Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

This is a brilliant, if challenging, film.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

A film of wonderful looseness and innovation. Set free to film fakes, the director is the real thing.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington

With rich irony, The World juxtaposes the teasing, grand images of the outside world's wonders with the insular community and the mundane lives of the park employees.

Washington Post by Desson Thomson

A movie with the visual expanse of a John Ford western and the ensemble grandeur and long takes of a Robert Altman picture. The movie is definitely Chinese in content, but it exudes American style and spirit.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

The title of Jia Zhang-ke's 2004 masterpiece, The World -- a film that's hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian -- is an ironic pun and a metaphor.

San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson

A heartbreaking, beautiful movie that gains strength from its deep characterizations.

L.A. Weekly by Scott Foundas

The comic, tragic and monumentally beautiful new film by writer-director Jia Zhangke (Platform).

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

A remarkable film.

Austin Chronicle by Marrit Ingman

It's a magnificent film – thoughtful but not distant, aesthetically and technically sophisticated but staged with restraint and delicacy.

Boston Globe by Wesley Morris

The director is becoming a master of blending the political and the personal with eloquence and deceptive lightness.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Maverick Chinese director Jia Zhangke examines the rapidly changing face of China as its economy edges further toward a modified form of market capitalism with yet another complex, multicharacter masterpiece.

Village Voice by Dennis Lim

On a first viewing, the movie seemed a dilution of the formal strategies Jia had perfected-at once less dispassionate and less empathetic. After a repeat viewing, it still strikes me as Jia's fourth-best film (that it's one of the year's best says plenty about the level at which he's working), but it's more apparent that The Worl d's muffled emotional impact should be understood as a function of its setting.

The Hollywood Reporter

It's a splendid microcosm of contemporary China's aspirations and shortcomings.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

If a movie can be stark and rapturous at the same time, this is that movie.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

Loosely constructed, The World drifts along pleasantly for much of its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Mr. Jia has a terrific eye and an almost sculptural sense of film space (especially in close quarters), and he brings texture and density to even the most nondescript rooms.

Variety by David Rooney

While the film feels overlong at two hours 20 minutes, there's a seductive stillness to its enveloping mood.

New York Post by V.A. Musetto

Jia's message is that globalization has failed to help the Chinese masses. We hear you, dude, but did you really need 143 minutes to get your point across?

New York Daily News by Jack Mathews

The World has a pokey pace, but it presents a uniquely powerful look at the new big kid in the global economy.

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

The World's dull weave of frustrated romances and worker exploitation is far too obvious, and Jia can only relieve the tedium so many times.