Blue Sun Palace

It has a very lyrical, steady and poetic moodiness to it.

Blue Sun Palace lives in the gray area with the rest of us mortals. What it conveys, quite beautifully, is the essentialness in sharing your life with others, through joy and grief.

Tsang deepens the themes of her movie in unhurried doses, bringing to the surface the loneliness, isolation, and displacement of the remaining characters.

Instead of leaning into trauma or misery, the filmmaker gives us complex characters who nonetheless speak very little — everything happens in their expressions, the quick flash of a twitch across a cheek when the other isn’t looking.

[A] resolutely humane but fiercely unsentimental film.

Tsang chooses to forgo much attention to plot or character development, instead prioritizing mood, choosing to harness grief in its pure form.

Tsang immediately proves herself a master of tight-space framing in her feature-length debut.

Tsang’s film offers a refreshing and rewarding perspective on an aspect of life often overlooked by mainstream cinema. This personal approach showcases her talent as both a director and a writer, promising a bright future in feature-length filmmaking.

Arguably overlong at two full hours for its very small, minutely observed story, "Palace" nonetheless has an air of patient poetry that turns the mundane into something melancholy, moving, and a bit spectral.

Tsang’s approach is patient but not withholding, like a documentarian focused on the gradual accumulation of everyday details and what they reveal about the lives of her characters.