By making it clear that those who find themselves in these situations are all ordinary people just like us, Ai Weiwei brings home the sheer, unthinkable monstrousness of their predicament.

| Mar 23, 2020

Its dazzling drone photography sends you gliding over vast expanses of ocean and desert yet the film itself leads to the inescapable conclusion that the world is shrinking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2018

What he shows us is tragic and horrifying, but he offers no possible solutions and nothing much in the way of analysis.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 16, 2018

Through brief but intimate exchanges, Ai brings the individuals behind the statistics into focus.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 10, 2017

Beautifully filmed testimonies that tear at your soul.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2017

The scattershot and lengthy documentary doesn't attempt to be a news report...but the cumulative impact of its often haunting images brings home the plight of millions of the world's people.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 8, 2017

Difficult, but hugely important film-making.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2017

Ai Weiwei's magnificent documentary stands as a companion piece to the BBC's series, Exodus: Our Journey To Europe.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2017

An ambitious, humane and often shocking cine-essay on the subject of migrants and the 21st century migrant condition.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2017

Although maybe a little naive in places, this is an unflinching record of a cry of anguish that has to be heard and acted upon. Everyone needs to see this.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2017

Weiwei turns feature documentarist to portray the global landslide - the molten movement of human masses - that is today's historical moment and reality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2017

The imagery encourages viewers to adopt a global perspective in considering the subject matter.

| Nov 16, 2017

It does not browbeat or preach, it simply shows, and what it shows is overwhelming.

| Original Score: A | Nov 10, 2017

Ai's film becomes more digressive than discursive. Rather than contending with the information saturation around the crisis, Human Flow falls prey to it. Footage is layered without clear logic, poetic or narrative.

| Oct 31, 2017

We never remain long enough with any one person to get more than a cursory idea of their story, and so over the course of the film's 140 minute runtime, we end up with a sense of the crisis as a tragedy, yes, but a choral, abstract one.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 26, 2017

The film is all the more powerful for being so calm and unhurried. Ai doesn't castigate or preach. He doesn't have to. The facts, the images, speak for themselves. Instead, he bears witness.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 26, 2017

Ai Weiwei has made something beautiful: Human Flow is neither indulgent nor pedantic, but clear-eyed in its view of the enormity of the crisis too vast for most of us to comprehend.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 20, 2017

An artful, solemn globe-hop epic of the refugee crisis with an unfortunate cast of millions.

| Oct 19, 2017

Solutions would be welcome, but it's not really the fault of the film for not having the answers. Human Flow at least opens the tap for global inspection.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 19, 2017

Weiwei doesn't break any new ground in covering the global refugee crisis, but he vividly illustraes - in straightforward yet artistic terms - the scale of the problem without compromising the dignity or humanity of the survivors.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 18, 2017