One might quibble with the CGI battle sequences ..., but that's a small complaint. As long as [the film] concentrates on the scheming royals in their lush and lavish settings, it soars.
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01/11/07
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Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)
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Reviews Counted:117
Fresh:76
Rotten:41
Average Rating:6.4/10
Consensus: Melodrama, swordplay, and CG armies -- fans of martial arts epic will get what they bargain for, though the baroque art direction can be both mesmerizing and exhaustively excessive.
Runtime: 1 hr 54 mins
Genre: Action/Adventure
Theatrical Release:Dec 21, 2006 Limited
Box Office: $6,466,942
Synopsis: In 2004, Zhang Yimou caused a sensation with his astonishing HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and his CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER is yet another dazzling, visually stunning film. Calling again upon the... [More]
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Reviews for Curse of the Golden Flower
Just as the emperor’s own misrule is shrouded in ceremony, so too is the rather emotionally insignificant melodrama at the center of Curse of the Golden Flower, given only minimal cover from scrutiny by Zhang’s visual virtuosity.
01/11/07
Curse's gorgeous scenes are draped in silk and brocade, gold and jade -- literally, the walls and floors and ceilings. Battle scenes are painstakingly bloody.
01/11/07
Zhang does a marvelous job at contrasting the tactile sumptuousness of the sets with the venomous, venal brutality that occurs within their walls.
01/11/07
Basically, the movie is soap opera done on a grand opera scale -- more Dynasty than Later Tang Dynasty. The immensity of Zhang's vision is eyepopping. Imagine several football fields worth of shimmering golden chrysanthemums.
01/11/07
Top CriticTheatrical drama becomes largescale cinema. It's a spectacular take on family ties that bind so tight they're cutting off circulation.
01/11/07
Some may be turned off by how busy the film is, rushing from one set piece to the next without catching a breath.There's no time to stop and sniff a golden flower.
01/11/07
These characters have enough conflicting relational issues to fill about a year on a daily soap; it's messy and passionate, murderous and lusty.
01/10/07
It's operatic in its feeling and there’s a lot going on here. And there’s murders and betrayals, and affairs that are illicit, and women on horse-back and great fight scenes.
01/08/07
Top Critic[Y]es to opulence, yes to passion, yes to political murder and courtly intrigue and illicit sex and all that. But no... to histrionics overblown on a nuclear scale and ludicrousness that blots out the sun...
01/06/07
Curse of the Golden Flower is a watchable soap opera, but its marching-band martial-arts scenes are little more than weakly staged retreads of the ones in Zhang's Hero.
01/03/07
Top Critic...a fascinating tale of palace intrigue and themachinations of power play.
12/31/06
While the film looks beautiful and the cinematography and staging by Xiaoding Zhao is as magnificent as ever, Curse of the Golden Flower is the weakest of the class (like being the worst student at Yale).
12/31/06
...A spectacle for the eyes and for the soul.
12/29/06
Curse of the Golden Flower may be one of Zhang's most erratic, even to major fans, but it still manages to also be a successful marriage of the storytelling that he built his career on and the large scale epics he's making now.
12/28/06
Director Zhang Yimou is aiming for glorious visual, kinetic and emotional overload, and he delivers the goods.
12/28/06
The morbid grandiosity of Curse of the Golden Flower is its own distinctive accomplishment, another remarkable chapter in the career of Asia's most important living filmmaker.
12/28/06
Top CriticA visually sumptuous action drama by Zhang Yimou, who proves himself to be the Busby Berkeley of our times.
12/26/06
Eye-popping. One of the year's most spectacularly visual treats. It has wide-screen images that are beyond astounding.
12/22/06
Curse of the Golden Flower is a triumph of set dressing, cinematography and costuming. Now if only it were compelling.
12/22/06
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