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Movies / Upcoming / 24 City
24 City

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24 City (2009)

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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.

Rated: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins

Genre: Foreign Films

Theatrical Release:Jun 5, 2009 Limited

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... 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 conscience in a society characterized by rapid modernization and a growing amnesia." (Dennis Lim, LA Times, 2008) – 24 City recounts the dramatic and thunderous fall of the state-owned Factory 420, exploring both its physical demolition and its powerful symbolic echo of a half-century of communist rule.

Given the name Factory 420 as an internal military security code, the Chengdu Engine Group was founded in 1958 to produce aviation engines, and saw years of prosperous activity. Now abandoned, the factory awaits its destiny. Sold for millions to real-estate developers, it will be transformed into an emblem of market economy: a complex of luxury apartment blocks called 24 City.

Constructed around eight dramatic interviews, punctuated by snippets of pop songs and poetry, along with beautifully-shot footage of the demolition, 24 City excavates the debris of collective memory and emphasizes the thin boundary between fact and fiction in post-revolutionary Chinese history. It does so by weaving into this oral history three fictional monologues delivered by professional actors. The interviewees represent three generations with ties to the factory: former factory workers, contemporary workers, and their children.

An absolutely mesmerizing experience, 24 City attempts to understand the complexity of the social changes sweeping across China by observing the impact a half-century of Socialism has had on the Chinese people. --© Cinema Guild [More]

Starring: Joan Chen, Liping Lu, Zhao Tao, Chen Jianben

Starring: Joan Chen, Liping Lu, Zhao Tao, Chen Jianben, Jiang Shanshan, Chen Rui, Zhai Yongming, He Xikun, Wang Zhiren, Guan Fengjiu, Hou Lijun, Zhao Gang

Director: Jia Zhang Ke

Director: Jia Zhang Ke
Screenwriter: Jia Zhang Ke, Zhai Yongming
Producer: Jia Zhang Ke, Shozo Ichiyama, Wang Hong
Studio: Cinema Guild

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Reviews for 24 City

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

Full Review Source: Boston Globe | comment Comment
08/20/09
Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris
Boston Globe
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

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.

Full Review Source: San Francisco Chronicle | comment Comment
07/31/09
G. Allen Johnson
G. Allen Johnson
San Francisco Chronicle
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

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

Full Review Source: Combustible Celluloid | comment Comment
07/30/09
Jeffrey M. Anderson
Jeffrey M. Anderson
Combustible Celluloid

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.

Full Review Source: Eye for Film | comment Comment
06/28/09
Amber Wilkinson
Amber Wilkinson
Eye for Film

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.

Full Review Source: NYC Movie Guru | comment Comment
06/07/09
Avi Offer
Avi Offer
NYC Movie Guru

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

Full Review Source: About.com | comment Comment
06/06/09
Jennifer Merin
Jennifer Merin
About.com

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

Full Review Source: New York Post | comment Comment
06/05/09
V.A. Musetto
V.A. Musetto
New York Post
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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.

Full Review Source: Wall Street Journal | comment Comment
06/05/09
Joe Morgenstern
Joe Morgenstern
Wall Street Journal
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

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

Full Review Source: New York Times | comment Comment
06/05/09
Manohla Dargis
Manohla Dargis
New York Times
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Mostly, 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.

Full Review Source: AV Club | comment Comment
06/04/09
Scott Tobias
Scott Tobias
AV Club

becomes whatever the viewer wants it to be.

Full Review Source: Filmcritic.com | comment Comment
06/04/09
Chris Cabin
Chris Cabin
Filmcritic.com

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.

Full Review Source: Time Out New York | comment Comment
06/03/09
Keith Uhlich
Keith Uhlich
Time Out New York

This subversively old-fashioned hymn to industrial production is filled with offbeat, vaguely absurd details.

Full Review Source: Village Voice | comment Comment
06/03/09
J. Hoberman
J. Hoberman
Village Voice
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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.

Full Review Source: Film Journal International | comment Comment
06/02/09
Maria Garcia
Maria Garcia
Film Journal International

Brilliant evocation of Maoist-minded workers alienated by China's bourgeois transformation.

Full Review Source: rec.arts.movies.reviews | comment Comment
05/30/09
Louis Proyect
Louis Proyect
rec.arts.movies.reviews

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.'

Full Review Source: Seattle Times | comment Comment
05/07/09
Jeff Shannon
Jeff Shannon
Seattle Times

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.

Full Review Source: Jam! Movies | comment Comment
03/20/09
Jim Slotek
Jim Slotek
Jam! Movies

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.

Full Review Source: Toronto Star | comment Comment
03/20/09
Peter Howell
Peter Howell
Toronto Star
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The complexity of [Zhangke's] postmodernist formal gambit nonetheless gets at something pressing.

Full Review Source: Lessons of Darkness | comment Comment
10/27/08
Nick Schager
Nick Schager
Lessons of Darkness

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

Full Review Source: Antagony & Ecstasy | comment Comment
10/27/08
Tim Brayton
Tim Brayton
Antagony & Ecstasy
 
 
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