Helloturia I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

lastliberal What are you supposed to do when you film goes up against others in the Golden Globes like eventual Oscar winner Talk to Her, or The Crime of Father Amaro, or Hero? You just look at the company and console yourself with the awards you have already won.This was a beautiful film with Xun Zhou (The Emperor and the Assassin) in the title role as an uneducated villager who is exposed to banned books by two university students, Kun Chen and Ye Liu (The Promise, The Curse of the Golden Flower), who were sent to her mountain for reeducation.Besides another critical look at the reeducation program under Mao, it also provides a look at how all yearn for freedom, much like watching the second hour of the new John Adams mini-series did.One thing that was very interesting in the film was the way it demonstrated the flooding of the Yangtze to create the 650 square mile lake in China. Until this film, I had no good idea of just how great a project that was. When you see these villagers trek up many many steps to get to their homes high in the mountains, and then see those same home flooded, you begin to comprehend just how big a project that was.This was a beautiful symphony with Mozart and Balzac transforming the people.

Andres Salama This Chinese movie, set in 1971, is about two university students that in the middle of the Cultural revolution, are sent to a mountain village for reeducation, in order to "learn from the peasants". Amid the menial work they are forced to do and the stifling stupidity of the villagers, the pair manages some solace by seducing the young seamstress granddaughter of a local tailor, when they introduce her to a secret cache of forbidden books (including a tome by Honore de Balzac referred in the movie's title). The movie is interesting to watch, yet a bit ugly in its contempt for peasants, who are seen as ugly brutes, basically. This sort of ugly snobbery makes one almost think that maybe Mao had a few points in sending the haughty intellectuals to the countryside for reeducation (of course, in real life, reeducation during the cultural revolution was a much more brutal affair than it is shown here).

Armand It is impossible to understand this story in his real essence. The beautiful skin of love and nice images, the acting and slices of memory are only small details of a horrible era (Chinese Communism of Mao period is more that the best thriller can presents). So, a tale about resistance, about culture like secret and vital refuge is not only interesting or touching but good "remember", too. The life in a country who considers his citizens like social dough is a cruel experience and a survive exercise. In Romania, the Communist regime was not very different but the relates about this period, his reflexion in films is mixture of frustrations and hate. Maybe, this is the normal way after a social crisis. So, the principal virtue of film is the subtle humor. The innocence of resistance, the original game, the delicate resistance against a grotesque situation. In many aspects the film is a charming miniature and it is Sijie Dai's merit to present not only a personal experience, a story of past but a slice of far reality so present in ours life, yet. Same impressive token about a subtle form of resistance is "Flying against the arrow" by Horia- Roman Patapievici.

Tony D'Ambra A faithful rendering of the novel. Casting is uncanny and cinematography breathtaking. The theme is deeply mature and a bitter-sweet recollection of youth and innocence in a remote rural village in China, during the Red Guard terror when the children of "bourgeois revisionists" are sent to the country-side for "re-education" through manual labor.But politics is in the background, and the story focuses on the friendship between two teenage boys and their love for the daughter of the village tailor, and the power of story-telling in shaping aspirations and mutual understanding. Even minor characters are profoundly developed and a gentle humor pervades the screen.The tacked-on ending not in the book mars an otherwise perfect reflection on the novel's story and the principal players.