Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

1900 liu One additional star for the topic that few has tried to film.In about ten or twenty years, these 120 minutes of social depicting will be one of the very rare and precious visual stories for people to understand and entertain what is going on in the first ten years of the 21st century China. It offers a prospective with some interesting details that makes sense to the westerners or maybe its fellow countrymen in the future. But it doesn't really add up for the people living in China nowadays, or at least, the details are not enough.Stories are too short that they can barely touch the real psychology that the Chinese laborers are having today. I'm not sure whether it is something that the director fails to do or he is not allowed to do. For example, there are lots of complexities existing between a complaining Shanxi miner and a mad murderer. Throughout the first story, the only real attempt Dahai, who has learned the laws and has close relatives living in the city, has made to disclose the corruption is a mail letter without a specific address. This is far away from the countless efforts that a Chinese miner would make before he explode himself with the illegal riches. To me, the efforts, the struggles, and the final desperate in Dahai's mind are the most interesting parts of the story. However, nothing really happens in the movie. The result is that, Dahai seems more like a legendary cowboy coming from a classic American western movie than a struggling Chinese worker who has relatives to care about.It touches the social issues we are all witnessing in China today, it is entertaining and somewhat heroic, but it fails to restore the story into reality, let alone into a provoking level.

Raven-1969 "It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates," wrote Hawthorne, yet darkness wins many battles in four murderous portraits from contemporary China that actually happened. A bold and elusive thief traveling along the margins of society, a gentle and lonely heart worn down by itinerant and mechanical work, a fervent revolutionary upset with corruption and greed, and a solitary soul who longs for a family and yet is surrounded by lust, all find themselves separated from society and the love and fulfillment they strive for. Each lashes out violently at their constraints. Filled with intriguing allusions, impressive depth, compelling themes and fantastic stories, I loved how this film seamlessly wound its way through modern China as well as the human heart. Winner of the best screenplay at Cannes.

Ruben Mooijman A lone gunman, fighting for justice in a world full of corruption, intent upon killing the main culprit and not backing down until he has done so. It sounds like something out of a John Ford western, but in fact it's the first of four stories in 'A Touch Of Sin'. This Chinese movie borrows quite a few themes from the classic westerns. Male dominance, for example, and a society lacking morality, but above all: violence as the ultimate solution. For a Chinese film maker, this is a brave movie. It paints a very bleak picture of Chinese society, by tackling issues like corruption, crime, prostitution and the exploitation of workers in enormous factories. These are very sensitive issues in modern day China, but still this movie got the green light from the authorities and wasn't banned from Chinese cinemas. But not every brave movie is a good one. The problem with 'A Touch Of Sin' is that it consists of four independent stories which differ a good deal in quality. The first one, with the lone gunman, is the best because it is a clear, focused story. Others are sometimes difficult to understand because they are too expansive and too long. The common feature in each of the four stories is the violence. Director Zhangke Jia shows it in a very graphic way, reminiscent of crime movies from Hong Kong or Japan. The bullet holes and blood splattering seem a bit out of place in a film appealing to an art-house audience, but at the same time it gives this movie a nice nihilistic touch.

Ilpo Hirvonen After some moments of silence, the master of the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers, Jia Zhangke returns with his newest feature "A Touch of Sin" (2013) which might just be his darkest work to date. It's an intriguing film of sheer brilliance told through the complexity of several, loosely connected stories about people in agony. While some fans of the director may be disappointed by the lack of clairvoyant lyric beauty, characteristic for example for "Still Life" (2006), others may find the narrative ambiguity and incoherence rather enriching. The film begins with an enigmatic scene at a deserted rural highway where a truck carrying tomatoes has fallen over. A cold sense of brutality breathes in the air. Soon the first characters are introduced and we learn that, in the same way as in "Still Life", "A Touch of Sin" is structured from different stories with different human fates. In brief, it tells the story of four random acts of violence in today's society.Although the stories lack obvious connection, they all share a few essential elements. First of all, they all escalate to an outburst of violence. Second, all of them are tales of social rootlessness and existential alienation. The latter remark is congruous with the fact that in all of Zhangke's films the general aspect meets the particular in a poignant fashion of chill and solitude. Individuals live in their personal prisons while the modernization of the society brings nothing but empty freedom. In other words, they live in spaces that are both private and public where they feel utterly detached. No one belongs anywhere in the Zhangke universe. Due to the complexity of several stories, the film also includes more than one central milieu. However, this seemingly arbitrary set of different settings of hotels and a coal miners' town do tell us about veritably similar subjects. All the spaces are haunted by the same problems. Such conflict of ambiguity and coherence should not frighten the spectator. Since instead of a straight-forward narrative with clear character delineation, Zhangke offers us a fascinatingly cynical cross-section of the contemporary Chinese society which is, on the one hand, characterized by economic boom to whose technological wonderland an individual may vanish, and, on the other, the tormenting but also comforting legacy of Mao. Modern Chinese way of life appears to Zhangke as something diverse -- as something that is in a constant state of change. Like in his previous features, Zhangke once again focuses on the transforming reality, the current flow, and its consequences on the individuals. Although this was already done to an extent in "Still Life" through the complexity of two overlapping stories, it also cast hope in humanity, whereas "A Touch of Sin" is far more pessimistic. Once again Zhangke's aesthetics of cinema is characterized by the elements of silence and emptiness in the images of loneliness and alienation. It is as though everything had died. Only violence is portrayed passionately, all the rest is understated. The violence in "A Touch of Sin" is raw and brutal, but essentially stripped. Above all, violence appears as a melancholic undertone of some kind which reveals the realities of the society. Even if the opaque and complex narrative of "A Touch of Sin" left the viewer speechless and unable to describe what he or she had just seen, there is always something profound to admire in Zhangke's cinema. In his films there is always that certain mood which is quite difficult to be put in words. In brief, it is a mood of emptiness, but also of utter richness.