70
City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
90
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
This is hardly a film to recommend as entertainment. As an act of remembrance, though, it is singular and, in its way, soaring.
60
The movie skips along episodically; it's not quite as sharp as a war narrative needs to be, even if its nightmarish psychology feels spot-on.
100
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
City of Life and Death isn't cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must.
75
Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan
It's a muscular, physical movie, pieced together from arresting imagery and revelatory gestures, large and small.
83
Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer
Despite its blunt characterizations and simplifications, City of Life and Death, through the inexorable pileup of gruesome detail, achieves an epic vision of horror.
80
Passionate and expertly crafted, this black-and-white opus is well worth seeking out.
83
The film never feels entirely staid: Lu wriggles out of convention where he can, especially in the first half, and engages with history as an artist, not a hagiographer.
88
Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea
Chuan's unsettlingly beautiful black-and-white, wide-screen account of those nightmare six weeks, re-creates that horror in ways that are at once allusive and lucid, mixing cinematic impressionism with documentary-like detail.
88
Here the Japanese senses of honor and of shame are particularly entangled. Later in the film, Lu mounts an Imperial Army parade through the Nanking ruins. It's something to see.