Click here to copy URL

Farewell My Concubine

Ba wang bie ji (Farewell My Concubine)

1993

Chen Kaige

Gong Li, Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, Lu Qi ...

7.3

7,058

Drama "Farewell, My Concubine" is a movie with two parallel, intertwined stories. It is the story of two performers in the Beijing Opera, stage brothers, and the woman who comes between them. At the same time, it attempts to do no less than squeeze the entire political history of China in the twentieth century into a three-hour time-frame.

	Author	Review
United States	Vincent Canby The New York Times	"One of those very rare film spectacles that deliver just about everything the ads are likely to promise (...) The movie is full of memorable scenes (...) Leslie Cheung is exceptionally good"	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"The film flows with such urgency that all its connections seem logical. And it is filmed with such visual splendor that possible objections are swept aside (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United Kingdom	Phillipa Bloom Empire	"A fascinating portrait of China, both beguiling and tragic to behold (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times	"This gorgeous, intoxicating epic is confident enough of its visual and narrative power not to rush the telling"	POS
United States	James Berardinelli ReelViews	"One of the year's true masterpieces (...) A motion picture experience that few will soon forget after leaving the theater (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"[It] is worth seeing largely for its pizzazz: riveting performances, epic sweep and storytelling, bold and melodramatic use of color, and a capacity to generalize suggestively about large historical events"	POS
United States	Hal Hinson The Washington Post	"It's a lovely film, but a little inert. It reaches its high point with glorious close-ups of the children. From there, it's all downhill."	NEU
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	"Dramatizing totalitarian oppression is hardly novel, but 'Farewell My Concubine' may be the first film to capture the unique spiritual cruelty of a regime in which beauty itself had become a crime."	POS
United States	David Ansen Newsweek	"Chen Kaige's ravishing epic 'Farewell My Concubine' should be the movie that opens American eyes to the new wonders of Chinese cinema"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.