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100With rich irony, The World juxtaposes the teasing, grand images of the outside world's wonders with the insular community and the mundane lives of the park employees.
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100This is a brilliant, if challenging, film.
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A heartbreaking, beautiful movie that gains strength from its deep characterizations.
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100A film of wonderful looseness and innovation. Set free to film fakes, the director is the real thing.
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100A movie with the visual expanse of a John Ford western and the ensemble grandeur and long takes of a Robert Altman picture. The movie is definitely Chinese in content, but it exudes American style and spirit.
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100The title of Jia Zhang-ke's 2004 masterpiece, The World -- a film that's hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian -- is an ironic pun and a metaphor.
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90The comic, tragic and monumentally beautiful new film by writer-director Jia Zhangke (Platform).
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90A remarkable film.
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89It's a magnificent film – thoughtful but not distant, aesthetically and technically sophisticated but staged with restraint and delicacy.
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88The director is becoming a master of blending the political and the personal with eloquence and deceptive lightness.
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83Jia's compassion for the drifting souls struggling to create a life for themselves in such a transitory existence makes the metaphor resonant.
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It's a splendid microcosm of contemporary China's aspirations and shortcomings.
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80Maverick Chinese director Jia Zhangke examines the rapidly changing face of China as its economy edges further toward a modified form of market capitalism with yet another complex, multicharacter masterpiece.
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80If a movie can be stark and rapturous at the same time, this is that movie.
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80On a first viewing, the movie seemed a dilution of the formal strategies Jia had perfected-at once less dispassionate and less empathetic. After a repeat viewing, it still strikes me as Jia's fourth-best film (that it's one of the year's best says plenty about the level at which he's working), but it's more apparent that The Worl d's muffled emotional impact should be understood as a function of its setting.
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75The movie is long and slow. Either you will fall into its rhythm, or you will grow restless.
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70Loosely constructed, The World drifts along pleasantly for much of its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Mr. Jia has a terrific eye and an almost sculptural sense of film space (especially in close quarters), and he brings texture and density to even the most nondescript rooms.
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70While the film feels overlong at two hours 20 minutes, there's a seductive stillness to its enveloping mood.
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70It's a fine film, full of small epiphanies.
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63Jia's message is that globalization has failed to help the Chinese masses. We hear you, dude, but did you really need 143 minutes to get your point across?
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50The World has a pokey pace, but it presents a uniquely powerful look at the new big kid in the global economy.
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50One of the oddest and surely the longest cinematic experiences you may ever encounter.
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50The World's dull weave of frustrated romances and worker exploitation is far too obvious, and Jia can only relieve the tedium so many times.
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