Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014)

''Black Coal, Thin Ice'' is a sinister neo-noir movie by renowned Chinese actor, director and screenwriter Diao Yinan. The film is a mixture of a slow-paced thriller and a depressing drama. The movie received wide critical acclaim and won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival among others.

Sadly, this movie is a good example for the fact that critically acclaimed movies rarely appeal to wider audiences. Things start promisingly in the beginning when body parts are found in different coal factories in the People's Republic of China in 1999. The locations look empty, grey and polluted and show unusually cold-hearted, contemporary and realistic facets of the country. Just about fifteen minutes into the movie, a very weird scene occurs. The cops want to interview a first suspect and the whole event escalates for no apparent reason. The suspect and some of his friends die as well as several cops. We soon get to know that the suspects didn't seem to have anything to do with the murder and the question is why they would immediately panic when they saw the police and try to kill everyone around them. The whole scene was intense and had a shocking effect but it felt exaggerated and almost surreal. The promisingly slow start felt disharmonically interrupted and botched.

This opening massacre is not the only time characters are acting in abnormally weird ways in this movie. The movie surely includes a lot of symbolism and metaphors and tries to portray loneliness and rejection in a directionless and industrialized society but some scenes are out of place and so surreal that they somehow contradict the dark realism of the plot. While the movie has several interesting experimental ideas, other parts are unnecessarily long-winded and the plot itself is not surprising enough to carry over almost two hours. The film feels as if Charles Bukowski met David Lynch in an industrial ghost town to elaborate a script that is missing that certain something. The plot itself is not complex enough to make this a good thriller. The characters are not profound enough to make this an intense drama. The story is not surreal enough to make this an uneasy mystery movie. This film includes elements of all these genres but not enough of everything to fully convince and sometimes feels directionless. What could have been a revolutionary mixture of genres feels headless at certain moments.

The initially interesting characters and solid acting also fail to develop further as the movie goes on. Five years after the first crime and its ensuing massacre, other dismembered body parts are found that all seem to lead to the mysterious widow of the first victim. The two desperate, disgraced and lonesome cops who survived the opening massacre try to find the real murderer behind these gruesome crimes. One has become a drunken security guard who desperately wants to solve the murder case that destroyed his life. He first investigates and stalks the mysterious and quiet widow before he begins a romantic relationship with her. This relationship between two solitary souls could have been an amazing idea. The concept isn't new but movies such as ''Sea of Love'' or ''Basic Instinct'' have shown what you can make with such a plot. Sadly, the two main characters don't connect on any level. Even their common loneliness is lived in different facets and it's challenging if not impossible to feel empathy for any of them. I found that the conclusion of this initially promisi

Fmovies: Black Coal, Thin Ice is the kind of film that can only be felt, the charming point of the film is the indescribable feeling you get from the unique atmosphere. It's a suspense film with sort of Film-Noir feeling, but the plot of the case actually is not so important. As I said, what matters is the feeling. Those empty street shots, environment background sounds, strange acts and even some dark humor tastes. It even looks like a Jia Zhangke's film sometimes.(Well, Jia Zhangke's name did appear in the thank list in the end credits.) Such feeling reached the top in the ending of the pyrotechnical in daytime, it not only reflect the title (The Chinese title is Bai ri yan huo, which means The Daylight Pyrotechnix.) but also release the depressed emotion and atmosphere. (The Uncut Version has very strange but interesting dark humor style scenes in the ending, but they are cut out in the Censored Mainland China Theatrical Version.)

The atmosphere in the film is nearly perfect, however the romance relationship between two characters is not believable at all. The whole film is based on that relationship, but it didn't convince me. Without the reliable relationship, the rest of the film seems not make sense at all. So yeah, it's a rare and unique film in Chinese cinema, it is well did in many aspects, but I don't think it is qualified for Golden Berlin Bear.

My score: 7.5 for the Uncut Version, 7.3 for the Mainland China Censored Theatrical Version.

I'm a big fan of Asian cinema, and I'm always happy to sit back and watch a Chinese thriller. However, BLACK COAL, THIN ICE takes some sitting through, purely because of its pacing. This is one of the slowest-moving films I've ever seen, and it feels like it goes on forever. The plotting is straightforward detective/police procedural stuff, and feels stretched out to fill the running time.

This is a mood piece throughout, focusing on summoning up a chilly atmosphere rather than worrying about the intricacies of story. It's also a thematic film exploring some social themes in China: alienation, husband/wife relationships, adultery, abuse. The problem I have with it is that it just didn't wow me. Everyone else seems to love it, so perhaps I'm missing something.

