The question most film remakes need to answer is whether or not they bring something new or different to the table that justifies their existence. For American remakes of foreign films, that justification is generally language accessibility. When there’s a great idea for a movie out there already done once, but there’s an untapped audience that just doesn’t enjoy reading subtitles, it’s an attractive prospect to skip all that creative development and just make the same movie in English. The results (with plenty of notable exceptions) tend towards pale and uninspired reflections of the original film.

Of course, when a great director steps on board for a remake, one hopes for a different read on the material, that rare cover song that re-imagines the original in unexpected and provocative ways: as, say, Martin Scorsese did with The Departed. It’s someone else’s song, but it’s unmistakably Scorsese’s voice.

In A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop, the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou takes on the task of remaking the Coen brothers’ debut film, the darkly comic neo-noir, Blood Simple. There’s no question that Zhang puts his unique stamp on every frame of this project, re-setting it from a bar in 1980s rural Texas to a noodle shop in 19th century rural China. The striking vistas of the Gansu region of northwestern China, with its big skies, dusty plateaus and rugged landscape, provide a mesmerizing backdrop to Zhang’s typically operatic visuals and colorful compositions. The director takes time seemingly between every scene to just let the camera watch the clouds roll by over this beautiful and forbidding landscape.