Fleeing by Night

An exquisite love story directed with admirable subtlety and sensitivity.

If this all sounds masochistic, it most certainly is. But the filmmakers have rendered it with such grace and subtlety that the spectacle of three very intelligent people ruining each other's lives becomes irresistibly romantic.

The many opera scenes are so beautifully mounted, they make up for the moments when the story veers toward melodrama.

That decade-spanning finale allows the three leads to age onscreen and demonstrate their impressive range, particularly Liu.

The story is hardly original, but this well-directed Taiwanese drama paints an intermittently vivid portrait of life on the Chinese mainland in the 1930s era.

An overwrought Taiwanese soaper.

This dreadfully earnest inversion of the "Concubine" love triangle eschews the previous film's historical panorama and roiling pathos for bug-eyed mugging and gay-niche condescension.