Spielbergism avant la lettre, The Red Balloon was the art-house E.T. of 1956. Flight of the Red Balloon is something far more baffling—a literal-minded movie with an amiably free-floating metaphor.

But no one has preserved it more consistently than the French writer-director-producer Albert Lamorisse, whose Oscar-winning short “The Red Balloon” (1956) has been central to stoking juvenile ...

Given all this, Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Flight of the Red Balloon," which opens today, should be one of the biggest disasters in the history of motion pictures. A belly-up catastrophe.