The bittersweet immigrant love story at its core \u2014 starring cutie-pie it-boy Fred Hechinger (\u201cThe White Lotus,\u201d \u201cThelma,\u201d \u201cGladiator II\u201d)<\/a> as an army veteran and wildly promising discovery Sebiye Behtiyar as an undocumented Sebiye Uyghur woman, arriving in New York City amid great peril and pain \u2014 is as seemingly doomed as the movie\u2019s release strategy. Director Liu more than uncannily follows in Ross\u2019 footsteps, which led to a Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay nominations for \u201cNickel Boys\u201d: Liu also worked as a camera assistant on fiction series and films outside his nonfiction efforts, bringing to \u201cPreparation for the Next Life<\/a>,\u201d based on Atticus Lish\u2019s 2014 novel, a sophisticated visual sense.<\/p>\n That\u2019s even if the movie is uneven dramatically, weighed down by traumas and break-ups and breakdowns in the later stretches, and with too many shots of Aishe (Uyghur) jogging toward her future. Those scenes, long tracking shots held by cinematographer Ante Cheng\u2019s camera, don\u2019t tell us anything about Aishe other than how her soldier father, back in the Chinese province of Xinjiang she escaped where the Uyghur ethnic minority is persecuted, instilled in her a commitment to exercise and physical strength that becomes part of her preparations for the next life. If they tell us anything, it\u2019s to literalize how she\u2019s running from her past.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n But the film\u2019s occasionally clumsy symbolism and sputtered drama aren\u2019t a reason to write off the film. On the contrary, \u201cPreparation for the Next Life\u201d is a promising narrative debut that also harnesses Liu\u2019s established bona fides as a documentary director. His observant approach to capturing the sights and sounds of New York\u2019s Chinatown and Lower East Side \u2014 the streets packed with extras, the kitchens where Aishe works steaming and bustling \u2014 displays what can only be a documentarian\u2019s attention to local detail and color.<\/p>\n Skinner is back in the United States, and in New York City with nothing but a backpack and baggie of anti-anxiety meds, after yet another tour of duty in the Middle East, and clearly dealing with undiagnosed PTSD and self-medicating with alcohol. Meanwhile, though Aishe speaks Mandarin and English (the latter a slight update from Lish\u2019s novel, in which her English vocabulary is limited), she is treated even by the landlord operating the Lower East Side hovel she\u2019s renting week after week as an outsider because she is Muslim. We get flashes of her perilous journey as a refugee from China to the United States, more so than is offered of Skinner\u2019s past, which he prefers not to divulge either. He spends much of his time on benders.<\/p>\n Martyna Majok\u2019s script would not work on the screen without the chemistry between Behtiyar (an actress wise for her years and lack of professional experience) and Hechinger, who fall fast in love all over New York City after a very only-in-the-movies encounter, in Times Square hotels and in a McDonald\u2019s or in the threadbare apartment Skinner rents, but are ultimately too damaged and from too disparate of cultural backgrounds to make it work. A late-breaking confrontation between the actors amid Skinner\u2019s escalating alcohol dependency is capably played by Behtiyar and Hechinger, in a film that has previously avoided overdramatics or sentimentality. A piano-driven score from \u201cThe Last Black Man in San Francisco\u201d composer Emile Mosseri rings in your head long after the movie is over, a thing of true beauty. The cinematography is also up there with the year\u2019s best.<\/p>\n In a span of entire completed films evaporating off studios\u2019 rosters faster than a Titanic-bound submersible, does Amazon\/MGM Studios want to be known as a corporation that treats artists similarly? \u201cPreparation for the Next Life\u201d begins a quiet release this weekend, and it doesn\u2019t feel like the studio is supporting it. There\u2019s an audience for this film, for those who like their romances unsentimental and spare, politically conscious without overheaping the messaging. It\u2019s a flawed but affecting film worth more than being treated as everything but a literal write-off.<\/p>\n Grade: B-<\/p>\n Amazon\/MGM Studios releases \u201cPreparation for the Next Life\u201d in theaters Friday, September 5.<\/p>\n Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bing Liu, the writer\/director born in China until his family moved him to the United States when he…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":202758,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,1020,53,105797,11853,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-202757","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-preparation-for-the-next-life","12":"tag-reviews","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115152641965248987","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Venice](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/ryan4-4.jpg\")
<\/a> ![\"'Die,](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Die-My-Love-2.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n