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Absolutely brilliant

The first must-see film of the year.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I found this movie somewhat of a mixed blessing.Henry O is likable as a concerned father visiting his cold-as-a-fish daughter, who has abandoned many of her Chinese traditions and lives a kind of sterile existence in Portland. Mr. Shi apparently worked too much under some harsh Communist conditions; some suspected him of having an affair with a co-worker though it never happened. Still, his late wife held all this against him and his daughter Yilan is still stewing over it.Some of the best scenes in this film depict Mr. Shi and another foreign-born parent, Madam (Vida Ghahremani), struggling to commiserate with each other in English after having met by happenstance on a park bench.As good as those scenes were, I'm not sure the plot and characterizations in this film hold together very well. Toward the end of the film, Mr. Shi gets a little more pointed in his questions of his daughter. He's concerned that she's wasting her time on a married Russian man. Their getting below the surface in their dialogue somehow draws them closer together and in the end Yilan cracks a smile for the first time.I guess we are supposed to see this as a breakthrough. But I found Yilan so unpleasantly monosyllabic that I really stopped caring much about her. It bothered me that Madam, a refreshingly vibrant presence earlier in the movie, gets whisked out of the story near its end. Her friend says she placed her in an assisted-living facility because her son had not wanted her moving in with him.That made no sense to me...She was a sensitive and determined woman and I didn't see how a friend of hers could dispose of her in this fashion.In the end I guess it smacked a bit of stereotyping against elders.I'd heard good things about Wayne Wang's direction but this production was a mixed bag. As a student of Mandarin, though, I greatly enjoyed the beautifully articulated conversations between father and child. The meals Mr. Shi whipped up looked delicious as well!

Here a perfect example of a boring film.It starts out strong, the first twenty minutes or so are somehow interesting and perhaps a good character development... we have this old man, trying to deal with his loneliness, with a struggling relationship with his daughter. Then this theme lasts forever. Literally no conflicts happens in this film. All of it seems pointless, and apparently the highest point of this film is nowhere near of being interesting. This coming from someone that can stand really boring films. So i am not exaggerating about it, trust me. The boredom in this film is beyond the acceptable limits by far.Maybe i am not in the perhaps small 'targeted' group of audience of people that are 60 years old or more, but frankly, i am just warning about 99% of the people in this world that are not in the targeted audience to stay away from the film.But yeah, those who have a grandpa do know that this film is very truthful to reality. It depicts the loneliness and the struggles that a 'old' person suffers when 'changes the ambient that he/ she is used to live. Real deal here. Very realistic. But all in all, the climax don't does nothing to me. It is just about some pointless revelations explaining why the 'quiet' behavior of both the father and daughter. Not mildly interesting.The technical aspects in this film are generic at best. Not worth to mention.Skip this film and avoid an inevitable headache. 3.7/10

I saw the preview for A Thousand Years of Good Prayer, which shows a Chinese man talking on a park bench with an Iranian women; both have problems speaking in English but they communicate and talk about their children. I thought it would be a nice heartfelt movie about two immigrants connecting. That was a part of it... but it was a lot more than that.There is indeed a Chinese man; he is an old rocket scientist and is visiting his 30-some year old daughter in the U.S.; the problem is that they don't talk... almost at all. The setting is a pretty dull-looking suburban apartment complex, and the only thing to do is to go to a nearby park with some ducks. I had a feeling of depression throughout the whole movie. There isn't really anything momentously bad that happens in the movie; maybe it's that nothing huge happens at all and people are just not happy. It was very non-uplifting, especially as there is no clear resolution by the end. There are a couple funny parts, and some of it is pretty charming as it is a reflection of real life. However, I was expecting a very cute and fun feel-good movie, and it wasn't. It was a snippet of time in this family's life, about some pretty severe communication gaps and how difficult it is to heal a whole lifetime of lack of intimacy and hurt. Some wounds don't heal overnight, and some lessons can't be learned in a short period of time. The film has sincerely stellar acting, and it is serious in a very real way. I can't say I enjoyed the film and maybe it's because it hit too close to home, but I can say it was very good.

This movie felt like it lasted over 1,000 years. A really bad soap opera masquerading as a meaningful family "drama" exploring generational and cultural barriers. There is not one genuine moment in its bloated running length. An anamorphic screen image can't disguise what an amateurish production this is – the acting is especially laughable. Story in a nutshell: elderly Chinese man comes to The States to visit his daughter. The father is hoping (and pushing) to become a grandfather. Pathos and a lot of moping ensue. Yawn. The void between father & daughter is played out in interminable dinner scenes. The only thing more boring are the excruciating park bench pidgin English dialogue scenes between the father and an Iranian woman he befriends. Daughter's Russian boyfriend is a cardboard cutout of a joke – like everyone in this epic. And oh yeah, the most unintentionally hilarious line of the movie, "You were never a rocket scientist."