Jia’s lively metaphor turns the World Park into a hollow place where workers remain exploited and confined, leaving them with almost no identity outside their constraints.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 25, 2025

Jia's tenderness for his characters is infused with a quiet rage: as the wide-screen views freeze them in a confining emptiness, dead zones of action and dialogue suggest a land where imagination itself has been suppressed.

| May 18, 2020

Has the kind of setting that would make the Surrealists weep with joy and envy.

| Original Score: 9/10 | May 13, 2020

This isn't a tragedy, this is life as it is, with all its beauty and grimness intact.

| Mar 14, 2018

Gives one a rough idea about the Chinese Dream through its modern day landscape and relating the new China to the hopes and aspirations of its young citizens.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 12, 2008

The World feels too small in scope--ironic considering its title.

| Mar 1, 2007

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 21, 2006

The World is less a condemnation of the current state of the world than an attempt to explain and come to terms with it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 4, 2006

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2006

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Beyond the novelty of the setting -- which isn't even that novel when you have something similar a few exits south -- there's just not enough going on.

| Oct 13, 2005

Easily one of the year's best films.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 16, 2005

It's a heartbreaking, beautiful movie that gains strength from its deep characterizations.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 16, 2005

Its rewards come with patience and concentration.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 9, 2005

... an inspired metaphor for the strange new world of modern China in the global economy.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 9, 2005

The World steeps the viewer in a culture that clings to traditional conventions but must...embrace the mores of the high-tech, fast paced world....

| Original Score: B | Aug 27, 2005

It has a romantic power that seeps into your bones, with its languid rhythms, general plotlessness, and fierce attention to surreal detail.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 26, 2005

Jia has a passion for long-held shots that probe both character and institutional contradictions without mercy. But with some compassion and much dry wit.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 19, 2005

The World has a lot to say and is not in any unholy rush to say it.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 18, 2005

Jia's most extraordinary mapping isn't of an external landscape, but an emotional one. Without ever leaving Beijing, he shows us an entire universe of human joy, frailty and sorrow.

| Aug 18, 2005