The Wild Goose Lake

"An invigorating, poetic, and discretely brilliant Chinese noir that adds up to less than the sum of its parts..."

"Diao is a master of both settings and set-pieces. Unfortunately, the characters and plot twists are much less compelling."

"The film's masterstroke is that its fugitive antiheroes are framed by an environment that reflects their criminal lives back at them."

"Visually, the film, set in the city of Wuhan, is most impressive."

"The movie exhilarates."

"Perhaps the world (Yinan) creates is a bit too scattered for its own good, but you will still want to melt inside its stunning, riotous glow."

"What it all adds up to has some of the unevenness of a nightmare..."

"Flashbacks, a frenetic pace and striking set pieces combine to make this near-abstract crime movie... an exhilarating if skin-deep experience."

"The film is an exercise in style, derivative in some ways and original in others. In action sequences, Diao's panning camera movements can suggest a less austere version of the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien: characters will drop out of sight before the camera catches up with them again, or we'll see them skulking round corners, trying to glimpse others who then come into view."

""The Wild Goose Lake" is unapologetically down-and-dirty B-movie filmmaking, but with its stealth social commentary and matter-of-fact bleakness, you would never call it escapist entertainment."

"It's a rare privilege, to watch an artist level up in this way."

"What it sometimes lacks in clarity it easily makes up for with its stunning, memorable visual games."

"Like an organic feature of the Chinese cinematic landscape, as though it pooled onto the screen in all its oily, murky glory, having welled up from deep inside the ground."

"Some of the film’s romance, and its fatalism, did not have the piercing impact as the visual masterstrokes. But there’s no doubting Diao’s style."

"A film that doesn’t hit you like a tidal wave as much as it gradually washes over you, leaving in its wake a series of memorable set-pieces and a dense, dark web of violence and fatality."