What Farewell My Concubine is, most clearly, immediately, and strikingly, is staggeringly beautiful.

Full Review | Aug 20, 2024

A tale in which gender roles and sexuality clash in a world built on tradition and artifice, becoming intertwined with the ever-shifting march of time that leaves little time for personal truth.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 5, 2024

Chen Kaige offers a definitive vision of what it looks, sounds, and feels like to realize that the personal is always political.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2024

It remains a bravura act of filmmaking. ... The restoration of Farewell My Concubine for this release is among the finest I've seen in the Criterion Collection.

Full Review | Jul 22, 2024

Even if you’ve seen the movie, you’ve never seen it like this.

Full Review | Nov 5, 2023

One of the greatest films I've ever seen.

Full Review | Oct 21, 2023

A movie whose decades-spanning chronicle of a Peking opera troupe pushed the envelope in several ways...

Full Review | Oct 3, 2023

As both a monumental piece of Chinese cinematic history and a lasting tribute to the special brilliance of its star, Farewell My Concubine is an essential viewing experience.

Full Review | Sep 28, 2023

Farewell My Concubine is a tragic and poignant story in every sense of the world.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Sep 26, 2023

The movie is more stunning than ever, a daring blend of history and personal storytelling with one of the most striking performances of its era from Leslie Cheung.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 21, 2023

One of the greatest cinematic works China has ever given the world.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 20, 2023

A complex examination of both China's political history and sexual identity. It's also about art.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2023

An unhurried journey on the great tide of modern Chinese history, this gorgeous, intoxicating epic is confident enough of its visual and narrative power not to rush the telling.

Full Review | May 9, 2023

It is [Chen's] controlled, poetic, even visionary use of his medium that gives the film power and meaning.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | May 2, 2023

Thoughtfully considered and gorgeously rendered in a production worthy of Lean, Chen's film marks the intersection between life and art, politics and performance, the intimate and the epic.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 24, 2022

The aspirations of art pitted against the never-ending flux of politics. That is the underlying conflict driving Farewell My Concubine.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 6, 2022

Farewell my Concubine is one of the definite world cinema masterpieces, a must-watch for every cinema fan.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2020

This epic work by Chen Kaige becomes the stuff of instant: the creation of a prophet not honored in his own country, and cruelly cut for commercial puposes here in the Land of the Free.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2018

For all its spectacle and drama, the film can feel more like tourism than tragedy.

Full Review | Dec 7, 2017

Part history lesson, part love story, and part musical, here is a visually and thematically stunning epic from China that you will not forget.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Nov 12, 2015