Grant Gadbois There are great aspects of Three Times, but overall the film falls short of entertaining. The camerawork is quite lovely, especially the long takes, as it gives the piece a very special rhythm. The characterization is meaningful yet shallow in all three stories, which makes it hard to connect thoroughly with the characters. The first story is fantastically charming, but the second is beautifully dull, and the third failed to bring this viewer back into the picture. Three Times is an art piece, and should be viewed as such. The majority of modern movie-goers would not enjoy this film, but it does have merit, and this reviewer can most accurately described it as an experiment in cinema.

Paul Magne Haakonsen "Three Times" is not just your average movie, and it definitely is not the type of movie that will broadly appeal to just anyone in the audience.The movie is roughly two hours long and is divided into three segments, each telling a different love story in a different place, time and environment. But they are set around the same two leads - Shu Qi and Chen Chang.The first segment is titled "A time for love" and it is set in 1966 taking place in a pool hall where a military enlisted man falls in love with a woman working there. This is my personal favorite of the three segments.The second segment is titled "A time for freedom" and it is set in 1911. This segment is the strangest and perhaps the most artful of the three, as it is shot mostly without audible dialog. There is a piano playing constantly, and whatever dialogue is there is shown as written text on the screen, like in the old silent movies. The story in this is about a courtesan who falls in love with a political activist. This was the toughest to get through, as it was amazingly slow paced and nothing much happened.The third and final segment is titled "A time for youth" and it is set in 2005. The story in this segment is about a bisexual singer who is in a relationship with two people, a man and a woman, but things are not all well. This last segment was fairly blend, in my opinion.I enjoy Asian movies a lot and had to check out this movie as Shu Qi was in it, and also was intrigued as the movie had received fairly well reviews and ratings. Having seen it now, I will say that the movie is entertaining, but it is hardly the type of movie that you will put into the DVD player a second time, as it just doesn't have that much entertainment value to support more than a single watching.The people in the movie did good jobs with their given roles, and that goes for all three segments, and the director, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, does actually have quite a knack for capturing raw emotions and good imagery on film.

gradyharp THREE TIMES (Zui hao de shi guang) is so frank a film that the viewer may get lost looking for the hidden meanings in this century traversal of lovers' interactions in China. Not one for simple linear film-making, director Hsiao-hsien Hou instead opts for mood and suggestion and leaves the paucity of dialog to make room for emotional involvement and response. Three periods - 1966 A Time for Love, 1911 A Time for Freedom, and 2005 A Time for Youth - are depicted with the same main characters, Qi Shu and Chen Chang, who prove to be exceptionally sensitive to the concept from the director: with each new tale these fine actors mold new characters and questions and yet allow us to see a line of similarity in the couples as the director has suggested.The film wisely opens with the most successful of the three 'Times' - 1966 A Time for Love - - tracing the emergence of timid passion between a lad headed for the military and a young girl who works in a pool hall. They communicate by letters after their first brief introductory encounter and circumstances interfere with the progress of their relationship in 1966 Taiwan. The middle section 1911 A Time for Freedom is gorgeous visually and conceptually the director has elected to use the cinematic form of the period (silent movie) to tell his story about the freeing of a young girl from the grip of a brothel madam and surveys the political tensions between Japan and China as the quietly lighted story of love and yearning unfolds. The film ends with 2005 A Time for Youth and here our lovers are caught up in the pollution of smog, cellphones, emails, nightclubs, and infidelities for same sex affairs that speak loudly about the tenor of the times.Hsiao-hsien Hou's films are an acquired taste and many will find the choppy editing, the fragmentary scenes that are not always well focused for the story line, and the over-long length (130 minutes) too much to endure. But the ideas are fresh and the characters and vignettes are memorable, and most of the major critics in the media have lavished praise on this film. It is an interesting work but for this viewer there are enough flaws to keep it grounded. Grady Harp

anonyimdb1 You need patience to sink yourself into Hou's rhythm. But it is not to say patience alone would enable you to understand him. You need to think, use retrospection, and savor. His film is not constructed like our modern day commercial productions that employ the conceptions so successfully implanted in your brain by the omnipresent pop culture throughout your life that when the buttons are pushed you are instantly and readily joyed, angered, saddened, or cheered.Hou's film is not built on that.The expression is not visually over-charged, nor verbally flowered, nor did he use any clichés, be it western or eastern. The screen speaks beyond itself.It could be said that most western (by "western" I mean culturally European or American in contrast with the "eastern" by which I mean the Chinese or Japanese culture) movies have their meanings put as explicitly as possible, with one of the criteria of success being that the film should say everything that could be said and with nothing left. The audience would only appreciate the things presented and ignore the ideas inexplicit. With quite an opposite of this western technique, Hou expresses himself mostly in an implicit way. The movie itself is not the ultimate product but only the more superficial side of a deeper meaning. It is like painting. In order to describe the wind, a swinging willow has to be drawn. Because the wind is invisible and cannot be captured. It is the same with the technique that works implicitly which Hou uses - he is trying to capture the culture of the society as a whole and the various individual views on love in each of the three historical phases where three love stories took place. He was trying to capture the unspeakable panoramas of the societies with the stories that were each unique to their respective historical context.Hou pieces the three stories together to mark the transition of the Taiwan history and to compare the societies and their impact on individuals. The three couples in each era were all played by Chang Chen and Shu Ki. Thus, the three stories could be seen as three hypotheses of how their love would evolve under the respective influence of each particular historical setting. The lovers are the same, but the times change. Then you could see his evaluations on each era, how he reminisces the halcyon days of the 60s, how he respects and yet condemns the protestant-like days of early 20th century, and how he doubts the present globalization and the emergence of the hybrid culture between the western (chiefly American) and the Chinese.This is simply a masterpiece. I give it a 9 only because I've seen better ones from him and his fellow Taiwanese director Edward Yang. For those of you who enjoy this film, I recommend Hou's A City of Sadness and Yang's A Brighter Summer Day. The latter, in my opinion, is the best Chinese movie ever, and arguably the best movie ever. It used the "implicit technique" to the consummation.