Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)

Curse of the Golden Flower

Gong Li plus Chow Yun Fat sounds like some kind of superstar pairing, all right. Too bad it comes on the downslope of a precipitous decline in the watchability of director Zhang Yimou’s work. Gong is the Empress and Chow her Emperor in this grand soap-opera pageant of color and sound that seems born more from a desire to see how closely Chinese cinema can hew to the high digital standard set by the Lord of the Rings movies than by any honest attempt at storytelling on a human scale.

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