Tears Of The Black Tiger takes a journey back to a lost past: the heroic years of Thai genre cinema, when influences from Hollwood and everywhere else were subsumed into rollicking Thai melodramas. The film centres on the handsome bandit Black Tiger, who's in love with a high-born lady, a union made more difficult because her father plans to marry her off to the police captain in charge of wiping out Tiger's forest-dwelling gang.

A brilliant pastiche of varnished themes, styles and characters, this is director Wisit's homage to old movies from around the world, with a cross between spaghetti westerns, songs of high romance, and contemporary Bollywood.

Using tricks of 1950s film styles - the remarkable lurid technicolor of neon pinks, oranges and turquoises - Tears Of The Black Tiger is one of the year's most unusual - and fun - cinema experiences.

An out-of-work cameraman, Yo Yo (Ge You), is hired to shoot a documentary about a legendary director, Don Tyler (Sutherland), who is filming a remake of The Last Emperor. Tyler suffers a mental block while he is preparing to shoot a lavish scene in the Forbidden City. Sacked from the film by the studio boss (Mazursky), Tyler has a stroke and urges Yo Yo to fulfil his final wish, a lavish 'comedy funeral'. Yo Yo sets out to plan what promises to be a very costly extravaganza. This is a heavy-handed satire sending up China's embrace of Western style commercialism. Unfortunately, given that this film was produced by Columbia's Asian production arm, the satire proves to be self-defeating.