Youth (Spring)
Icarus Films | Release Date: November 10, 2023 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
74
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 14 Critic Reviews
Positive:
11
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
88
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyNov 10, 2023
Wang’s non-adherence to narrative lines deliberately prevents the sense of sustained drama. Still, every sequence has some emotional or dramatic hook to make it engaging. Read full review
83
The Film StageEthan VestbySep 14, 2023
Maybe there’s not much space for beauty, yet there’s still a thrill from the trademark jerky camera movements that follow Wang Bing’s subjects. His often muddy-but-striking images always figure out a way to compose bodies somewhere between ultra-realism and painterly precision. Read full review
83
IndieWireBen CrollMay 26, 2023
Like a Brueghel or a Bosch, Youth (Spring) is less an individual portrait than a bustling portrayal of types — lovesick fools and weary old souls, agitators and wallflowers, peacocks and young parents-to-be, all united and made equal by the same shared and endless labor and the same cramped living quarters. And all of them — but for two outliers — united by age. Read full review
81
TheWrapSteve PondMay 26, 2023
The film is as exhausting as it is disturbing, and it’s relentlessness is in many ways the whole point as viewers spend 212 minutes looking at circumstances in which these young people, most in their late teens and early twenties, spend their daily lives. Read full review
80
The New York TimesBen KenigsbergNov 9, 2023
While the running time may be indulgent, the experience of feeling trapped in this world is difficult to shake. Read full review
80
Paste MagazineKatarina DocalovichJun 1, 2023
Never sugar-coated or saccharine, Youth (Spring) shows the full spectrum of our experiences. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinMay 26, 2023
Youth (the parenthetical subtitle Spring heralds a projected series of films) is consistently engaging, even if it’s not always easy to see what the whole package is trying to say that couldn’t be said with more brevity. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 26, 2023
It’s possible to be slightly overwhelmed by the scale and the social realist detail of the film, which was shot over a five-year period from 2014 to 2019, but the hope and idealism of the young workers is moving. Read full review
80
Time OutDave CalhounMay 26, 2023
Wang’s film feels less like an exposé than an eye-opener; a portrait of a reality that feels almost otherworldly in its distance and difference. Read full review
70
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyMay 26, 2023
The result is the depiction of a seemingly sealed-in, quasi-carceral world, revealing how much China’s current economy – after decades, and multiple phases, of Communism – is now built on old-school sweatshop capitalism, with youth a readily available, and very disposable, commodity. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineSam C. MacSep 13, 2023
Twenty years on from Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, we return with Wang Bing to the factory floor, but this time he doesn’t muster the formal strategies or the narratological scope that once allowed him (and us) to imagine broader implications for China’s future. Read full review
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