Writing in Variety magazine, Ada Shen notes three quirky new Mainland films:
Gu Changwei’s directorial debut, Peacock (kongque)
A drama, set in a small city in the early 1980s, about three misfit youths born to utterly average parents.
Jia Zhangke’s The World (Shijie)
A modern-day musical telling of an amusement-park security guard who falls for a showgirl. The movie is largely set at the Beijing theme park Window of the World.
Zhang Yuan’s Beautiful (kan shang qu hen mei)
The film is based on the semiautobiographical novel by author Wang Shuo. To be filmed from a child’s perspective, the movie will tell of a precocious 5-year-old sent to foster-care kindergarten whose tall tales of a child-eating monster soon wreak havoc among his 300 classmates.
The article is here (free trial registration required).