One Second is as much a tribute to the struggles of a man whose life has stolen from him as it is to a bygone way of looking at movies.
Zhang viscerally unites musical and action forms, underscoring their similarity as celebrations of movement.
This is an often beautiful film, unmistakably the work of a great director but also a clearly compromised one.
This is a film in which everyone’s dreams are irrevocably broken, the pieces too small to grasp, let alone pick up.
Berlinale, the most smoothly run of all major festivals, is a pleasure for the Anglophone.
The film has too many weak, unconnected strands, too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere.
When did Zhang Yimou start acting like Jean-Pierre Jeunet?
Come for the colors, stay for Gong Li's performance.
Zhang simply tells a story itching with melodrama and socio-historical resonance in as sober and still a voice as he can muster.
Zhang Yimou moves ever closer to grand opera with Curse of the Golden Flower.
Holding the camera on the aged face of the great Japanese actor Ken Takakura speaks volumes.
Certainly, these films do appear to be bridging some form of cultural gap.
The extras are scarce but Quentin Tarantino's, err, Zhang Yimou's Hero gets the video/audio treatment it finally deserves.
In Zhang Yimou’s orgiastic film, love isn’t so much a fabulous extension of history as it is a colorful off-shoot.
Hero is elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, and female-empowering.