Stray Dogs

Stray Dogs really starts to come alive in its second half, when... the family-of-outcasts narrative tips completely into the slippery realm of the avant-garde.

In its most evocative moments offers images that will stick in your mind even longer than they stay on the screen.

A mysterious and deliberately prolonged series of tableaus about the fragility of flesh and the smallness of humanity, among other things.

[A] glum, humorless exercise in Asian miserablism ...

An extreme, compassionate magnification of the minutiae of second-to-second existence (brushing teeth, counting money).

If this is Tsai Ming-Liang's last film, he's leaving the cinema farther along than he found it.

If this, truly, is Tsai's send-off, Stray Dogs is a finish for the history books.

This is perhaps the most political Mr. Tsai has ever gotten.

The emotional and geographical wasteland where this takes place is both foreign and achingly real, and for those with the patience to traverse its terrains, its rewards are as vast as they are strange and unsettling.

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.

This is the tenth and the most daunting feature film Tsai has made.