The Last Emperor 1987

Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune: It is a hesitant, conservative approach that yields great elegance and a rhythm that carries the viewer along. Yet the film is haunted by a sense of opportunities not taken, of an artist deliberately reining in his artistry. Read more

Sheila Benson, Los Angeles Times: As coolly lavish an epic as we may ever see. Read more

Jay Boyar, Orlando Sentinel: There's probably a truly great movie in the story of Pu Yi, but The Last Emperor is not that movie. Still, what director Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) has accomplished here is both ambitious and impressive. Read more

Desmond Ryan, Philadelphia Inquirer: If there is such a thing as voluptuous detachment, Bertolucci and John Lone have found it. Lone's achievement in his absorbing account of Pu Yi is to place him at a distance and yet make his plight totally involving. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: 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. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: The expanse of time is saturated with an expanse of visual beauty that feels absolutely right for the story. Read more

Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News: As pure spectacle, "The Last Emperor" is a spellbinding peek behind the gate of a lost world. Read more

Vincent Canby, New York Times: The Last Emperor is like an elegant travel brochure. It piques the curiosity. One wants to go. Ultimately it's a let-down. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: 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. Read more

Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine: It works astonishingly well. Read more

Brian Case, Time Out: John Lone is superb as the sad mediocrity; and if spectacle finally triumphs over sympathy, it is not without a decent struggle. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Variety: Constantly absorbing and tremendously interesting. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post: A remarkable achievement. Read more

Rita Kempley, Washington Post: We need more than elegant parallels and lavish production values. We need tension, characterization, drama. Read more