Zhou Yu's Train: Critic Reviews

By the end of the drowsy journey, the characters are indistinguishable from the scenery.

Built out of bits and pieces of successful Chinese films of the recent past, this syrupy romance comes to seem less a movie than a memory of movies.

A terrific film.

The effort required at the end of Zhou Yu's Train to sort out exactly what just went down isn't worth the payoff.

This is one of those languid numbers where slow motion -- and there's lots of it -- is meant to signify poetry, and a line like 'I know my lake is artificial, but it's full of water' is supposed to seem lyrical.

The love triangle among pottery maker Zhou Yu (Gong Li), her long-distance poet paramour (Tony Leung Ka Fai), and her fellow traveler (Honglei Sun) devolves from opaque mystery into boring melodramatics and incoherent contrivances.

A ticket to this movie is a season's pass on that train -- and you must complete every ride.

A dreamy ride worth taking.

A pointlessly convoluted version of a love story that would really be very simple, if anyone in the movie possessed common sense.

Li fails to stoke much heat in Sun Zhou's pretentious and symbolic love triangle.

I cannot argue with critics who found the film pretentious and inflated, but I somehow enjoyed it for its deification of the female on her endless journey to eventual oblivion.

Though the pic makes little sense at a concrete level, Sun and his script collabs manage to keep the wispy craft afloat for 90 minutes through sheer cinematic sleight-of-hand.

Breathtakingly filmed.

Zhou Yu's Train has its strengths, but it's clearly no bullet train.

Zhou Yu's Train is less than the sum of its very impressive parts, which are scattered on to the screen so haphazardly as to make it nearly impossible to mentally assemble the chronology of the story.

Much of the rest that goes on in Zhou Yu's Train feels needlessly overinflated.

Sun spends so much time on the mood and atmosphere that he forgets about the story.

Emerges gradually as a lyrical contemplation of the often ambiguous yet persistent nature of love through an intricate structure that fragments the narrative as it moves back and forth through time.

...lovely and slight

See Zhou Yu's Train for the interesting Chinese scenery, or see it to feast your eyes on the always beautiful Gong Li, but don't see it for the drama

A film that has considerably less on its mind than it thinks.

It just may be a movie that has difficulty transcending national borders.

The whole thing would be pretty painful if not for the presence of Gong, who makes some of it watchable.