Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Four people in different provinces are driven to violent ends: An angry miner is enraged by corruption in his village. A migrant discovers the possibilities of owning a firearm. A receptionist is pushed beyond her limits by an abusive client. A young factory worker goes from one job to the next.
Jia Zhangke's anthology masterwork draws from real incidents of violence across contemporary China, weaving four loosely connected stories into a searing critique of rapid modernization and moral collapse. The plotting is structurally bold and thematically cohesive for an anthology, earning a 4. Cinematography is exceptional — Jia and DP Yu Lik-wai shoot vast industrial landscapes and sudden bursts of gore with equally striking composure, evoking classical wuxia while staying rooted in grim realism. Novelty is high: the film is utterly singular in its fusion of genre violence with Jia's austere social-realist sensibility, creating something with no real precedent. Acting is competent and naturalistic but unevenly distributed across the four segments — Wang Baoqiang's segment is ferocious, but others are less memorably performed. The ending is the weakest element — the final young-worker segment trails off into ambiguity that feels thin rather than resonant, and the film's conclusion lacks the formal weight of what precedes it.