The film’s integrity is chiefly a matter of countless small but uncommon observations...

This simple, repetetive tale has a mesmerizing quality able to hook audiences from beginning to end.

The plot seems expressly designed to placate the bureaucrats who banned Zhang's two previous films in China, but the quasi-documentary approach (involving scores of non-professional actors, hidden cameras and radio mikes) is brilliantly finessed.

This is the first film I have seen from China that has at once such documentary verisimilitude, such comic inventiveness, and such reflective strength.