Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Derrick Gibbons An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

timmy_501 Zhang Ke Jia's 24 City has an unusually oblique narrative, mostly told through a series of interviews that initially seem to have little connection to one another. As the film goes on, narrative threads begin to come together into a coherent whole. This narrative strategy is initially off putting but eventually yields dividends for the patient viewer. The narrative has some interesting things to say about Chinese culture, which Zhang depicts as quite rigid with little mobility economically or geographically for most people. At the same time, people's situations aren't particularly stable as several workers talk about suddenly losing their jobs through no fault of their own. In spite of a lack of external motivation, citizens are expected to be very internally motivated and express this through patriotic team fervor and self-sacrifice. In spite of how inherently un-cinematic the interviews (which make up the majority of this film) are, Zhang is able to bring his mastery of the medium to bear and 24 City ultimately transcends this limitation. One way he does this is to surround each interview segment with scenes full of action, such as numerous factory sequences and one memorable early shot taken from a moving truck. He also makes the interviews themselves visually interesting in a couple of way. First, most of the interviews incorporate some sort of background movement, including one that has two men playing badminton and another that offers frequent glimpses of foot traffic. Secondly, each interview takes place in a carefully designed space that tends to be both full of detail and reflective of the unique characteristics of the interviewee. Finally, he uses camera movements quite carefully for emphasis throughout. Ultimately, 24 City is an example of how carefully employed cinematic techniques can make even material which initially seems quite humdrum and unsuited for film into a memorably viewing experience.

Joseph Sylvers Zhang Ke Jai has(at least to me) grown substantially since "The World", able to leave some of the melodrama behind and let his characters and the landscapes speak for themselves. "24 City" is a beautiful film, both relevant and moving in the ways "Up In The Air" wishes it were.A factory in Chengdu, China that has been in operation for generations is being closed down to make room for a upscale high rise apartment building called "24 City" ironically named after a poem about harmony. We follow a series of interviews with former factory workers about their lives in and around the factory.Some of the interviews could have been shortened or illustrated visually instead of having us just watching talking heads speaking over silence, but that is my personal preference.It could be argued, by not re-creating their lives Jai gives his subjects a sense of dignity, and creates an intimacy between them and the viewer that would be otherwise lost. For the most part I would agree, though in honesty, I did get anxious more than a few times during some of these discussions. Jai's subjects at first seemed to be almost rambling inconsequentially, but as the film goes on, their statements become enmeshed in each other and the film as a whole, and intricately articulate how the factory for generations was their entire world, romantically, socially, philosophically, and culturally.Some of the workers had their first fights there, their first loves, some moved their whole families on the promise of work, while others left their families behind, and suddenly this community which has sustained them all this time has disappeared, moved by forces beyond their control. Part of the film is documentary, but some of the interviews are "fictional" and feature actors.I had trouble telling the difference between those who were actors and who were actual workers, but the mixture between the authentic and the dramatic only serves to highlight the contrast between the promise of worker's solidarity and justice and the realities of changing economic priorities. Jai's "The World" offered us the best metaphor for the globalized melancholic that I've yet to see, that of an amusement park masquerading as the greatest architectural achievements of humanity, while those who toil in it are increasingly alienated from any sense of "authentic" culture, themselves, and each other. That film itself, however was not as compelling as it's ideas.In many ways "24 City" and so I am told Jai's similar, "Still Life" continue this series on the changing face of China, and the "real" people caught up in this global gentrification. What made me look at "24 City" as something other than just a clever polemic was a baffling scene of a girl skating to a soft, bubbly, trance like electronic song. The girl skates in circles, and the music plays and we just observe her, and the song continues, as the camera floats off looking across the city and the mammoth building rising up into the skyline. I don't know what if any purpose this scene had to the rest of the film, but it was lovely. Equally startling were the huge crowds of workers, by the hundreds in the film's first scenes, that are as overwhelming as the CG throngs of countless soldiers and orcs from "The Lord Of The Rings" epic battle-scapes. In those moments Zhang makes his cinematic eye, rival and better his(at least for me)binding interest in social realism.Realism especially of the socially progressive variety is not my cup of tea (to put a borderline pathological aversion mildly), but "24 City" made, if not a believer, than a fascinated viewer out of me. If globalization has to be "hot button" of contemporary art, if there must be sad-sack post-modernist which stylistically bite the hands that feed them, if the classical Marxist themes of alienation, class, and gentrification must persist on into the next decade, we could all do worse than to see them filtered through Zhang's warm humanism (another term I would usually avoid).It's not a thrill a minute, and there is no George Clooney smirking to enjoy, but "24 City" is rewarding, intimate, and oddly sensual, which few politicized movies, and even fewer documentaries, seem capable of doing these days. This is the first Jai I enjoyed, and makes me interested to visit the rest of the oeuvre.

