It's that quality of directness, of purpose -- here particularly fierce purpose -- that gives Jia's plays with fiction and nonfiction both their vigour and their political perceptiveness and bite.

Beyond the spattered blood and broken bones, Jia's usual levels of compassion and social analysis are maintained.

Teases together four disparate stories of people driven to violence by the purgatorial pain of their modern existence.

[D]irector Jia Zhang-ke takes four true stories of life in the modern China economy and weaves them into an unsettling portrait of the country, where the runaway growth takes its toll on the citizens racing to simply survive.