Cinema Releases - Ash is Purest White

Week Commencing 26th April    Also available on   Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player

Week Commencing 3rd May  Also available on Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player

Week Commencing 10th May  Also available on Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player

Week Commencing 17th May

Week Commencing 24 May

Week Commencing 31 May  Also Available on Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player

Week Commencing 7 June  Also Available on Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player

Week Commencing 14 June Also Available on Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player

"A deeply moving gangster love story… You are pulled in almost immediately by the beauty of the characterizations, the specificity of the milieu and the depth of feeling that courses beneath every exchange."

"Exquisite and ferocious...Beautiful, expansive and deeply melancholy drama...A sublime romantic tragedy."

Justin Chang, LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Zhao Tao is Jia’s Joan Crawford, or his Gloria Grahame… whatever narratives ellipses Jia throws at her, Zhao Tao’s Qiao endures—through many reversals of fortune and changes of wardrobe."

Jonathan Romney, FILM COMMENT

"Jia Zhangke explores the masculine codes of his country and his own previous work in this ravishing, self-referential film about a woman in love with a mobster, with an astonishing lead performance from Zhao Tao."

"One of the most accomplished oeuvres in contemporary cinema."

"Magisterial film"


Giovanni Marchini Camia, SIGHT & SOUND

★★★★

"Jia Zhang-ke’s latest is an often glorious drama"

"Jia is very much an industry unto himself. Perhaps his only contemporary is Zhao Tao, who first appeared in Jia’s 2000 film Platform and has been the most consistent human presence in his cinema since. Here, together, they display an astonishing level of artistic symbiosis, years of creative loyalty all channeled into a portrait of devotion betrayed, unrewarded, but nevertheless unbowed. When everyone else mouths off about the values of the jianghu code, Qiao listens, and takes them to heart. This is her delusional undoing, her tragedy, and, finally, her glory.”

Nick Pinkerton, ARTFORUM

★★★★

"Few film-makers are as observant or as poetic as Jia is about the passing of time..."

"…this sprawling epic is undeniably a gangster movie, but it is also something stranger and sadder, a haunting, transcendent and often downright weird meditation on transience, loyalty and the soul of modern China."

Nicholas Barber, BBC.COM

"Do not be gulled by the slow pace of Jia's stories; they are ceaselessly alive to his country's haste, as it rushes to erase and to construct, and his sympathies tilt to those uncertain souls who simply can't keep up."

Anthony Lane, THE NEW YORKER

★★★★

"The movie represents both the director and his lead actress at the peak of their powers."

Glenn Kenny, ROGEREBERT.COM

"There's a timeless quality to Qiao and Bin's relationship, to its elemental cycles of loyalty, power, and humiliation."

Bilge Ebiri, VILLAGE VOICE

"...subtly majestic drama”

Daniel Kasman, MUBI NOTEBOOK