Summer Palace Reviews
June 17, 2013
The supporting cast is uniformly fine and excels at creating an emotional spectrum appropriate to the wildly variegated tonalities of Summer Palace's very realistic milieu.
November 18, 2011
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
November 17, 2011
Original Score: 3/5
September 7, 2011
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
March 21, 2008
Though made in 2006, its American release could not have been better timed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
February 29, 2008
Search out this vivid film in a theater. Don't let the sacrifices he [Director Lou Ye] made be in vain.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
January 18, 2008
I still must recommend Summer Palace, especially for the remarkably strong performance by Hao Lei as Yu Hong, the daughter of a shopkeeper in the provinces.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
January 18, 2008
Lou Ye's Summer Palace examines youthful idealism and its unhappy aftermath.
Original Score: 3.5/5
January 17, 2008
In Yu Hong (Hao Lei), the film also has a vibrant heroine.
Original Score: 3/4
January 15, 2008
Combines flashes of insight and scintillating cinematography -- grainy, fumbling, light-blinded -- with stretches of inscrutable mediocrity.
January 14, 2008
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.
January 11, 2008
With 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
October 10, 2006
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
May 18, 2006
An occasionally involving but way over-stretched tapestry.
May 18, 2006
Lou has created a remarkable portrait of a headstrong woman and a generation of Chinese that still finds itself at a crossroads in that country's history.