The characters are thinly drawn but somehow likable despite this; it helps that the lead actors, Fan Liao and Lun Mei Gwei, are both very good and naturalistic in their roles. Some moments of quirky comedy are the best thing the film has to offer, but for the most part it's just about long, drawn-out and repetitive scenes with the odd jarring moment. Although I like the genre, I didn't enjoy this film, and was really waiting for it to end more than anything else.

Black Coal, Thin Ice fmovies. An ex-detective re-investigates a strange unsolved murder case that effectively ended his career five years previously. In doing so he ends up becoming increasingly involved with a young woman who seems to be connected with a series of similar killings.

It was good to see an example of a Chinese neo-noir. My previous experience with films from China has been usually of movies of epic proportions with big production values. So it made for a refreshing change to see something more low-key and contemporary. This one sets out its stall very well with the sinister discovery of various body parts being found in bags of coal spread all over the country, huge distances apart. The introduction of a femme fatale into the mix only ups the intrigue level further. And I have to say that on the whole I did enjoy this film and found it compelling, with its Chinese origins ensuring that it was a little different and punctuated with unpredictable moments. By the end of the piece it would be only fair to say that some questions still remain. I thought the ending was really very strange indeed with an odd final few moments and an ambiguous feeling. It almost feels like a superfluous ending but maybe I missed something in it. In truth odd things happen on a number of occasions throughout this one and reasons are not always very forthcoming, I am guessing this is a film that would benefit from a re-watch possibly. Also good was the wintry atmosphere of the snowy locales where the action unfolds that created a feeling all of its own which worked well. But I would probably have to conclude that, while I definitely liked this one, it does falls short of being great. It's not really that suspenseful for this type of film and the plot development doesn't ultimately reveal all that good a mystery in the final analysis. Certainly a good enough movie I have to emphasise but it just has a few hard to ignore unsatisfying flaws as well though.

How does a Chinese director empty the noir sensibility of any and all of the glamour associated with its Hollywood counterpart? How does it become a study in pure dourness and grimness? If you're Yi'nan Diao, the first thing you do is set it in a place as grim and dour as a northern Chinese factory town circa 1999. In this frozen wasteland that may or may not be Harbin – it doesn't matter, it could be Siberia – the ball gets rolling when dead body parts start showing up on the conveyor belt of a coal processing plant: after all, in this time and space in China, the human body is just another physical commodity…

Following a bloody shootout that leaves the two main suspects and two of his partners dead, we jump forward five years to find the surviving detective, Zhang Zili, paralyzed by the trauma, retired from the police force and passed out in the snow in an alcoholic stupor. But things are never what they seem in noir, right? So he's dragged back into the case when a former partner of his suspects the involvement of a black widow- like female at the heart of the matter. An exotic call girl? A mysterious nightclub singer? No – just some depressed woman who works at a dry cleaner's where she's regularly mauled by her piggish oaf of a boss.

The plot is unimportant, really, because the film is one big painting, a night-time world where the neon signs of the internet gambling dens and bleak taxi-dancing joints are beaten into submission by the cold dark chill of northern China, where all color and light are sucked into the film's essence, which is nothing but a black hole, a gravitational death machine that swallows up every photon in sight. At one point, while spinning around the world's most depressing ice skating rink, Zili asks his former partner, "Does anybody ever really win at life?" Of course not. Like all the other catatonic ice skaters, he's just going round and round, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind (depending on one's point of viewÂ…) getting nowhere while people continue to copulate and kill and die. The key to the film is the direct translation of the Chinese title, which means "daytime fireworks." I'll let you figure that out for yourself, but if you like your noir pitch-black, this one's for you.

The plot is that two cops who have had their careers ruined, by a case that went horribly wrong, decide to reunite. This they do after a murder that has striking similarities to the one that floored them happens again.

Zhang Zili has lost everything, his wife, the job he loved and has turned to the bottle as he goes through the motions as an underpaid security guard. Then he gets the chance to solve the case that is his nemesis. This is not a police procedural though; this has elements of the heart, base existentialism and even dark humour.

This is from director and writer Yi'nan Diao who brought us 'Night Train' and 'Uniform'. He comes from a very industrialised part of China and this is generally reflected in his films - and indeed it is here. Also the loneliness that comes from the isolating capacity of industrialised living. This though is a confident and assured piece of film making. Even when I thought a scene or two had stayed going a tad too long, he just reveals why and all of a sudden you are right back on track. In Mandarin and running to around 100 minutes this will appeal to those who appreciate modern Chinese cinema and who like a bit of dark brooding to their crime thrillers.