A Touch of Sin

Directed by Jia Zhangke

(Not rated)

***

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Jia Zhangke’s latest film represents “a somewhat radical departure,” said A.A. Dowd in the A.V. Club. Known as a master of glacier-slow art-house cinema, the director has this time given up commenting quietly on the rapaciousness of modern China and instead lets loose “a howl of anger.” This Mandarin-language polemicunfurls four violent vignettes—all of them loosely based on actual news stories—and stages each one as “a kind of working-class revenge story.” As it turns out, “Jia has a knack for orchestrating violence,” said Stephanie Zacharek in The Village Voice. When a miner goes on a rampage, a migrant worker confronts a crew of highway robbers, and a masseuse strikes back against two would-be rapists, the brutality on-screen is “just stylized enough to have a kick, though you always feel its emotional weight.” As usual, Jia has also “blurred the line between fiction and nonfiction,” by shooting on location and making liberal use of nonactors, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. “At once monumental and human scale,” A Touch of Sin “has the urgency of a screaming headline.”