Critic Reviews

• Aaron Hillis, Village Voice

  The film plays like the work of a fifth-generation Chinese hack faking a lavish Hollywood saga on an indie budget.

• V.A. Musetto, New York Post

  So beautifully filmed, it is especially sad that the script doesn't measure up.

• Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

  Overwritten dialogue is matched by melodramatic performances.

• Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

  Ann Hu's Beauty Remains is distinguished by a ghostly, intimate atmosphere that will linger with you long after the plot has faded.

• Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Times

  A delicate figurine of a movie, Beauty Remains is an account of a tragic love triangle set in China in 1948, just before the Communists won the civil war.

• Frank Lovece, Film Journal International

  The movie's tapestry and matrix of confused emotions is as breathtaking as the period fashions and as breathless as, well, Breathless.

• Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

  A tepid and stilted Chinese soap opera about two sisters and their uneasy relationship.

• Ken Fox, TV Guide's Movie Guide

  Beautifully art directed, costumed and shot (by Scott Kevan, who brought the same to exotic haze to the interiors of Secretary), the whole thing feels like a living, breathing tableaux vivant from a China that is about to abruptly disappear.

• Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

  Life is a stage in the film%u2014a feeling confirmed by the final shot, in which the characters arrange furniture and pose for the audience, waiting for a standing ovation that will never come.

• Prairie Miller, WBAI Web Radio

  A luminous, epic dreamscape, reimagining a decaying lost paradise from whose destructive core a buoyant redemptive unshackled political consciousness and redefined, aroused sisterhood rise from the ashes of repressive patriarchy.

Read all 10 critic reviews