No matter what your image of modern China, it’s nowhere near complete until you’ve seen it through New York-based, China-observing director Jessica Kingdon’s eyes.

| Mar 28, 2022

The film is full of news, insights and revelations without pushing a dogmatic thesis: it's as open-ended and humanly interested as documentaries get.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 13, 2022

Crucially, the film never patronises. Is anyone learning anything westerners haven't learned too, just less explicitly?

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 13, 2022

Slyly observes China's transition from the world's factory to a massive consumer society.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 10, 2022

Covers the filmmaker's intended ground, and more.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 20, 2021

Ascension often veers into the surreal, made more unnerving by Kingdon's static camera and long takes, not to mention Dan Deacon's quietly eerie score.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 15, 2021

[A] shockingly incisive, observational nonfiction feature debut.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 8, 2021

Through her unfussy direction and sly editing, Kingdon's collection of vignettes is a reminder that the destructively frenzied cycle of consumption and waste always trickles down.

| Oct 7, 2021

This aestheticization of Chinese society doesn't exactly sit well with this viewer: one wonders if this counts as a kind of tourism.

| Oct 7, 2021

Jessica Kingdon's maintenance of her critical and often ironizing perspective keeps Ascension from tipping into polemic.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 5, 2021

Like its documentary predecessors, Ascension finds aesthetic allure and fodder for debate in the complex symphony of industrialism and the people functioning within its order and disorder.

| Jun 23, 2021