It just may be a movie that has difficulty transcending national borders.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 19, 2004

Li fails to stoke much heat in Sun Zhou's pretentious and symbolic love triangle.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 19, 2004

Zhou Yu's Train has its strengths, but it's clearly no bullet train.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 17, 2004

This is one of those languid numbers where slow motion -- and there's lots of it -- is meant to signify poetry, and a line like 'I know my lake is artificial, but it's full of water' is supposed to seem lyrical.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 27, 2004

A terrific film.

| Aug 27, 2004

The effort required at the end of Zhou Yu's Train to sort out exactly what just went down isn't worth the payoff.

| Aug 27, 2004

We're too busy trying to figure out who's who and what's what, when we should be ruminating on the multiple implications of an intimate story of love's labors lost.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Aug 19, 2004

Zhou Yu's Train is less than the sum of its very impressive parts, which are scattered on to the screen so haphazardly as to make it nearly impossible to mentally assemble the chronology of the story.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 13, 2004

Much of the rest that goes on in Zhou Yu's Train feels needlessly overinflated.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 13, 2004

A dreamy ride worth taking.

| Original Score: B | Aug 12, 2004

A pointlessly convoluted version of a love story that would really be very simple, if anyone in the movie possessed common sense.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 6, 2004

I cannot argue with critics who found the film pretentious and inflated, but I somehow enjoyed it for its deification of the female on her endless journey to eventual oblivion.

| Jul 29, 2004

The back-and-forth approach can be confusing, but it doesn't obscure the picture's chief ideas.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 23, 2004

Watching Sun Zhou's romantic drama Zhou Yu's Train is like reading a poem -- not a great poem, or an entirely clear one, but one that occasionally blooms into beauty, with images that can take the reader's breath away.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 16, 2004

Breathtakingly filmed.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 16, 2004

A ticket to this movie is a season's pass on that train -- and you must complete every ride.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 16, 2004

Built out of bits and pieces of successful Chinese films of the recent past, this syrupy romance comes to seem less a movie than a memory of movies.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 15, 2004

Emerges gradually as a lyrical contemplation of the often ambiguous yet persistent nature of love through an intricate structure that fragments the narrative as it moves back and forth through time.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 15, 2004

Deeply felt but overly hyperbolic romance.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 15, 2004

It's classy, delicate whimsy, a testament to the way romantic love, however unsatisfied, continues to drive itself.

Full Review | Jul 15, 2004