111 minutes, 2025, Jia Zhangke

Premise: An essayistic exploration of 21st-century Chinese history, framed by archival footage and an elliptical romance between a singer and her lover.

Where to watch: in U.S. theaters now

It’s not the geographical sweep of the images, which span several regions of China and trace their industrial development over the last twenty-some years; it’s not the bruised and revelatory feeling coursing underneath each sequence; it’s not the haunted, heavy ambience and propulsion of the club music which soundtracks much of the first half; it’s not the inclination towards narrative abstraction; it’s not even the piercing, extraordinarily sensitive performance of the lead actor Zhao Tao that constitutes the most important thing about this movie, it’s history. Watching this movie is like if someone dreamed about the definition of “the past” and was recounting it to you while you yourself were in a dream.

Without the context of Jia’s prior movies, which would be useful here given that this movie repurposes several scenes from his filmography, I will just offer the following observation about the magnificent structure and ideological architecture on display. He has somehow managed to capture, with boisterous energy and an exceedingly steady directorial hand, the profound and subterranean melancholy of history passing you by. Sometimes this process is obvious and literalized, as when the camera moves down a street and captures passersby — immediately transfixed, they stare as if trying to see past the lens and into the body of the device making their image (both of which may be forever inaccessible to them). Other times this feeling is integral to the form; for a viewer who hasn’t seen these images before, each individual shot is willing to go abstract & lead you down its own path, to show a singular vignette of capital-L Life, a hint of devastating experience, playing out on somebody’s face, and almost immediately wrest it away. But the superstructure behind this style of montage is in fact a humanistic, intellectually rigorous one, because it’s showing you how fast time and memory can go when you attempt to reassemble them. The speed of this movie is the speed of history. It’s a record of that part of the psyche which lives forever, outlasting all the images which broke into and ruggedly shaped it. Like many great filmmakers, Jia has a piquant and unassailable inclination toward steadiness, careful flow, the methodical slow-drip of historicity; it’s because he’s aiming at an experience of eternity. He’s getting close.