A Touch of Sin

Overlapping stories of ordinary folk excluded from China's economic transformation build to a blood-splattered portrait of a nation in this latest from director Jia Zhang Ke, internationally acclaimed for a series of films tracing his homeland's recent social changes. But where 2006's Still Life was all serene melancholy, here Jia turns up the heat, unleashing gunfire and violent psychosis in four micro-dramas drawn from actual newspaper stories: here's a village blowhard who won't stay quiet about the local bigwig who's prospered while the community stays poor; there's a migrant worker committing armed robbery to grab his piece of the otherwise elusive consumerist dream. A sort of daisy-chain structure holds the disparate elements together, and while the various sections achieve a balance between art house anomie and Tarantino-esque carnage, the cumulative effect is what's significant - a fierce, angry statement about the state of modern China, which, unsurprisingly, fell foul of the Beijing authorities.