Blind Shaft

Powerful stuff from writer-director Li Yang that's both an uncompromising indictment of the human cost of China's evolving market economy and an nail-bitingly suspenseful thriller. Song (Li Yixiang) and Tang (Wang Shuangbao), two itinerant miners who, like many men from the impoverished provincial towns of China, have left their villages in hopes of earning a living, have concocted a ghoulish moneymaking scheme. After prowling the pools of migrant laborers that gather in towns everywhere, Song and Tang entice an unsuspecting yokel into accompanying them to one of the many privately owned — and notoriously unregulated — mines that dot the countryside. Song a...