Contemplative film about a transforming society. The visuals are sometimes rough but it fits the content extremely well and while the film moves slowly the content is interesting enough to keep thing moving, though I'll admit I did get restless occasionally.

Beautifully filmed but characteristically stultifying effort from Jia Zhang-ke about a displaced man looking for his wife after a dam has wiped out his hometown. If... dialogue... scenes... could... just... proceed... at... a... reasonable... pace... we... might... have... something... here.

Sprinklings of magic realism look to the potential futures ahead of China as the country stumbles through industrialisation and modernisation and faces the same crossroads all industrialising countries are bound to come to - towards technological advancement or self-destruction? This metaphor is never more clear than in the stunning closing frame to the film where we see a man walking along a wire between two buildings - as he progresses he risks falling yet it is too late to turn back.

Visually this movie is just stunning. As others have said, the magic realism is really amazing. But I just felt like the pacing was off and so my mind drifted off to other, non-movie related places, a few times. Still though, there are a lot of really memorable images in it and that's more than enough to recommend it. Aside from the cinematography, the acting and script is all good but not especially great.

Seamlessly blends the mundane with significant themes and low-voiced, emotive force. Jia has most certainly developed his craft into something here.

"Jia Zhangke has an uncanny knack for grounding his portraits of Chinese alienation in settings that are at once schematically allegorical and tangibly lived-in." - Fernando F. Croce

I feel the director doesn't have a great understanding of the film's subject matter, and the story seems bland to me as a result. Nice cinéma vérité style though I guess.

This is real China. Still Life's stunning depiction of this region will prove to be a valuable resource in 10 - 15 years when the region and China have completely changed. It better captures the social, political, cultural, and geography of the region than any documentary I have seen. Not a spell-binding drama by any means, but a valuable resource nonetheless.

i was bored and the actors looked bored

A nice social study about industralisation in China and the impact of the exploding economy on society. There are some amazing shots in this film, and it shows China in its most depressing way. But besides that, it sometimes also feels forced.

The story could be so interesting because a village is under water due to Three Gorges Hydro power. However its so slow and with worthless scenes that the story can't move on.

On the surface it is a story of two different people (a coal miner and a nurse), both from Shanxi, who come to the Three Gorges in Fengjie, looking for their ex-wife and husband respectively. Their stories have a very slow pace which highly contrasts the rapid changes that are taking place in the town. In fact, those changes play the leading role in the movie. The two main characters, are there, just two show, how they affect the lives of ordinary people. As far as I know the picture is accurate

The aliens were silly and mar what would have otherwise been a masterpiece.

Jia divides the film into four sections named after an object often used to bridge gaps between people (Cigarette, Tea, Liquor, Sweets). But the lives in this story are anything but still, they seem to be in perpetual upheaval. Jia populates the film with a variety of interesting or modernist touches: a fusebox suddenly sparking, juxtapositions of modern and traditional, et cetera. My interest wavered a bit from time to time but in the end I really liked a lot.

Still Life is a film of contrasts--life and death, change and stasis, breaking down and putting back together. Jia's assured and contemplative camera highlights the violent upheaval taking place in the city, but masks that taking place in the lives of the principal characters. The images are often stunning in their beauty, and in the last twenty minutes, approach the sublime. This is the best "new movie" I've seen in about two years. Amazing.

battered, full of catharsis, it bears the great weight of time on its shoulders; fengjie necessarily bustles ever onward in the growing shadow of what once was, its routines preserved in the mist even as buildings crumble and the water devours from below. flashes of magic-realism enhance the landscape's resonance further, speaking of the distant future and the distant past, hope and atrophy bound into one fleeting, fluctuating unity.

The assured cinematography and cautious pacing suggests everything in this pensive film. The dialogue is inessential; the images of people sitting and walking - and that of buildings falling - are evocative and (yet) somehow alien in their determinacy and reposefulness. Firm in shape and elegiac in tone, the film ooze of finesse and tenderness...