Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan)
This is not the film to explain Hou Hsiao-hsien's reputation as one of the most lionized foreign-cinema director of the past decade, but it's worth an immersion into its bright surfaces and fatalistic social milieu of bar girls and small-time crooks. Back to the low-key style of Hou's other modern gangster movie, Goodbye South, Goodbye, this is a kind of tone poem that shifts time, at one point even looking back at the present from the imaginary window of the future. Shu Qi plays Vicky, who lives with Hao-hao (Tuan Chun-hao), an unemployed punk with dyed blonde hair, with whom she has an unhappy on-again off-again relationship. Eventually, she drifts into the orbit of an older gangster/businessman, Jack (Jack Kao). Millennium Mambo is intended as the first of a series of films by Hou about life in modern Taipei. - L.L.

(Tues., Sept. 11, 9:15 p.m. Uptown; Wed., Sept. 12, 3:30 p.m. Cumberland)