Critic Reviews

The film, a sort of cinematic state-of-the-arts speech, is endlessly warm, playful and lovable, a sprawling and prankish hangout comedy with no clear precedent.

Wang, weaving deftly in and out of his ensemble and revealing the characters’ interconnected relationships in piecemeal fashion, shows how the bonds of community and activism intersect, not always conveniently, with those of love and family.

A Bread Factory is an idealistic statement about the importance of art in everyday life. It's about how a scene from a play or a line from a poem can cast a new light on your problems or dreams, maybe put a whole new frame around your life, your community, and the culture and nation that helped shape you.

Despite Wang’s habit of casual stylistic quotation (riffing on Ingmar Bergman’s compressed close-ups here, Wes Anderson’s whip pans there), A Bread Factory remains stubbornly its own thing.

Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory has an immense cast, a deliberate pace and thematic ambition to spare — but it also has a ground-level, plain-spoken modesty that renders it hypnotic.

Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.

There’s nothing else out there like Patrick Wang’s two-part, four-hour labor of love, A Bread Factory, and that’s wholly a good thing.

Part One, subtitled For the Sake of Gold, is original and intriguing.

The film is episodic and often veers into hit-or-miss flights of fancy.