Stop Watch

Silence can be deafening in Tsai Ming-liang's films. The award-winning Taiwanese director will often have a character simply walk through a park, with no dialogue at all. His movies don't explain, they make the audience work for meaning. Though critics sometimes accuse him of pointing a camera at nothing, he clearly knows how to create something from the void. What Time Is It There?, his seventh film, is a visual feast on love, death and loneliness.

Tsai holds the patent on slow opening scenes, and this one doesn't disappoint. We see a man (Miao Tien) at a kitchen...