A naked Martian visits Earth. Xiao Bo brings him home so that they can learn from and about each other. The lessons start with basics (the land, the water), but before you know it they`re investigating spray-on cologne, baseball and nicotine. The only flies in the lubricant are Xiao Bo`s buddies (who think the alien is a fake) and Xiao Bo`s live-in girlfriend, who feels crowded out of what she thought was a stable relationship. The stage is set for the final conflict between earthbound prejudices and jealousies and galactic love... [Star Appeal] is no less idiosyncratic than Cui`s previous films, but it does go quite some way towards clarifying his thoughts on the `alienness` of queer identity. Much of it is about the education of one man by another, although the final scenes shift away from natural history and the imaginary aerodynamics of human flight into the realm of [l`education sentimentale]. So you might even call it Cui`s answer to the Godard movie [Le gai savoir...] with the accent, of course, on the [gai]. (Tony Rayns)