It’s tempting to think of “An Elephant Sitting Still” as a suicide note written with blood in a dirty patch of hard snow. Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama ...

Shortly after completing “An Elephant Sitting Still,” Chinese novelist and filmmaker Hu Bo took his own life. The 29-year-old would not live to see his four-hour epic premiere at the Berlin Film ...

As a reader of arts criticism, there’s a decent chance that maybe after discovering John Keats or “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” or maybe, disquietingly, at some more recent point in your life, you’ve ...

I walked out of Doc Films theater for a break after my second time seeing An Elephant Sitting Still with vertigo and an acute soreness in my body. For this screening, Doc welcomed the film’s director ...

“Another lousy day begins,” a man growls near the start of “An Elephant Sitting Still,” and he doesn’t know how right he is. This extraordinary, overpoweringly bleak movie, a first feature from the ...

The much-talked-about elephant in Hu Bo’s “An Elephant Sitting Still” never appears onscreen, but it isn’t an imaginary beast. The sedentary pachyderm is rumored to live in Manzhouli, a city in the ...

Stretching to nearly four hours, An Elephant Sitting Still is a film of almost unremitting bleakness, following the overlapping paths of a group of characters and their existence – “life” hardly seems ...

When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By A.O. Scott The much-talked-about elephant in Hu Bo’s “An Elephant Sitting Still” ...