Farewell My Concubine

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

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.

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.

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

With stunning set pieces and the dramatic backdrop of the revolution, Kaige captures perfectly the relationship between the two boys.

The scenes in the Peking Opera School, where boys are caned for doing wrong or right, are no less horrifying than the later tableaus of public humiliation at the hands of the Maoists.

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

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.

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.

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