A Touch of Sin (2013)
Average Rating: 7.1/10
Reviews Counted: 25
Fresh: 21 | Rotten: 4
Its screenplay isn't as graceful as the choreography of its action sequences, but A Touch of Sin offers enough stylishly satisfying violence to muscle past its rough spots.
Average Rating: 7.3/10
Critic Reviews: 10
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 1
Its screenplay isn't as graceful as the choreography of its action sequences, but A Touch of Sin offers enough stylishly satisfying violence to muscle past its rough spots.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 183
Movie Info
A "brilliant exploration of violence and corruption in contemporary China" (Jon Frosch, The Atlantic), A TOUCH OF SIN was inspired by four shocking (and true) events that forced the world's fastest growing economy into a period of self-examination. Written and directed by master filmmaker Jia Zhangke (The World, Still Life), "one of the best and most important directors in the world" (Richard Brody, The New Yorker), this daring, poetic and grand-scale film focuses on four characters, each living
Oct 4, 2013 Limited
Kino Lorber
- Official Site
Cast
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Tao Zhao
Xiao Yu -
Jiang Wu
Dahai -
Wang Baoqiang
Zhao San -
Lanshan Luo
Xiao Hui -
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All Critics (25) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (21) | Rotten (4)
Sin, more stylized than the director's previous work, is also more detached.
Top CriticThe most dramatic and even lurid of writer-director Jia Zhangke's movies.
"A Touch of Sin" is by no means subtle, but it is composed with a passion and sinuous grace that makes it far more effective than many other sincere message movies.
A blistering fictionalized tale straight out of China, "A Touch of Sin" is at once monumental and human scale.
Jia has a knack for orchestrating violence: The brutality is just stylized enough to have a kick, though you always feel its emotional weight.
By far the best action movie of the year.
Zhangke is a throwback to the golden age of cinema, evoking Ray, Kurosawa and Sembene. Like them, he embodies the national idiom while addressing the universal human condition.
It's not a pretty picture, but it's a compelling one.
It's a bold, invigorating statement from a director who keeps reinventing himself.
Jia's film remains a troubling, exhilarating epic of pugnacious surreality that's filled with jabbing questions and no simple answers.
The movie builds repeatedly to crescendo, pushing some desperate individual to the brink and then watching as he or she explodes into violence.
As depicted by Jia Zhang-ke, the balance between the spoils and moral rot of murder are far preferable to the debasing rigors of tradition and hollow nationalism.
A searing narrative that takes aim against the corruption and greed in The New China.
A decent 45 minute buildup is squandered as the rest of the running time ambles along.
This was one film that I gladly wished was longer. It's the best omnibus in quite some time.
It's a stunning commentary on why our collective belief in might makes right continues to prevail.
Ultimately A Touch of Sin a rather misshapen attempt to add drama and narrative intrigue to Jia's stylistic repertoire, and the joins show too obviously for the result to be truly satisfying to his diehard fans, or to potential new recruits.
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Foreign Titles
- A Touch of Sin (DE)
- A Touch Of Sin (Tian Zhu Ding) (UK)
