Dongyu Zhou is the girl Chen Nian and Jackson Yee plays handsome street punk Xiao Bei. Derek Tsang directs from a screenplay by Wing-Sum Lam, Yuan Li, and Yimeng Xu, based on a 2016 Young Adult novel by Jiu Yuexi. The novel's title has many English translations, including Young and Beautiful; In His Youth, In Her Beauty; and The Youthful You Who Was So Beautiful; and it's now being reprinted under the name Better Days. Nan Chen is credited as a co-screenwriter and the movie is nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar.
One reviewer noted that the story points to the "animalistic nature of adolescence — an age when kids are old enough to cause vital damage but not old enough to care." The movie has "bookends," beginning and ending with a flash forward to Chen teaching an English class to Chinese kids. At the end, Yee reads some info about what the Chinese government is doing to stop bullying. Not surprisingly, Chinese censors banned this movie for over a year. The post script makes it sound like it's based on a true story, but my research tells me otherwise.
The soundtrack by Varqa Buehrer isn't available to stream, but he does have some tracks on Apple Music and Spotify.
The cinematography is inventive, with work by Jing-Pin Yu and Saba Mazloum.
The cinematography is inventive, with work by Jing-Pin Yu and Saba Mazloum.
Zhou is 29 (she doesn't look that old) and has been acting for ten years with 38 credits and 70 combined nominations and wins, 25 of which are for this project alone. Yee has also been modeling and acting for ten years, but he was only ten when he started. He's now a solo musician as well as an actor. This is Tsang's fourth feature, Buehrer's first, Yu's seventeenth, and Mazloum's seventh.
Rotten Tomatoes' critics have seen no days better, with a perfect 100% average, and its audiences are satisfied, coming in at 97. I paid a small fee to rent it on Apple TV on March 28, and it's available on Prime as well.
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