...what the documentary captures, in its narrative mosaic, is an entrepreneurial and ambitious spirit in the workers, very much in tune with the frenzy of performance and profit of their bosses. [Full review in Spanish]

| Mar 5, 2025

The filmmakers are seemingly not interested in telling a particular story or promoting a specific narrative. Rather, they want to put the audience in the shoes of the people who inhabit these factories and tell their very human stories.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Feb 20, 2024

...the featured workers function in the film like the elements in a Bruegel painting: each figure is distinct and unique but takes its meaning as part of a larger whole.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 20, 2024

... A marathon, one worth the time and effort.

| Jan 17, 2024

The dispiriting sameness that Wang uncovers in each shop, each day, and each stitch ultimately expresses his empathy for the difficult circumstances in which his subjects toil.

| Jan 16, 2024

Wang’s intent is more subtly sociological -- Youth explores the connections and even culture, in a sense, that can develop among people thrown together in arduous circumstances.

| Nov 18, 2023

The prolific director examines how the People’s Republic became the workshop for much of the world.

| Nov 10, 2023

It’s not a pleasant experience, but it’s an illuminating one.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 10, 2023

Chinese documentarian Wang Bing’s vibrant masterpiece Youth (Spring) just may be the season’s fleetest three-hour-plus movie.

| Nov 10, 2023

Like Wang’s “’Til Madness Do Us Part,” set in a mental hospital, the movie is an exhortation not to forget the unseen.

| Nov 9, 2023

An unflinching, but repetitive, exhausting and overlong documentary

| Nov 6, 2023

Each frame and each interaction begins to feel nostalgic in some way, even when applied to people we’ve only just begun to know.

| Oct 10, 2023

Wang’s ambitions in this first part of a planned Zhili trilogy seem greater than just reminding Western audiences of the human cost behind the bargains on Shein.

| Oct 2, 2023

Youth (Spring)‘s 3-plus hour length is not only necessary, but an absolute gift to sit through.

| Sep 23, 2023

As the camera roams outside the sewing rooms, Youth observes an industrial wasteland that’s as barren figuratively as it is literally.

| Sep 18, 2023

What’s eternally moving about the veteran documentarian is his deep earnestness.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 14, 2023

Wang Bing doesn’t muster the formal strategies or the narratological scope that once allowed him (and us) to imagine broader implications for China’s future.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 13, 2023

The impact of the film is dampened for the young workforce depicted, who have — once again — been subsumed by a machine so much larger than themselves.

| Jun 26, 2023

One could deride Youth (Spring) as overly repetitive—seemingly endless—and that would be completely missing the point: Youth (Spring) is possibly the most significant document of Chinese garment workers ever created.

| Original Score: 8.0/10 | Jun 1, 2023

This is less a social-issue documentary and more about an extreme existential poignance... These are young people in the prime years of their lives, but without the means or mobility to move forward, living years of monotony without a break.

| May 31, 2023