It benefits from a riveting performance by newcomer Hao, but the whole is sadly unsatisfying.
Comment
03/13/08
Summer Palace (2008)
65
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:26
Fresh:17
Rotten:9
Average Rating:6.1/10
Consensus: Though it suffers from excessive length and inconsistent pacing, Summer Palace is held aloft by Hao Lei's riveting performance.
Theatrical Release:Jan 18, 2008 Limited
Synopsis: China, 1989 Two young lovers play out their complex, erotic, love/hate relationship against a volatile backdrop of political unrest. Beautiful Yu Hong leaves her village, her family and her... [More]
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Reviews for Summer Palace
Now I don't mind movies that have the pace of a snail, but nothing freakin' happens in this movie. Nothing!
07/22/08
It falls apart just when it was starting to pull itself together.
03/12/08
The film becomes less and less involving as it spins out its excessive 140-minute running time.
01/22/08
An occasionally involving but way over-stretched tapestry.
05/18/06
Way too long for something with this little content.
09/14/06
Truth be told, Summer Palace feels more like an artier St. Elmo’s Fire than anything else.
01/17/08
Combines flashes of insight and scintillating cinematography -- grainy, fumbling, light-blinded -- with stretches of inscrutable mediocrity.
01/15/08
Ye's back-and-forth storytelling insinuates that the lives of Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are incomplete without each other, but because their young love was never convincing in the first place, the bittersweet conclusion rings hollow.
01/11/08
Lou Ye's Summer Palace examines youthful idealism and its unhappy aftermath.
01/18/08
Top CriticMopey-soapy as it sometimes gets, though, this is intelligent, passionate stuff.
02/29/08
The saying goes "There's a time and a place for everything, and it's called college." Who knew that included actually caring about something?
03/10/08
This is just the sort of film the festival should be bringing to town, because it's unlikely to show up anywhere else. Rambling and intimate, it plays like the diary of a young woman who makes many, many mistakes, most of them with men.
04/19/07
In truth, I’ve never seen so much lovemaking in an aboveground film, but the revelation, and great triumph, of Lou’s work is that these scenes are never pornographic -- that is, never separated from emotion.
01/14/08
Top CriticWith Summer Palace, Lou Ye speaks more plainly in his own voice, tired at last of affecting Wong Kar Wai's florid style of filmmaking, though he is still treading the Wongian terrain of lovelorn melodrama.
01/11/08
Set against the tumultuous year of 1989, this vividly colorful melodrama of Chinese youth's sex and politics links the initimate and personal with the broader social forces in intriguing, fascinating ways.
01/28/08
A torrid sexual romance between two students at Beijing University set against the backdrop of changes simmering in China in 1989.
01/15/08
Though made in 2006, its American release could not have been better timed.
03/21/08
It's one of the more memorable films in years.
08/25/07
Despite its problems, Summer Palace is still a good film thanks to [its] sweep-away moments.
01/24/08
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