Spring in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun)

A mood. The impossibility of putting life back together after everything has fallen apart.

Sean Gilman

On visiting old friends, going for a boat ride, singing songs together like old times. On building your health back up, building up your will to live, brick by brick, just like the garden wall. The constant wind in the trees grows more forceful as time goes on, as time runs…

Augie

Many national cinemas have that canon classic that perennially appears on local lists of the best movies ever made but is largely unknown outside the country's borders. This is China's. Notably, it topped the Hong Kong Film Awards Association's poll of the greatest Chinese…

Will Sloan

What could’ve so quickly evolved into an exaggerated melodrama, Spring in a Small Town conserves its heart-rendering strength because director Fei Mu and screenwriter Li Tianji maintain a tight clasp on the controlled emotions of its narratives moment in time. Taking place…

Paul Elliott

Contrary to most critics, I don't think this is the best movie in Chinese cinema history. I do understand its historical importance owing to its humanistic theme and directorial excellence, but it has far too many holes for me to rate this any higher. The best thing…

nick

Cinema as a poetry of interruptions, where the camera moves as fluently as the wind in the characters' faces, so strikingly beautiful, but also knowing when to stop movement so feelings can flourish properly. The narration has that same potent poetry to it, pungently…

Diogo Serafim

Wong Kar-Wai obviously got a lot from here, but it's very understated and no one gets the consolation of their sadness making them look like a catalogue model. The bombed out garden is a fantastic location. There are a lot of times where it will cut suddenly to what a third…

Dok

This has that sense of discovery, of constantly testing the limits of what is possible with minimal resources, that typifies the best of early talkies. The lyrical editing of real landscapes into expressions of uninhibited spirit in particular recalls Boris Barnet's By the…

Jake Cole

The fighting is over, but the wreckage is plain to see. Destroyed buildings, broken minds and crushed relationships torn apart by the distance of war. Director Fei Mu carefully constructed a narrative here that appeals to the eternally hopeful and a population that…

Graham