"Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien (A Time to Live and a Time to Die) emerged as a major new talent of the 80s, and this lyrical childhood remembrance shows you why. A young boy and his sister spend a summer at their grandparents' house in the country while their mother recuperates from an illness; they while away the hours climbing trees, swimming in a stream, searching for missing cattle, and coming to uneasy grips with the enigmatic and sometimes threatening realities of adult life. The fine, unsentimental attention to childhood incident, as well as the vignettish formal structure, recalls the work of Japan's Hiroshi Shimizu, a child-genre specialist of the 30s and 40s whose Four Seasons of Children this film closely resembles, though Hou's social concerns run deeper, and his spare, contemplative styling--the precise formal center around which a world accumulates--sets him squarely among the modernists. There's a slight sense of drift toward the end, as if Hou's personal, long-take certainty had momentarily deserted him, but otherwise it's a remarkably assured effort."

-- Pat Graham, The Chicago Reader

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DVD Rip

Format                           : AVI
Format/Info                      : Audio Video Interleave
File size                        : 1.37 GiB
Duration                         : 1h 37mn
Overall bit rate                 : 2 000 Kbps


Video
ID                               : 0
Format                           : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile                   : Advanced Simple@L5
Format settings, BVOP            : Yes
Format settings, QPel            : No
Format settings, GMC             : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix          : Custom
Codec ID                         : XVID
Codec ID/Hint                    : XviD
Duration                         : 1h 37mn
Bit rate                         : 1 737 Kbps
Width                            : 608 pixels
Height                           : 336 pixels
Display aspect ratio             : 16:9
Frame rate                       : 23.976 fps
Color space                      : YUV
Chroma subsampling               : 4:2:0
Bit depth                        : 8 bits
Scan type                        : Progressive
Compression mode                 : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)               : 0.355
Stream size                      : 1.19 GiB (87%)
Writing library                  : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04)

Audio
ID                               : 1
Format                           : AC-3
Format/Info                      : Audio Coding 3
Format profile                   : Dolby Digital
Mode extension                   : CM (complete main)
Codec ID                         : 2000
Duration                         : 1h 37mn
Bit rate mode                    : Constant
Bit rate                         : 256 Kbps
Channel(s)                       : 2 channels
Channel positions                : Front: L R
Sampling rate                    : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth                        : 16 bits
Compression mode                 : Lossy
Stream size                      : 179 MiB (13%)
Alignment                        : Split accross interleaves
Interleave, duration             : 96 ms (2.30 video frames)
Interleave, preload duration     : 96 ms
Language                         : Chinese