| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 10, 2003

Formally ambitious and emotionally engaging.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2003

It helps that the central performers are experienced actors, and that they know their roles so well.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 13, 2002

The asylum material is gripping, as are the scenes of Jia with his family.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 2, 2002

Ultimately engages less for its story of actorly existential despair than for its boundary-hopping formal innovations and glimpse into another kind of Chinese 'cultural revolution.'

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 22, 2002

Intriguing in concept ... [and] just as compelling in execution.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 22, 2002

A brave experiment.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 15, 2002

Daring and beautifully made.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 14, 2002

Less than fresh.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 1, 2002

If Quitting isn't worthy of affection exactly, it's worthy of respect, as director Zhang Yang plays with the structural elements of the story as well as notions of fiction and fact.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2002

It further declares its director, Zhang Yang of Shower, as a boldly experimental, contemporary stylist with a bright future.

| Oct 11, 2002

Unfortunately, the experience of actually watching the movie is less compelling than the circumstances of its making.

Full Review | Oct 10, 2002

Jia's performance is so unsparing and intense -- and the film so compassionate and chaste in its approach to a life lost and recovered -- that Quitting ultimately satisfies.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 20, 2002

Once he starts learning to compromise with reality enough to become comparatively sane and healthy, the film becomes predictably conventional.

| Sep 19, 2002

Zhang ... has done an amazing job of getting realistic performances from his mainly nonprofessional cast.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 13, 2002

If you're not totally weirded- out by the notion of cinema as community-therapy spectacle, Quitting hits home with disorienting force.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 13, 2002

If Mr. Zhang's subject matter is, to some degree at least, quintessentially American, his approach to storytelling might be called Iranian.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 12, 2002

A probing and universal contemporary drama.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 12, 2002

Straightforward yet opaque and uncompromising piece of work.

Full Review | Sep 10, 2002