In 2008, Jia Zhang-ke was still in top form, as evident in “24 City”, particularly in the way he combines documentary with fiction while reinvigorating his own cinematic style.

| Original Score: 7 | Mar 30, 2025

Things are confused here, and the documentary/drama suffers. A lack of social and historical perspective lies at the heart of the problem.

| Feb 13, 2021

A fascinating and bittersweet film, its structure creating a wholly original and moving viewing experience that takes the plight of people half a world away, and makes it stunningly, hauntingly, our own.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 5, 2019

Through interviews with retired workers and faux interviews with scripted characters, Jia brings long-repressed history to life on an intimate scale.

| Jul 23, 2018

A fond, quietly ironic look at the past and the present facing the global problem of individual obsolescence and urban uprooting.

| Feb 11, 2016

Jia purposely refrains from voicing any opinions here and its authenticity may be arguable, but if pure fiction is so often taken as historical testimony, why shouldn't half-fiction qualify for the same honours?

| Aug 4, 2015

Jia Zhangke seems to be entering a new phase of his fascinating career with 24 City, a documentary/fiction hybrid that reworks the director's signature techniques and strategies to stunning and self-critical effect.

| Aug 2, 2015

In the end, the filmmaker's fragmented approach marks an interesting, if not entirely successful, departure for one of China's most talented working directors.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 2, 2015

24 City belies its documentary origins with overtly poetic film language: the film is an elegiac visual symphony of carefully framed compositions, trompe l'oeil camera movements, posed portraits, internal rhymes and mysterious vignettes.

| Jun 18, 2012

A blend of documentary and drama which is by turns movingly authentic and deliberately artificial.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 14, 2010

A familiar scenario both here and in China, but Jia Zhang-ke has shaped it into a complex and lucid cinematic poem about identity, transience, and loss.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 6, 2010

24 City includes evocative footage of Factory 420's dismantling, but emphasizes people over place.

| Jul 6, 2010

In [Jia Zhangke's] chronicle of the changing fortunes of a defunct but once glorious aeronautic factory and its workers through talking heads and wordless images exclusively, the documentary strain prevails to simple, yet emotionally reverberating effect.

| Jul 6, 2010

Strongest moments are when the pristine HD lensing by Hong Kong's Yu Lik-wai (a Jia regular) and Wang Yu, and warm string music by Yoshihiro Hanno, take over in montages showing the gradual dismantling of the factory.

| Jul 6, 2010

Zhangke never hints much about politics ... His is more the story of ordinary people caught up in history and still determined to live their lives as well as they can. It's both relevant and resonant.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 6, 2010

History weaves in and out of faces that purl their monologues -- real or scripted -- as Jia presents the past as a giant, invisible river.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 6, 2010

An intriguing hybrid of fiction and documentary, this film chronicles the dismantling of a notorious factory in Chengdu to make way for a new luxury community. It's skilfully assembled, but a bit dry for Western audiences.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 6, 2010

Punctuated with eyebrow-raising poems about aeronautics factories, its treacle-paced obliqueness will frustrate some viewers. But the pay-off's a layered, haunting portrait of China in its shift to a capitalist economy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 6, 2010

A deeply serious and sombre film, trying to find a way of telling the stories of people affected by the gigantic political and economic changes sweeping that country whose concerns must in the end affect us all: 21st-century China.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 30, 2010

Enthralling, beguiling and haunting.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 30, 2010