Return to Dust’s characters don’t so much develop as they deepen.
Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.
Jia discusses what he likes about digital video and how Zhao Tao helped bring her role to life.
With Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham delivers a richly evocative portrait of working-class life in the British Midlands.
It’s a quixotic and profound statement on the spatial and temporal dissonances that inform life in 21st-century China.
Walter Salles reinforces the impression of Jia’s art as emerging fluidly from the vagaries of his own life.
This vision of post-industrial existence never succumbs to the morbid, as flickers of hope shine through the gloom.
It’s the fleshed-out first segment that best presents characters with actual lives, as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film’s second half.
It’s the unlikely third-part arrival in a widescreen, English-speaking Australia in 2025 that proves to be Jia’s undoing.
It’s perhaps only natural that a film festival as wide-ranging as the Berlinale would include a few documentaries about filmmakers.
Jia’s tetraptych offers a haunting look at a system in which late capitalism and its provoked responses are terrifying and consumptive.
Here, the balance between the spoils and moral rot of murder are far preferable to the debasing rigors of tradition and hollow nationalism.
From the opening moments of Jia’s film, something strange is afoot.
Wang Bing’s no-frills style of documentation visually echoes the preadolescent trio’s simple yet unforgiving world and its sense of labor as life.
There’s a palpable sense of both anger and sympathy on the part of Wang for the plight of his subjects.
Sauna on Moon is less a classic narrative than snapshots of a life in progress.
In contemporary Shanghai, Jia has located a nexus of past and future and, predictably, he’s more interested in the rubble than the glamour.
In a Better World exposes conflicts between cultures, countries, classes, and cohorts, and then promptly resolves them all.
Silent Souls is a ghost story, with flashbacks literally bringing the dead back to life.
Lightweight escapism is only fun if it’s light on its feet.