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65
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64
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64
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63
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61
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60
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57
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55
House Bunny, The
54
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54
Get Smart
53
Sex and the City: The Movie
53
Rocker, The
52
Longshots, The
51
Mamma Mia!
51
Step Brothers
49
Hancock
47
Swing Vote
47
X-Files: I Want to Believe, The
43
Meet Dave
42
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36
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36
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35
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35
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34
Happening, The
31
Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The
26
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24
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19
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Transsiberian
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I.O.U.S. A
71
To the Limit
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Girl Cut in Two, A
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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Empire Pictures
MPAA RATING: Not Rated
Starring
Xun Zhou,
Kun Chen,
Ye Liu,
Shuangbao Wang,
Zhijun Cong,
and
Hong Wei Wang
Based on the international best-seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is set in the early 1970's during the later stages of China's "Cultural Revolution," as two city-bred teenage best friends, Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu), are sent to a backward mountainous region for Maoist re-education. (Empire Pictures)
| GENRE(S): |
Comedy
|
Drama
|
Foreign
|
Romance
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Sijie Dai (also novel)
Nadine Perront
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Sijie Dai
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: December 27, 2005
Theatrical: July 29, 2005
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
111 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
France / China |
| LANGUAGE(S): |
Mandarin / French (with English subtitles) |
Original title "Balzac et La Petite Tailleuse Chinoise"

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
San Francisco Chronicle
Jonathan Curiel
Sweet, funny, sad and profound -- the sort of film that becomes more remarkable when you realize it's based on someone's real life.

88
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.

88
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

80
Los Angeles Times
Carina Chocano
For an exquisitely melancholy story steeped in a sense of the past as a succession of great waves of political, ideological and economic change, it's fitting that the movie should end with an underwater sequence. It looks like a dream of a memory of a place about to be wiped out by the next great flood of history.

80
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
If the movie is straightforward and predictable in its attitude, it also exudes a sort of documentary lyricism.

75
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.

75
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
In the end, it's a lovely little movie about very big things, and the smallness both illuminates it and keeps it from greatness.

75
New York Post
V.A. Musetto
A meditation on literature, love and remembrance that is able to find humor and hope in the dark days of the Cultural Revolution.

75
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
It's a fanciful tale, but the message is sweet - that the higher arts speak a universal language that transcends politics and ignorance.

75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sean Axmaker
It makes for an unusual angle on the era, and a passionate paean to the power of books, ideas and art.

70
The New York Times
Dana Stevens
Dai Sijie's tender, touching adaptation of his own novel of the same title.

70
Variety
David Stratton
A visually lush and very Westernized vision of life in a remote Chinese village in the early 1970s.

70
Village Voice
Ed Park
Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.

70
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
By turns merry, tough-minded and sweetly nostalgic.

63
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Artfully designed to appeal to lovers of romance and books, but by the end of the film I was not convinced it knew much about either.

60
Washington Post
Teresa Wiltz
Sure, Balzac meanders at too leisurely a pace. But the actors are charming; the story sweet

50
Chicago Reader
Patrick Z. McGavin
The ethereal private moments and inspired passages are beautifully shot by Jean-Marie Dreujou, but Dai never quite organizes the material dramatically, and the tone is too often jagged and disruptive.

50
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Tasha Robinson
Sijie mostly adapts his own work dryly and literally—the footage of the Chinese mountainside is breathtaking, but it's the only thing in the film with much depth.

50
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
The story is winning but the telling, with Dai adapting and directing from his own novel, is too sentimental in the long run.

50
Dallas Observer
Melissa Levine
The film is beautifully shot and well-acted, but, like the book, it never achieves anything like the import of the stories that inspired it. Balzac is even a little dull, especially toward the end.

50
Austin Chronicle
Marrit Ingman
Cute and toothless as a kitten, Seamstress doesn't inspire the same kind of fervent devotion its principals feel when confronted with art, but it does make a pleasant enough diversion.

40
TV Guide
Ken Fox
Demonstrating just how different literature and filmmaking can be, filmmaker-turned-writer-turned filmmaker Dai Sijie botches an adaptation of his own best-selling short novel.


The average user rating for this movie is 8.3 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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