LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Sabah Hensley This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

crossbow0106 Let me start off by saying I am a Tsai Ming-Liang fan, having seen just about all of his films. He is a master of the long shot, as well as telling a story with minimal dialogue. This story is about a street person (Tsai's muse Lee Kang-Sheng), who gets beaten up by a gang. He gets rescued by Bangaladeshi immigrants, who take him back to where they live (it is not a home, more like a construction site). They nurse him back to health. His character (the characters are not named, an interesting way of telling the story) meets and also spends time with a waitress (Chen Shang-Chyi, a pretty veteran of Liang films). This causes jealousy, both with the immigrant who saved him and the mother of the waitress. The mother and daughter also care for an invalid, bed ridden brother, who is also played by Lee Kang-Sheng. This story, set in Tsai's home country of Malaysia, is indeed oddly touching, an exploration of loneliness, the need for human contact, jealousy and survival. This is not for everyone, certainly not lovers of action and fast moving films. All of Tsai's films are slow and methodical, and this one has a heart. He is fairly unique in his storytelling, I like that emotions can be conveyed with so little said. I always liked the combination of Keng-Shang and Shang-Chyi as a couple in his films, they seem very comfortable with each other. That being said, check out these Tsai films first for a primer into his style: "The River", "What Time Is It There" and "The Hole". I liked this, the film has heart.

author-21 I am always a little surprised to see negative reviews of Tsai Ming-Liang films in web communities populated by film enthusiasts. And that's not because I'm about to argue that all film enthusiasts should like Tsai Ming-Liang movies, far from it. Rather, what surprises me is that film enthusiasts -- people motivated enough to have IMDb logins and, further, motivated enough to write reviews -- would be unfamiliar enough with Tsai Ming-Liang and his work, prior to viewing any particular film, that they could end up being surprised by what they get. Like all of Liang's films, this is a very, very, VERY quiet movie. That's the whole point: long takes, minimal dialog, you get out of it what you're prepared to concentrate hard enough on to see the subtlety of. I own all of his films and I watch them again and again -- and that doesn't make me a better person than the other reviewer, either. He's an acquired taste and if you don't like quiet, light-brush-stroke movies you won't like this guy's stuff. But I can't imagine anyone not knowing all of that before they start, and then complaining about it afterward.

liehtzu Pusan Film Festival Reviews 7: I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang) I haven't seen Tsai's last film, "The Wayward Cloud," but I'm happy to report that "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" is better than his appallingly dull and pretentious "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," even if it's got nothing on Tsai's best work of the '90s, "Vive L'amour" and "The Hole." "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" represented the mummification of Tsai's style - the stretches of silence and static scenes where nothing happens, which had served him so well in his early career but with each passing film threatened to get old, finally found their ultimate negative expression. Tsai continues to grind his wheels with the new film, though it's hardly as unbearable as "Goodbye, Dragon Inn." The problem is that Tsai's style was something of a revelation when he made "Vive L'amour" - though it felt a little like a Taiwanese version of an Antonioni film it was actually a deadpan comedy, with a wickedly tragic twist at the end that turned like a knife you didn't even realize was stuck in your ribs all the while. I hoped that a change of scenery might do Tsai good, and it was interesting to hear that "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" was shot in Malaysia, where Tsai was born. I wanted to ask him some questions after the screening about the differences he may have felt shooting in Malaysia, but unfortunately, like the Bruno Dumont session, questions were asked in Korean translated to the director's native language, and I don't speak much Korean, French or Chinese. No one speaks much in Tsai's new film (of the three main characters only one is ever heard to utter a word), there are frank and disturbing sexual scenes, and there are several shots of people walking slowly down darkened corridors or alleyways. All this has become a mannerism - rather than communicate incommunicability the lack of dialogue feels like an art film pretension now, rather than be shocking the sexual scenes strike anyone familiar with the director's past work as been-there-done-that, and the long static shots of people walking just serve no purpose whatsoever. Unfortunately much of Tsai Ming-liang's new film feels stale.

erahatch "What Time Is It There?" remains my favorite film by Tsai Ming-liang, but it's fascinating to follow his work and see how he builds his own imaginative world -- close to, but not exactly, our own -- film by film."I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" took me a little longer to get into than any prior film by the director, but by about the half-hour mark I was fully absorbed. Thankfully, "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" rewards patient viewers by reserving some fantastically humorous, mysterious, and even hypnotic moments for its last acts. Whereas in previous films, familiar visual tropes such as umbrellas and watermelons have played recurrent symbolic roles, here it's mattresses and anti-smoke facemasks, somehow used just as evocatively. Other obsessions -- dripping water, holes in floors and ceilings, mysterious and unspoken attractions -- recur here in ways that recall the director's previous works without depending upon them.I wouldn't suggest curious viewers start with this film, but rather delve back as far back as possible into Tsai Ming-liang's back catalog and proceed from there -- easier than ever before to do now, what with the increased DVD availability of early gems such as "Rebels of the Neon God." For those unsure if they want to make that level of commitment, check out "What Time Is It There?" or "Goodbye Dragon Inn." But for the already converted, rest assured that "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" is a strong, worthy addition to Tsai Ming-liang's body of work.