Critic Reviews

• Dave Calhoun, Time Out

  The film takes on an operatic feel, moving between euphoria for the new and lament for the lost.

• Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

  The director has an exquisite eye that keeps getting stronger and subtler. He trusts that beauty is vagueness's alluring upside.

• G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle

  24 City won't change the minds of detractors -- it is his most painfully slow yet -- but it might change the minds of his supporters, including this critic, for Jia attempts something that is, in the end, unforgivable.

• V.A. Musetto, New York Post

  The result is surprisingly engrossing -- even lively, due in part to brief musical numbers inserted amid the interviews.

• Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

  Mr. Jia is an artist, one of the most interesting filmmakers working anywhere in the world, and he made his film to bear witness to a way of life while witnesses could still be found.

• Manohla Dargis, New York Times

  The actors in 24 City, an experimental fiction-nonfiction hybrid, bring their own existential realities to their short, touching performances.

• Derek Malcolm, This is London

  Zhangke never hints much about politics ... His is more the story of ordinary people caught up in history and still determined to live their lives as well as they can. It's both relevant and resonant.

• Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

  History weaves in and out of faces that purl their monologues -- real or scripted -- as Jia presents the past as a giant, invisible river.

• Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall

  An intriguing hybrid of fiction and documentary, this film chronicles the dismantling of a notorious factory in Chengdu to make way for a new luxury community. It's skilfully assembled, but a bit dry for Western audiences.

• Carmen Grey, Total Film

  Punctuated with eyebrow-raising poems about aeronautics factories, its treacle-paced obliqueness will frustrate some viewers. But the pay-off's a layered, haunting portrait of China in its shift to a capitalist economy.

• Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]

  A deeply serious and sombre film, trying to find a way of telling the stories of people affected by the gigantic political and economic changes sweeping that country whose concerns must in the end affect us all: 21st-century China.

• Matt Bochenski, Little White Lies

  Enthralling, beguiling and haunting.

• Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph

  Chinese arthouse fixture Jia Zhang Ke looks at the closure of a state-owned factory in Chengdu, combining real interviews with awkwardly am-dram mock ones.

• Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

  Reflective historical documentary on ordinary Chinese workers.

• Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid

  As far as nonfiction goes, you probably won't seen anything else this year so beautifully filmed.

• Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film

  This blending of the truth and invention is a key plank of Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke's work, which skates so close to documentary it is hard to spot the join.

• Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

  Compelling and provocative with powerful images and quietly moving interviews that shed light on impact of social, economical and political changes on factory workers in China.

• Jennifer Merin, About.com

  Jia Zhangke uses documentary and narrative storytelling in "24 City," an extraordinary chronicling of how deconstruction of an aviation factory in Chengdu, China, effects the lives of 30,000 workers for whom the factory was not just a job, but a way of li

Read all 18 critic reviews