Average Rating: 6.8/10
Reviews Counted: 10
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 2
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 6.1/10
Critic Reviews: 5
Fresh: 3 | Rotten: 2
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 2.8/5
User Ratings: 15,651
The beauty and tragedies of China's history are reflected in the lives of a handful of film fans in this historical drama. Mao Dabing (Xia Yu) is a delivery man working in a small village in rural China during the latter days of the Cultural Revolution. Mao is a movie fan who lives for the periodic outdoor screenings held in the town square, but he meets a bigger buff one day when, after he has an accident on his bicycle, he's assaulted by Ling-Ling (Qi Zhongyang), a cute but overly excitable
Dec 16, 2005 Wide
Jul 25, 2006
First Run Features
All Critics (11) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (10) | Rotten (2) | DVD (4)
Strip away the silly ideology of the old films, and Electric Shadows could be any movie buff's tale. It's the memory movie of our own mind, in English, Mandarin or whatever language the local Bijou screened them in.
Debuting writer-director Xiao Jiang shows she has the makings of a quality mainstream filmmaker.
Dreamy lighting, soft colors and lilting music mix with an agreeable cast.
This fanciful Chinese tearjerker wants to be an Asian Cinema Paradiso but doesnt quite live up to its prototype.
For every privileged moment (mother and daughter dancing in a yard of screen-like sheets hanging in the breeze), there's a death or sociopathic act that says movies can ruin your life.
In an astonishingly accomplished first feature, female filmmaker Xiao Jiang puts an entirely different face on China's Cultural Revolution.
...a gentle coming-of-age drama set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution.
Chinese filmmaker Xiao Jiang makes an impressive debut with an extended flashback about two cinema-crazed kids coming of age amid the communist revolution of the early 1970s.
Like a Chinese version of The Notebook, every bit as sappy and shameless, only with crazier ingredients and 10 percent less saturated sentimentalism.
Xiao's bittersweet film is superficially a swoony love letter to the cinema. But her valentine has a hidden sting, rooted in some hard truths.
A touching, deeply evocative love letter to the history of Chinese cinema.
Sort of a Chinese Cinema Paradiso. Sentimental and compelling.
January 15, 2009
Super Reviewer
The main character's name isn't Mao Dabing. It's still Mao Xiaobing. "Xiao" means "little" and "da" means "big," so he's joking that he has grown up. Very sweet movie but the more I watch it, the more leery I am of the melodramatic coincidences the story depends on.
October 13, 2008Super Reviewer
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