Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Dir. Bi Gan. 2018, 140 mins. 3-D DCP. In Chinese (Mandarin) with English subtitles. With Wei Tang, Jue Huang, Sylvia Chang, Hong-Chi Lee, Yongzhong Chen. Bi Gan follows up his knockout debut, Kaili Blues, with a stylized, color-drunk noir about a lost soul (Jue Huang) on a quest to find a missing woman from his past (Wei Tang). Following leads across Guizhou province, he crosses paths with a series of colorful characters, among them a prickly hairdresser played by Taiwanese superstar Sylvia Chang. When the search leads him to a dingy movie theater, the film launches into an hour-long, gravity-defying 3-D sequence that plunges its protagonist—and us—into a labyrinthine cityscape.