Caught by the Tides

Two decades of China’s rapid transformations are on dazzling display in Caught by the Tides, master filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s latest feature. In the early 2000s, lovers Qiaoqiao and Bin bide their time in a ragtag song-and-dance troupe in the city of Datong. When Bin leaves town and Qiaoqiao goes in search of him, however, the two are swept up in the long drift of the twenty-first century. What ensues is a quietly devastating, decades-spanning romance of two individuals borne along by the forces of time and tide.

Featuring not just callbacks to earlier films, such as Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Still Life (2006), but also contemporaneously shot footage from those productions, Caught traces an alternate path through Jia’s era-defining filmography—one that doubles as a counter-history of contemporary China itself. Anchored by a luminous performance by Zhao Tao, Jia’s longtime partner and artistic collaborator, the film derives its considerable power from the cumulative sense of time gone by.

It’s an achievement by turns fleeting and monumental: a series of interlocking time capsules, a wrenching feat of self-reflection, and a stealth musical.

Justin Chang, The New Yorker

This dreamy, arresting, dialogue-light latest from Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke is a poetic, musical and reflective portrait of one woman’s journey to find an old lover.

Dave Calhoun, Time Out

Zhao’s face is one of the most transfixingly expressive in modern cinema, and her long collaboration with her husband Jia stands among the screen’s greatest actress-director unions.

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter