Mountains May Depart

“With audacious leaps of time and intimate echoes spanning a quarter century of intertwined lives, the director Jia Zhangke endows this romantic melodrama with vast geopolitical import. . . . Jia films these interlocking stories and their diverse tributaries with a bare and restrained simplicity that contains his many levels of rueful outrage. Incidental touches, ranging from music and food to industrial catastrophes and looming violence, evoke a nation out of joint and its lost generations to come” (Richard Brody, New Yorker).