Bertolucci makes pretty pictorial music, but two hours and forty-six minutes is a long time for a movie to dance. Maybe it wouldn't be if his sense of rhythm hadn't become erratic.

Full Review | Sep 15, 2023

The Last Emperor is a gorgeously shot, decade-spanning biopic with an international cast and an incredible propensity to recreate the Qing Dynasty China era. It’s one of those films I admire more each time I view it.

Full Review | Jun 14, 2023

A beautiful portrait of a young man who is burdened from the beginning from a country he knows nothing of as radical change sweeps up around him.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2023

An absolute odyssey of a film, it is as intriguing visually as it is storywise.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2023

Yet there’s also a great sadness in the film, as it tracks Puyi, the emperor of the title (played by four actors at different ages), through a state of permanent lifelong imprisonment, from gilded cage to Red Army capture.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 17, 2023

When this film really sings, it's as if Bertolucci had tapped the wellspring of cinema and, ecstatic, discovered the eroticism at its essence.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2022

A spectacle that evokes respect and even admiration rather than genuine movie-movie affection.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 8, 2022

The end of this near-masterpiece leaves one uneasy. It's hard to accept that Bertolucci, with his exhilarated sense of beauty, his love of pleasure, could accept the graying of China for any reason.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

A fabulous facsimile of a movie, a frosting without a cake.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

The director and his screenwriter Mark Peploe have included but simplified a lot of complexities in this mammoth detailing of nearly 60 years of 20th-century Chinese history without sacrificing entertainment value.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 2, 2022

The Last Emperor [is] one of the most beautiful-looking films ever made. Yet the style is so chill and remote its very beauty keeps the audience at a distance. This is a movie waiting for an idea, or passion, to bring it fully to life.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

If at times The Last Emperor is closer to DeMille than Dostoevsky, and its parts greater than the whole, when was the last time a pageant offered such splendors?

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

The result is a tendency to inertness that might not have mattered in a film of smaller scale... Yet the film gets by on the oddity of its story, the quality of the acting, and its good looks.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

Bertolucci's camera magnificently captures the scene. His script, written with Mark Peploe, is less successful.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

The movie, however, belongs to John Lone. Like all great actors, he's a chameleon, and his occasional nobility as the Emperor is brilliantly, comically, contrasted with his Westernization as a playboy.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

Like Shakespeare's Richard II, Bernardo Bertolucci's lush epic The Last Emperor is, in a sense, a meditation on monarchy as a sumptuous swan song.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

It offers more striking panoramas than anything in the old costume epics of the 1950s. But The Last Emperor is inert; the pictures, while lovely, don't move.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 2, 2022

Constructed on such a scale that it seems to cry out for heroic action, it is instead a chronicle of delusion and debauchery, of ennui and lethargy. But that's not to say the film is bad; in its way, it's brilliant, being unsentimental and majestic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 2, 2022

It is an epic masterpiece, one of the truly great films of our time.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

[The Last Emperor] has a leisurely, rocking pace over 2 hours and 46 minutes. If you fight it, you won't enjoy the trip. But if you relax and allow it to carry you -- it'll take you places you've never

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022