There is a focused and incredibly powerful 80-minute feature buried within the film, but as it stands, the film holds more potential than it does results.

| Feb 22, 2022

Although it is a bit lengthy, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is a well-done and beautifully expressed film for understanding a people and their history.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Oct 4, 2021

Gentle and heartfelt, but don't enter this doc without familiarity with its subjects. You may feel adrift otherwise.

| Sep 17, 2021

Jia's documentary works best when it's allowed to unspool according to the mellow logic of a freewheeling conversation with smart, thoughtful people.

| Original Score: B- | Sep 15, 2021

It's a heady, informative tour through lived experiences rather than formal historical analysis.

| Aug 30, 2021

For those on the director's wavelength, however, the film offers a treasure trove of images and prose that are carefully shaped and off-the-cuff reminiscences describing a nation's ceaseless, quietly seismic patterns of change...

| Jul 19, 2021

Jia Zhang-ke's vague intentions make this the most dubious of recently imported foreign-language films. Its overly poetic, quasi-humanism about the gamut of life from birth to death seems more official than universal.

| Jun 16, 2021

Jia's latest is a didactic, propogandist exercise, and something of a punctuating about-face from his best work.

| Jun 6, 2021

But Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue ... has something of a keener eye and so, even when the importance of its subjects may be lost on a western audience, it finds burrows of ideas that flourish through a veil of unexpected stylistic choices.

| Original Score: B | May 29, 2021

The portraits here ... are sensitive and intriguing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 28, 2021

"Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue" resists the obvious, even when it finally reveals the meaning behind its poetic title.

| May 28, 2021

The movie is an affecting group portrait and also a complex and subtle piece of literary criticism.

| May 27, 2021

A compelling mix of a vanishing past, recollections from contemporary authors born between the 1950s and the 1970s, and the history that shaped them.

| May 25, 2021

The film presumes familiarity with the authors it depicts, and will carry much more meaning for those with an existing passion for Chinese literature, culture, and history.

| Feb 12, 2021

What emerges over 18 brief chapters is a portrait of modern China since 1949, refracted through the very personal memories of creative types who lived through the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution and the years that followed.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 11, 2020

[The] entire first half of Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue [is] a missed opportunity.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 10, 2020

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is not only a lamentation of the disappearing past but also an effective reading initiative campaign.

| Oct 23, 2020

An ode to the importance of art that is a work of art itself, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is yet another fascinating look at contemporary China courtesy of Jia Zhangke.

| Oct 15, 2020

In this leisurely paced, quietly moving film, Jia pays tribute to writers who connect modern urban culture to its provincial roots, and the current era to one that's quickly being lost to living memory.

| Oct 13, 2020

Jia's subjects are, above all, creative writers, and the vividness, the vitality, the passion of their spoken-word dramas, delivered in a variety of private and public settings, conjure vast skeins of imagined images...

| Oct 8, 2020