The Trial

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s neon-splashed reverie is a dreamlike drift through the night world of early 2000s Taipei as a wayward bar hostess is caught between a jealously possessive boyfriend and a kindly gangster.

A drug-dealing dropout decides to live in a flourishing garden located in an abandoned industrial site in this anticapitalist rejoinder to the “economic bubble” culture of the 1980s.

In one of her most complex works, Yvonne Rainer concocts a genre-busting, autobiographical meta-film that interrogates memory, gender dynamics, and the reductive manner in which women’s stories are too often told.