The Last Emperor: Critic Reviews

The Last Emperor is like an elegant travel brochure. It piques the curiosity. One wants to go. Ultimately it's a let-down.

There's no doubting its spectacular richness and heartfelt, deeply satisfying storytelling.

A remarkable achievement.

We need more than elegant parallels and lavish production values. We need tension, characterization, drama.

Everything involving the life of Pu Yi was a waste. Everything except one thing: the notion that a single human life could have infinite value.

It's a tribute to the film's intelligence and its feeling for dialectics that it views both the Forbidden City and the detention center as prisons, and that when Pu Yi winds up as a gardener there's a sense of gain as well as loss.

Constantly absorbing and tremendously interesting.

It works astonishingly well.

That rare breed of film that is both pure Oscar bait and a thoroughly compelling work.

Works the brain in two-part harmony: the melody skids effortlessly across the historical timeline of the Ching dynasty, China's last, and the harmony part is all aesthetic appeal... [Blu-ray]

Bernardo Bertolucci's cinematic biography of Emperor Pu Yi is an astonishing, ravishing and smashing film... And it's a glorious production which won 9 Oscars - that's every major category for which it is eligible

Visually splendid epic on the last Manchu imperial ruler of China.

We never question the integrity of the historical moment in the film, but we do question our patience.

Storaro's photography, Scarfiotti's designs and the locations seduce us into this leisurely odyssey covering 50 years from Emperor Pu Yi's accession aged three to his end.

Though boasting stunning photography by Vittorio Storaro (who shot in the Forbidden City), Bertolucci's beautifully crafted saga suffers from episodic text, incoherent story, and lack of truly epic hero at its center.

An involving look at the life of an emperor forced to give up all that he knew only to realize he never had everything he wanted.

John Lone is superb as the sad mediocrity; and if spectacle finally triumphs over sympathy, it is not without a decent struggle.

Mesmerizing, Oscar-winning, fate-filled journey to a vanished time and place.

The small screen doesn't quite do justice to the rich visuals but with an incredible story and fine performances, it is still a compulsive and moving epic.