93% City of Life and Death
Posted by on July 18, 2011
All Critics (43) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (40) | Rotten (3) | DVD (1)
Lu tells the heartbreaking, nearly unbearable story with compassion, controlled fury and unflinching realism.
It’s a film strong enough to change your life, if you can bear to watch it at all.
This is hardly a film to recommend as entertainment. As an act of remembrance, though, it is singular and, in its way, soaring.
It’s a muscular, physical movie, pieced together from arresting imagery and revelatory gestures, large and small.
Lu does more with the first 50 minutes than some directors accomplish in 10 movies.
Lu’s distinction lies in the cinematic virtuosity he brings to orchestrating carnage, the calculated attention he pays to human interest, and the globalist, universalizing attitude inherent in both.
Exquisitely shot in black and white, with a rare attention to detail and dramatic complexity, “City of Life and Death” is a timelessly great film that commands our collective attention.
In almost any form, the story of the Nanking atrocities can leave you profoundly shaken. But Lu Chuan’s version may be the most compassionate and emotionally satisfying treatment to date.
Here, in bloodless miniature, is the true obscenity of war.
There is real beauty in its effort to comprehend the incomprehensible.
among the greatest war films ever made
Chinese filmmaker Chuan Lu has tackled a vast and ambitious subject in City of Life and Death. I knew very little about the siege on Nanjing (or Nanking, as Westerners have long referred to it) in 1937; I feel as if I understand it now, in all…
Despite a puzzling, ridiculously benign view of Japanese sex slaves, this is a brutal depiction of the bestiality of the Japanese Rape of Nanjing that is long overdue.
There is no way to soften the events presented, even though Lu spares us some documented atrocities that are as bad or worse than what we see. The result is both moving and exhausting.
A work of grim art told with relentlessly restless curiosity about the human capacity for survival.
The most visceral war film since Saving Private Ryan – a portrait of the hopeless in the grasp of a sadistic oppressor.
…it is this humanity, standing beside horrific crimes against same, which makes “City of Life and Death” one of the greatest war films.
The almost documentary look makes you feel the despair, the tragedy and the horror as the film brings the viewer into this brief moment in history.
Action and ultimate tragedy shot in spectacular black and white. One of the great war films.
First feature on horrors from the Chinese point of view of the Japanese Rape of Nanking is impressive as…a humanistic epic…of brutal mass executions…by ordinary soldiers.
Chuan’s attempt is certainly admirable in the time and care put towards honoring those at Nanking, but the effort is misguided and its propagandist take feels hollow and disappointing.
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