Shijie 2004

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune: With 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. Read more

Tom Keogh, Seattle Times: Its rewards come with patience and concentration. Read more

G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle: It's a heartbreaking, beautiful movie that gains strength from its deep characterizations. Read more

AV Club: Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: It has a romantic power that seeps into your bones, with its languid rhythms, general plotlessness, and fierce attention to surreal detail. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: The World has a lot to say and is not in any unholy rush to say it. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: Flawed only by its abrupt and stylistically awkward ending, The World is a tragic, visionary work. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: A glorious achievement from Jia Zhangke. Read more

Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly: Jia's most extraordinary mapping isn't of an external landscape, but an emotional one. Without ever leaving Beijing, he shows us an entire universe of human joy, frailty and sorrow. Read more

Jan Stuart, Newsday: Tao, who shuttles between multiple ethnic costumes in the course of a typical workday, embodies the film's thematic core: the loss of identity in a culture that has bulldozed its own historic past to clear the way for Western-style progress. Read more

Jack Mathews, New York Daily News: The World has a pokey pace, but it presents a uniquely powerful look at the new big kid in the global economy. Read more

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: Mr. Jia has fashioned a quietly despairing vision of contemporary China with an almost ethnographic attention to detail. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: A tonally flat experience. The movie's highs and lows are modulated to the point where nothing moves you or touches you in these lives of not-desperate-enough desperation. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: I became invested in the backstage story, which emerges slowly and in uncertain pieces. There is integrity in a movie that refuses to pump up melodrama where none belongs. Read more

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Read more

Time Out: Read more

David Rooney, Variety: While the film feels overlong at two hours 20 minutes, there's a seductive stillness to its enveloping mood, with much to appreciate in the sureness of hand with which Jia allows his scenes the time to breathe. Read more

Dennis Lim, Village Voice: The World is the director's most accessible film. But it's also his most despairing. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post: A movie with the visual expanse of a John Ford western and the ensemble grandeur and long takes of a Robert Altman picture. Read more