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

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

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

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

Chinese arthouse fixture Jia Zhang Ke looks at the closure of a state-owned factory in Chengdu, combining real interviews with awkwardly am-dram mock ones.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 29, 2010

The film takes on an operatic feel, moving between euphoria for the new and lament for the lost.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 29, 2010

The director has an exquisite eye that keeps getting stronger and subtler. He trusts that beauty is vagueness's alluring upside.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 20, 2009

24 City won't change the minds of detractors -- it is his most painfully slow yet -- but it might change the minds of his supporters, including this critic, for Jia attempts something that is, in the end, unforgivable.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 31, 2009

The result is surprisingly engrossing -- even lively, due in part to brief musical numbers inserted amid the interviews.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 5, 2009

Mr. Jia is an artist, one of the most interesting filmmakers working anywhere in the world, and he made his film to bear witness to a way of life while witnesses could still be found.

| Jun 5, 2009

The actors in 24 City, an experimental fiction-nonfiction hybrid, bring their own existential realities to their short, touching performances.

| Jun 5, 2009

Mostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers' gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.

| Original Score: C+ | Jun 4, 2009

Jia is one of the guiding lights of the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers, and 24 City is a potent exploration of his constant theme-the tectonic shifts that occur as the old gives way to the new.

| Original Score: 4/6 | Jun 3, 2009

This subversively old-fashioned hymn to industrial production is filled with offbeat, vaguely absurd details.

| Jun 3, 2009