yc955 This movie is by far his best IMHO. The flow is engaging and natural while the 'empty' spaces in between narrations are not unlike those quiet passages in Chopin's piano pieces or the white spaces in the classic Chinese paintings.I used to think Joan Chen only as a pretty face. But her performance here, even though short, changed my view completely. She can really act and act well! And she's still beautiful more than ever. Gawd bless her! The other pro actresses have proved their mastery in acting long ago and didn't disappoint here either.But the most credit has to go to the writer/director Jia - these short stories never really intertwine with each other as a plot, but together they are so strong and compelling that makes any smart and coy plot pale in comparison. Jia again nailed the pulse of the real life drama right on without wasting much of anything.I can't help but feel sympathetic to those who can't get 'it' because of the lack of background knowledge about the modern China. Only it's ironic, or even rather sad that, for such an iconic Chinese master movie maker with such a quintessential Chinese story telling, only found his fame mostly outside China today.Once a famous jazz critic wrote that if you remove all the names of the white jazz players from its history, you haven't changed jazz a single bit. IMHO, by the time the outside world gets tired of the curiosity of Jia, over time his mastery will establish itself in China and only then will he find his real audience.

Chris Knipp Jia's latest feature doesn't reach out and grab you; rather it builds up a steady accumulation of detail in an artful and partly fictionalized documentary whose central concern is the transition from a planned economy to a market economy in China, with the Cultural Revolution along the way. Jia decided to use actors to play "real" "documentary" talking heads--people who worked at a certain factory now dismantled to become a five-star hotel--or their children, one of them, Su Na (Zhao Tao) working as a "shopper," making good money traveling to other countries and buying expensive goods for rich clients who want to spend but are too lazy to do so. This woman, who wept when she visited her mother in the factory for the first time and saw her numbing job, is the opposite extreme from the aging, now dim-witted "master" of the factory in its early days who worked seven days a week, and used the same tool till it wore down to nothing so as not to waste. The shift in China from the self-effacing collectivist mentality to the current entrepreneurial capitalism is so great that you can imagine why Jia takes refuge in still tableaux of people, composites, and a gallery of talking heads. But this is not as stimulating a film as earlier works like Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World, or Still Life and will appeal only to the patient.Actors are used for some of the people because Jia interviewed 130 people and had to create composites. Jia sees no problem in making use of fiction this way in telling fact: life as he sees it is a mixture of historical fact and imagination. He uses poems by classical poets including the Dream of the Red Chamber and William Butler Yeats as well as songs, including "The Internationale" sung by a group of oldsters, pop music, a Japanese classical composer, and contemporary music by a Taiwanese composer. Sometimes the camera is still as a person speaks. Sometimes one person or a group look silently into the camera for a minute or so.The film, understandably, tells a tale of repression. It also witnesses people who were laid off in the 90's and suffered the lowering of an already frugal lifestyle.There are strange stories. One woman describes being on a company trip when she and her husband lost their little boy. It was wartime and they felt obligated to go back on the boat to return to work, and they never saw their child again. An attractive woman known as "Little Flower" was the prettiest girl at the factory and when the photo of an unidentified handsome and athletic young man appeared on a bulletin board everyone told her he should become her husband. Silly as this was she began to dream of it--but then they were called together and told he was a pilot whose plane had crashed so he had died due to the malfunction of parts they had made at the factory. They were meant to feel guilty. A woman for years helped her sister in the country by sending clothes and other things to be recycled for her children. More recently she was laid off and became so strapped she had to rely on her "poor" country sister to help her out.The focus is on the 420 Factory, which was founded in Chengdu, the capital of Sechuan, in the late 50's to produce airplane engines. In early days its function was secret and workers, shipped there from all over the country, lived in virtual isolation; kids got into fights if they tangled with the locals, one man recounts. Later 420 was retooled to produce peacetime products such as washing machines.Known actors such as Joan Chen or Jia regulars such as Zhao Tao and Chen Jianbin work together with unknown crew members to simulate the "interviews." Though Jia's logic in using this method to present composites makes sense, the effect is to undercut the sense of realism. Probably the best thing about the film is the beautifully composed shots of the factory in operation and being dismantled, taken by cinematographers Yu Lik-wai and Wang Yu. While Jia's Still Life was haunting and quietly powerful, Useless seemed inexplicable and lazy. This is somewhere in between the two. Emotionally it has some import, but the mixed genre doesn't entirely work, and the sense of a Brave New World conveyed in Jia's diffuse but interesting The World seems to have given way to adverts for capitalism. Is this so that Jia can work and travel freely and get his films shown at home? The leading Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker may be slowly morphing into somebody else.