Last Train Home: Critic Reviews

This is essential viewing for understanding our world.

Tells the story of a family caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future--a story that, on its own, is moving, even heartbreaking. Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.

It's depressing enough to watch this family's struggles with life. But their pain really hits home when you think that the pants you might be wearing could have contributed to it.

What else do you want? The question echoes down every frame of this haunting film, and Fan doesn't pretend to have an answer.

Last Train Home is an intimate portrait of an unfathomable immensity, focusing on a single family caught up in the world's largest mass migration.

Last Train Home is a harrowing experience. Don't expect to come out smiling.

Last Train Home suggests that the times they are a-changin'. The rulers of China may someday regret that they distributed the works of Marx so generously.

Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan considers the social upheavals wrought by China's economic miracle.

Fan's fly-on-the-wall perspective enables the viewer to empathize with all the players in the family drama, unlikely to have a happy ending.

Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan presents the human cost of China's economic rise in terms any parent or child can understand.

Helmed by Fan Lixin, who also takes credits as d.p. and co-editor, the pic laudably adopts an intimate, personal approach to a subject -- hardworking Chinese garment workers -- that's been covered in more hectoring fashion elsewhere.

Last Train Home is a startling look at the devastating human cost of China's newfound embrace of capitalism.

Last Train Home stands as an impressive feature debut from the thirtysomething Lixin Fan and a harbinger of more great documentary cinema.

An expert, unobtrusive observer, Fan disappears inside his own film and allows us to get completely inside his subjects' lives.

A moving film that succeeds both on a macro level and as a portrait of a single family struggling with problems both universal and specific to their time and place.

A startling and absolutely superb masterpiece of a documentary ...

This extraordinary Chinese-Canadian documentary illuminates the human price involved in China's ascent into a global economic power: every year over 130 million migrant workers take an arduous journey back home.

Despite being ruled by the Communist Party, the China depicted in this powerful documentary evokes Karl Marx: "The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation."

Lixin captures the messy tragedy of their lives with dignity and intimacy, and there are some scenes, such as a violent confrontation between father and daughter, that carry the sting of reality.

Director Lixin Fan gives a heartbreaking human voice to the downside of China's economic upside -- causing us to question the intrinsic worth of ambition, be it individual, societal or national.

Last Train Home finds a kind of desperate poetry in the hardships of the annual trip home...

Last Train Home will tug at your heartstrings as it opens your eyes, but it also will make you feel incredibly lucky and more than a little spoiled.

Heartbreaking and humanistic in the best sense.

This small masterpiece of documentary filmmaking offers a human-scale look at the impact of China's industrial growth.