Critics reviews

It’s all bold, shocking, and brutal, a tonal departure from the director’s typically dry, minimalist work, although just as attuned to gradations of class as his much-praised earlier films.

A more recent second viewing corrected my initial misimpression. In fact, the adoption by Zhao Tao of familiar wuxia poses after stabbing a sauna customer who's been slapping her with a wad of bills for not prostituting herself is clearly designed to function as a Brechtian ‘baring of the device' at the same time that it functions as an absurd fulfillment of the usual genre expectations. That is, it simultaneously invites our applause and makes us feel ashamed and/or embarrassed for applauding.

Tarantino and his fawning critics aggrandise comic-book style and comic-book-style morality into an impoverished, hypocritical conception of ‘art'; Jia artfully uses moments of comic-book amplification to heighten real-world ills, real-world injustices and the sometimes explosive but finally impotent rage of people trapped within a real world made distorted and grotesque by the predations of the powerful.

...I find Sin's focus on gunplay, rape-revenge, and crime-and-punishment to be a rather dull, rote expenditure of his talents.... Even as I find myself bending over backwards to grant all due respect to Jia and to A Touch of Sin, I keep finding myself thinking back to Ying Liang's exceptionally powerful film When Night Falls, which addressed the Jang Yia case not by reenacting Jang's murders but by exploring their negative space, the repercussions on those around them, his mother in particular.

Jia's films have always been observant, not instructive, and A Touch of Sin's most defining image is the one that closes the first arc, that of a previously abused horse trotting free from the master Dahai murdered. As with the characters, the horse, no longer whipped, but still yoked to a cart, has lost its most immediate oppressor, but is nowhere near free... [The film is] a haunting look at a system in which late capitalism and its provoked responses are equally terrifying and consumptive.

Where [American films of 2013] have emphasized the excesses of the haves, Jia has zeroed in on the destitution, not only material but spiritual, of the have-nots and, in the process, achieved something exceedingly rare in the movies: a just explanation, without a shred of speculative self-indulgence, of why people sometimes do horrible things.

Like Koreeda, Jia has had recourse to some of the casual long-lens coverage we find in many contemporary movies, but certain shots gather weight through his signature long takes–especially shots holding on brooding characters. In all, we get a dread-filled panorama, with bursts of violence staged and filmed with an impact that reminds you how sanitized contemporary action scenes are.

With a discerning eye for the whiplash symbol, the director Jia Zhangke sets four shocking crime-blotter episodes in China's Wild West landscape of pop-up cities and lays bare its psycho-political panorama of ruthlessness... In Jia's methodically furious vision, the ambient violence of unchecked power erupts among the insulted and injured with a horrific yet liberating sense of destruction and self-destruction.

A Touch of Sin" is Jia's most conventional movie and hence, in a way, his most obvious representation of China as a Hobbesian industrial behemoth. (The 2002 "Unknown Pleasures" which in my opinion remains his strongest film, is more subtle and corrosive.) Still, with the exception of the movie's fourth episode, the news items dramatized in "A Touch of Sin" have only minimal depth.

Many of Jia's films have been about bluntly binary social divides... 2008's 24 City and 2010's I Wish I Knew examined social change through oral testimony, offering some kind of continuity and shared experience probed by individual speakers, but A Touch Of Sin is all rupture all the time, from its separate stories (linked by overlapping characters but unfolding from isolated causes-and-effects) to its always-unexpected violent acts.

[After the opening scene,] Jia upends convention. His movie gets quieter, the violence comes more slowly. Hardship makes these people direct their anger inward as well as outward... "A Touch of Sin" is by no means subtle, but it is composed with a passion and sinuous grace that makes it far more effective than many other sincere message movies.

A blistering fictionalized tale straight out of China, "A Touch of Sin" is at once monumental and human scale. A story of lives rocked by violence, it has the urgency of a screaming headline but one inscribed with visual lyricism, emotional weight and a belief in individual rights. You can feel the conviction of its director, Jia Zhang-ke — one of the few filmmakers of any nationality who weighs the impact of social and political shifts on people — in every shot.