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80Enthralling documentary.
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A proper labor of love profiling many of the principles involved in the making of the films, peppered with a generous helping of wonderful clips.
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70The director Yan-Ting Yuen revisits the country's recent past to explore the history and legacy of one of the strangest byproducts of totalitarian madness: the revolutionary spectacular.
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63Entertaining and informative, but it suffers from distracting voice-overs of what are supposed to be Madame Mao's thoughts. Too bad.
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63Yuen would have been better off exposing more of that reality and celebrating less of the joyful silliness of the model works, let alone staging pointless hip-hop-inflected dance numbers set to Yang Ban Xi musical themes.
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Will intrigue art house audiences unfamiliar with modern Chinese history. But sinophiles and followers of Chinese cinema will be shocked by the lack of historical detail and context.
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60Both frustrating and fascinating, Yuen's documentary is something of a stray footnote. It requires not only the context of the yang ban xi but the perspective of other movies on the subject of entertainment and utopia.
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60Overall, the film lacks cohesion and a true point of view. Further muddling the film's meaning is a voice-over attributed to Jiang Qing, which we learn at the end is fictionalized.
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50Perhaps understandably, these artifacts of a vastly different ideological and economic era -- have become kitsch objects, the focus of a half-horrified nostalgia, in the midst of the feverish Chinese boom.
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50Despite the fascinating topic, director Yan-ting Yuen offers relatively little history or criticism of the works themselves, squandering screen time on such gimmicks as mock voice-over and scenes of young people performing hard-rock and hip-hop versions of vintage songs. It's enough to make you pine for the good old days when irony was illegal.