The director has an exquisite eye that keeps getting stronger and subtler. He trusts that beauty is vagueness’s alluring upside.
Comment
08/20/09
24 City (2009)
90
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:20
Fresh:18
Rotten:2
Average Rating:7.5/10
Consensus: One of China's most talented directors blurs the lines between non-fiction, drama, and musical theater in this vivid portrait of a country in cultural flux.
Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
US Box Office: $0
Synopsis: A masterful new documentary from Jia Zhang-ke – "Not only is the 38-year-old director the most prominent Chinese filmmaker of his generation, he also has come to assume the role of witness and... [More]
Reviews for 24 City
1 - 20 (sorted by date; Australian critics are listed first)
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.
07/31/09
As far as nonfiction goes, you probably won't seen anything else this year so beautifully filmed.
07/30/09
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.
06/28/09
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.
06/07/09
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
06/06/09
The result is surprisingly engrossing -- even lively, due in part to brief musical numbers inserted amid the interviews.
06/05/09
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.
06/05/09
Top CriticThe actors in 24 City, an experimental fiction-nonfiction hybrid, bring their own existential realities to their short, touching performances.
06/05/09
Top CriticMostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers’ gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.
06/04/09
becomes whatever the viewer wants it to be.
06/04/09
Jia is one of the guiding lights of the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers, and 24 City is a potent exploration of his constant theme -- the tectonic shifts that occur as the old gives way to the new.
06/03/09
This subversively old-fashioned hymn to industrial production is filled with offbeat, vaguely absurd details.
06/03/09
Celebrated filmmaker Jia Zhangke melds fiction and non-fiction filmmaking to portray the new betrayals in store for the Chinese as they shift to capitalism--ones not very different from the old betrayals of a paternalistic society.
06/02/09
Brilliant evocation of Maoist-minded workers alienated by China's bourgeois transformation.
05/30/09
With this moody and curiously effective follow-up to his critically acclaimed drama Still Life, director Jia Zhang-Ke paints another vivid portrait of China devastated by commercial 'progress.'
05/07/09
24 City is best viewed with no pretense of it being a documentary. Thus absolved of having to provide context, it can be appreciated for its narrative, a past-meets-present series of melodramas.
03/20/09
The boom-and-bust cycle that afflicts company towns in capitalist countries also dogs the state-run cogmakers, as Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke lyrically depicts in 24 City, an ode to changing times.
03/20/09
The complexity of [Zhangke's] postmodernist formal gambit nonetheless gets at something pressing.
10/27/08
One of the year's best... a narrative film masquerading as a documentary, and more of an essay on the status of life in a modernising China than either
10/27/08
1 - 20 (sorted by date; Australian critics are listed first)
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