Bai ri yan huo (Black Coal, Thin Ice) Reviews
June 13, 2015
Black Coal, Thin Ice twists and turns as it goes: even the jolting electronic music over the end credits springs another surprise.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
June 5, 2015
Maybe the angriest movie from mainland China since Li Yang's Blind Mountain.
Original Score: 5/5
June 4, 2015
What's fascinating is not merely the plot, but the wonderfully shot background, red and green neon on a grey townscape.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
June 4, 2015
It never quite catches fire, but it has a curious atmosphere of its own: menacing, pregnant with unease.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
June 4, 2015
Puzzling out the whos, the whys and the WTFs of this marvellously oddball case takes a back seat to drinking in the film's dark, shining evocation of night and the city.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
June 1, 2015
Moments of thrilling visual beauty are studded through this dour Chinese thriller like diamonds through a seam of coal.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
April 9, 2015
Writer/director Diao Yinan's brilliant and beautifully stylized Chinese noir transfixes the viewer with its cynical cops, hazardous settings and a mysterious aura of days gone by before delivering a devious denouement.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
June 12, 2014
The final reel is visually interesting in ways nobody could anticipate; it is also smugly perplexing, as if the filmmaker took joy from the knowledge virtually nobody would understand it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5