24 City (2009)

G. Allen Johnson

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 | Comment | Jul., 31 2009 11:27 AM

Amber Wilkinson

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 | Comment | Jun., 28 2009 10:30 AM

Jennifer Merin

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 | Comment | Jun., 06 2009 03:29 PM

Joe Morgenstern

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 | Comment | Jun., 05 2009 10:08 AM

Scott Tobias

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 | Comment | Jun., 04 2009 05:19 PM

Keith Uhlich

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 | Comment | Jun., 03 2009 02:09 PM

Maria Garcia

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 | Comment | Jun., 02 2009 08:00 AM

Jeff Shannon

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 | Comment | May., 07 2009 04:56 PM

Peter Howell

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 | Comment | Mar., 20 2009 01:18 PM

Tim Brayton

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 | Comment | Oct., 27 2008 03:07 AM