In Still Life, with progress comes change, and it doesn't care if you are ready for it or not.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 25, 2020

Still Life is more than about China's Three Gorges Dam, or industrialisation, or modernisation, or its implications for individuals, or its consequences on society. Yes, these are all parts of Still Life, but like life, the film is more than this.

| Apr 29, 2019

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they adjust to life's currents in the present.

| Original Score: A | Nov 24, 2008

The despondent tone is lifted by moments of hope and, surprisingly, hilarity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 20, 2008

Jia Zhang Ke is perhaps the most distinctive director working in China now.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 18, 2008

An extraordinary glimpse into the psychology, subtext and austere reality of modern Chinese culture.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 26, 2008

Never has destruction looked more beautiful than the demolished buildings in Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 9, 2008

Writer-director Jia Zhangke is a keen observer of the effects of the break-neck modernization that is stampeding China toward a future that no one can predict, control, or contain.

Full Review | Apr 14, 2008

Jia Zhang-ke is a new auteur making his mark. Embraced abroad on the international festival circuit, if less welcome on screens in China, this writer-director works in a genre that could be called globalist.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 22, 2008

Still Life is the first great film of the year. It's beautiful but so much more--full of subtle feeling, framed by a monstrous, eroding landscape.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 21, 2008

Still Life can be frustratingly slow but it's the effect that it has in the hours and days after the lights come up that makes it such a remarkable experience.

| Feb 11, 2008

More than any other director, the extraordinarily gifted Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke has a talent for locating the future in the present day.

| Feb 11, 2008

Nothing much actually happens in Still Life, and yet one is left with a deep feeling of irrevocable loss and destructive change only heightened by the chirpy tourist patter and government promotional talk about the great Three Gorges Dam.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 25, 2008

Spare, motionless and silent as a still-life painting. But what [director] Jia is documenting is nothing less than a civilization in a state of flux. Chaos wouldn't be an overstatement.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 25, 2008

These searches are not particularly suspenseful or emotionally stirring, but they're excuse enough for us to take in the breath-taking views of Three Gorges, the river and the razing of buildings along its banks.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2008

In Still Life, the blood and the sweat run directly into the Yangtze River, where they mingle with more than a few tears.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 18, 2008

The results are exhilarating, expertly choreographed and a movie to change one's view of both cinema and life.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 17, 2008

What's striking about Still Life is its micro-analytical curiosity: Judgment seems suspended -- like the bridge that magically lights up over the Yangtze or the unlikely tightrope walker glimpsed in the movie's last shot.

Full Review | Jan 15, 2008