Critic Reviews

Rarely has China's explosive economic growth been captured with such grace and with such a heavy heart.

As a visual love-letter to the Yangtze River, Crosscurrent takes your breath away. As a narrative film, it’s all washed up.

Cramming fantasy and mysticism, faith and history into a single riverboat journey, this dirgelike meditation on China’s painful economic rebirth dispenses with narrative in favor of semiotics.

It’s all about metaphor and mood, while the storytelling is so lightweight it might not exist. Without it, this drunken boat sailing on poetry can't hold interest for its entire two hour running time.

A meandering, sluggish tale that offers moments of great beauty but ultimately feels like a ragbag, take-your-pick bundle of poetic and spiritual suggestions inspired by China’s great Yangtze River.

Crosscurrent represents quite a remarkable blunder considering how much effort and noble aspirations go to waste because its maker forgot to tell a good story first.

Plotless, pretentiously literary and lousy at explaining geography, the movie fails to put Yang’s vision into a fictional framework that’s even remotely engaging.