Stray Dogs

The images are breathtaking, from incantatory close-ups of Lee's ravaged face, through sepulchral landscapes of concrete and vegetation, to weeping buildings haunted by shadowy ghosts.

Certainly the work of a deeply serious and distinctive film-maker.

Tsai now makes films that transform the auditorium into a different kind of space, in which viewers become attentive, and self-consciously present, in a way they wouldn't be when occupying the exact same seats to watch, say, Let's Be Cops.

If the first two-thirds offer more or less what you’d expect from a Tsai film, Stray Dogs shifts (through an appropriately dramatic thunderstorm) into dark fairy tale mode, with an intangibly creepy charge.