Recensioni de* critic*

The fact that the fictional director’s predicament precisely matches Ying Liang’s real-life predicament underlines the film’s transfixing honesty and candour.

There will be no revelation in this viewing that allows Chen and Yang to understand one another before the credits roll, but in this moment Ying gives us something better—a reminder that understanding is not a prerequisite for love.

A compelling, beautifully nuanced study of exile and displacement, the film underscores what a difficult position politically minded independent filmmakers still occupy in China. It is one of the bravest, most informative and persuasive films I’ve ever seen on this important subject, as well as one of the most elegantly crafted of recent Chinese movies.

The mechanisms of political repression are subtle and not always visible in this film, which is drawn from the details of Mr. Ying’s own experience and which shows how authoritarianism seeps into and threatens to corrupt the most intimate and ordinary human encounters.

If politics were enough, “A Family Tour” would suffice as a hard-won work of freedom in the face of unjust authority, as an act of revelatory declaration in the face of enforced silence. But Ying’s film is also a work of beauty.

A film whose creativity feels stifled by the promise and heartbreak of its story. . . . That such a film was made, about such a thing, under such circumstances is remarkable, but I couldn’t help but feel there could be a more alive film that juggled such ambitious ideas, rather than what felt more like an introduction of concept, situation and pain, rather than their electric animation.