Ghost Town Reviews
Top CriticHow does a massive, uneasily modernizing nation feeds its people? That question, in all its facets, is the river running through Ghost Town, and the waters are rarely clear.
Slant Magazine
Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town paints a haunting trifurcated portrait of people set adrift by forced large-scale economic and cultural transformations.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
I do not expect to soon find scenes to match Ghost Town's mountaintop funeral, the running along after a rowdy exorcism, or the scanning of faces at the town Christmas chorale. His back to prosperity, Dayong finds hallowed ground.
In spite of its length the film feels foreshortened, as if every vignette or incident, every character encountered for a few moments, contained the germ of an unwritten novel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
NYC Film Critic
"Superficial" is one word that can't be used to describe Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Never mind the nation's great economic leap forward; the longer you watch Zhao's chronicle of the financially destitute and the bureaucratically forgotten (and it's a lengthy doc), the more you feel that you're witnessing a country fraying at its edges.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
