Critic Reviews
| 88 |
TV Guide
Xiao's bittersweet film is superficially a swoony love letter to the cinema. But her valentine has a hidden sting, rooted in some hard truths about movie mania.
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| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Things take several turns for the worse as the story plays out, and the film loses much of its charm. But it's a fascinating artifact, and never more so than when it features clips from Chinese and, of all things, Albanian propaganda films.
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| 75 |
New York Post
The Chinese pleaser Electric Shadows belongs to a genre they don't teach in film school: Triple S, as in sweet, sappy and sentimental.
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| 70 |
The New York Times
Plays as an enthralling but implausible Asian soap opera.
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| 70 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Andrew Sun
With her debut, Xiao Jiang has created the Chinese equivalent of "Cinema Paradiso." The Beijing Film Academy graduate's confident first feature is a lovely, elegant paean to the joy and liberty that films offer as a symbol.
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| 70 |
Variety
A fairly conventional heartwarmer, lifted by likable performances, good-looking production values and (for movie buffs) a story centered on an outdoor cinema in rural China.
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| 60 |
Village Voice
Electric Shadows is committed to movies-as-escape swoonery, but the script's late disasters are also predicated on cinema and filmgoing, suggesting an ambivalence the rest of the film seems oblivious to.
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