cloud, and an equally unlikely metaphor for human connection," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

For Matt Singer at IFC News, the film "falls in to the director's format of what could be termed 'brooding and canoodling.'"

Earlier: Fiona Ng and Johnny Ray Huston (San Francisco Bay Guardian); Chuck Stephens (Film Comment); Keith Uhlich (Slant); and "Venice. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone."

Update, 5/11: Akiva Gottlieb for Nerve: "All his totems are in place - crippling passivity, disease, flooded basements, incest, homoeroticism - and even if the story's oblique internal logic never quite bubbles to the surface (in the other words, if it makes little narrative sense on first viewing), Tsai often infuses even the darkest, dankest corners of this polyglot industrial wasteland with sublime beauty."

Update, 5/12: At Twitch, The Visitor reports that the film will be shown in Malaysia after all. In one theater. The two-week run is pretty much sold out, so Tsai, who's in Kuala Lumpur for a retrospective accompanying this event, is shooting for a third week.

Update, 5/14: Daniel Kasman:

[T]he setting and subject have made I Don't Want to Sleep Alone Tsai's least funny film. Not without its playfulness and deadpan jokes, the uprooted Malay setting serves for a far more morose, empty and searching film, one whose suffusion with the dripping evening heat, lumberingly slow bodily movement, and general languor serve out the dance between the immigrants in a kind of humid, sorrowful slow motion. This evocative, palpable atmosphere is unfortunately married to a very haphazard cinematic quality, as Tsai's reliance mostly on single-shot scenes and long takes means that if a certain composition does not work or the direction does not liven up the shot, an entire scene or series of scenes can pass by with a banality and emotionlessness that has been rare for the director.

Posted by dwhudson at May 9, 2007 12:38 PM