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Review by Will Sloan Liked

The freewheeling mix of documentary and archival footage, repurposed deleted scenes from previous Jia productions, and new COVID-era drama conveys a sense of time and space/past and present collapsing in a modern China that is still always moving forward, forward, forward. Feels like Jia discovering cubism. Pretty incredible.

What does Jia think of the COVID protocols? The Beijing Olympic bid? Tour boats on the Yangtze? Robot waiters? Like a good therapist, he just finds them all interesting.

2

More on this, I hope, to come - since this is already a movie that’s deeply ingrained itself in my thoughts, and one that I already very much adore. A wonderfully creative (and innovative!) abstract masterpiece, though so much of it - primarily it's central conceit - I still struggle to articulate, yet now having seen it multiple times I've found my favorite section changing each time. Its impressionistic narrative structure consisting of documentary and not, deleted scenes from old films and brand new footage feels less like a straight line than a collection of memories structured into something I have never seen before. In fact, this is practically a remake of Ash Is Purest White, and at the same…

1

for jia, to age is to become dignified but uncool. strangely apropos that his images actually get less wrinkly as time es. on a long enough timescale, everything seedy and jagged becomes classy and smooth. zhao tao is one of the most captivating screen presences of all time. she's like the mona lisa, you seem to always be able to see the gears turning in her head (the film gets one of its best gags out of her enigmatic expressions).

letting those SOV images wash over me from the 4th row of alice tully, i was in esther heaven. probably the cinema experience of the year, for me.

Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½ Liked

More than just reusing footage that belong to early shoots, this feels like a more ample rethinking of a lot of strands of Jia’s drama and aesthetic strategies as they relate to China as a whole. A fascinating auteurist object, even more so because it does look forward. Ingenuous conceived, if not always successful, a reminder that his eye is consistently great and that Zhao Tao is one of film’s most compelling presences.

Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ Liked

a talismanic film found beneath the digital trash-stratum, coordinated somewhere between a chopped & screwed wang bing doc, a late-godard domestic remix, and an arthur lipsett pop music video -- which is to say it's another masterwork from one of cinema's brightest souls, essential viewing for what the medium must become, hell or high water -- no exaggeration, no hyperbole needed: if you're not on this wavelength, you're simply doing yourself a disservice.

a silent zhao tao chases after li zhubin's brother bin, who comes to be an architect of china's 21st century modernity, a sort of inverse doppelgänger to ash is purest white's brother bin, not a masculine gangster out of time, but a man thinking he's keeping up with…

Review by davidehrlich ★★★

A searching and scattershot portrait of displacement that’s as likely to resonate with Jia Zhang-ke devotees as it is to mystify those who are new to his work, “Caught by the Tides” finds the Chinese auteur returning the most pivotal characters and locations that have defined his movies over the last two decades. Then again, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never left them.

Tracing the faintest contours of a scripted love story around the scaffolding of some documentary footage that Jia has collected over the course of 22 years, this elusive chimera of a film strains to literalize the delicate relationship between time and memory — a theme that has become increasingly central to the…

2

The way Jia tracks time via handheld mini DV to robotic security cam footage is truly astonishing. Decades traversed through a digital void where memories are pixelated and fragmented. That transition from the aerial view of the ballroom into the grocery store oranges may be the single greatest moment in cinema, give or take. Felt my brain disintegrate. The dream sequence/video game, too. This moved me more than anything I’ve seen in years. Some of my favorite marriages of image and theme, maybe ever. Every frame of this film is in contention for my favorite images ever. So into how nebulous and malformed the early images are, mirroring the uncertainty ahead of our leads, their possibilities endless, only to end up in flattened and smooth modernity. It’s really something. 

Zhao Tao, man. Jesus Christ.

7

The subject position of Communist youth was not gender specific. Clinging to this position, young women like me sensed few gender constraints in our devotion to the revolution. Numerous young female leaders emerged on this island with eight farms. This cohort never believed in female inferiority and were free from social expectations of the roles of wife and mother. Femininity was not defined as performing the traditional roles of wife and mother. To be a good female youth was to devote herself heart and soul to the revolution...In those intoxicating moments with many young likeminded dreamers, I was a revolutionary youth, a Communist Party member. My gender was irrelevant.

- Wang Zheng

Follows the general contour of a Jia Zhangke…

2

Not quite sure what to make of this. I decided to see this without reading anything about it, without even watching the trailer, and that was probably a mistake. For the first 30 minutes at least, there are no characters or story—just snippets of documentary-like footage, in various formats and aspect ratios, of China in the early 2000s, with no hints given as to how it all ties together. Occasionally a young Zhao Tao appears in one of the clips as a performer or model of some kind, suggesting that maybe this comes from Jia's earlier movies, which I confirmed was the case when I read up on the film later. Apparently most of the movie is made up of…

Review by Jeff Zhang ★★★★★

Immense. The propulsive, unfeeling wake of China’s progress hand-in-hand with Jia’s entire career. Unprecedented formal daring wrapped in a singular, quiet Zhao Tao performance. Instant best of the year territory.

Review by coffee ★★★★ Liked

the world endures // we’re just ing through

Jia discovers TikTok and Counter-Strike. really glad i did my homework going into this because it’s really rewarding getting to see not only the footage from Unknown Pleasures/Still Life/Ash Is Purest White reused and recontextualized but also Jia’s career long interests taking entirely new shapes here. he knows you can’t really capture the breadth of an entire culture in such a short time but the work here really comes close, remixing his career and the Chinese 21st Century down to their most essential feelings, technologies, and evolutions. caught by the tides of history happening around you. feel like i’ve barely scratched the surface on all of the things it’s doing but i thought this was really excellent. the new deployment of security footage and robot cameras, just tremendous. Zhao Tao does more emotive work behind a mask with just her eyes than almost any other actor can do with their entire body

Review by nick ★★★★★ Liked

Best film of 2024, and Jia Zhangke's career best.

Caught by the Tides defies categorization, seamlessly blending archive footage from Jia’s earlier films (notably Unknown Pleasures and Still Life) with reenactments to craft a unique narrative. The film is an expansive, at times experimental journey through Jia's enduring universe, brought to life by Zhao Tao, who delivers one of her most naturalistic yet affecting performances. The addition of a gay subplot was unexpected but a refreshing touch that works surprisingly well.

Exploring themes of youthful angst and political unrest, Caught by the Tides ultimately finds a sense of resignation, resolving differences in a nostalgia for a hometown that exists only on film. It’s as if Jia is reflecting on his entire career, acknowledging that he too has been "caught by the tides." Highly recommended.