"An intimate epic that captures the passage of time with melancholic clarity, Caught by the Tides might be director Jia Zhangke and star Tao Zhao's most profound collaboration yet."
—Rotten Tomatoes
"A masterfully poetic and pioneering fusion of the old and the new…. So uncannily successful that it is possible to come away from Tides with the whimsical impression that this was the film [director Jia Zhang-Ke] was building toward all this time, as though all those lauded previous movies were simply him amassing the raw material for this one."
—Variety
The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with his marvelous Caught by the Tides. Assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years—a beguiling mix of fiction and documentary, featuring a cascade of images taken from previous movies, unused scenes, and newly shot dramatic sequences—Caught by the Tides is a free-flowing work of unspoken longing, carried along more by music than dialogue as it looms around the edges of a poignant love story. The film mostly adheres to the perspective of Qiaoqiao (Jia’s immortal muse Zhao Tao) as she wanders an increasingly unrecognizable country in search of long-lost lover Bin (Li Zhubin), who left their home city of Datong seeking new financial prospects. The always captivating Zhao carries the film with her delicate expressiveness, while Jia constantly evokes cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of change: of people, landscapes, cities, politics, ideas.