Critic Reviews
79
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
17(89%)
mixed
2(11%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 19 Critic Reviews
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Metascore
Metascore
100
Working with Western funding and Western camera technology for the first time, Yimou also has created the most visually striking of recent Chinese films to reach this country. [15 Mar 1991, p.25]
90
The film uses voyeurism, knowing exposure turns desire into a visual battleground. To look is to risk punishment; to be seen is to invite destruction.
89
Ju Dou is a juicy and stylish potboiler that keeps the pilots turned on full blast.
88
The film appealed to me for two reasons. First, because of its unabashed, lurid melodrama, in which the days are filled with scheming and the nights with passion and violence. Second, because of its visual beauty.
88
Ju Dou is far richer and more jolting than "The Postman Always Rings Twice," which it suggests. When it comes to film noir entrapment, we have nothing on the Chinese. [05 Sep 1990, p.63p]
88
Even if it were not physically beautiful -- and Ju Dou is as enthralling to look at as any Chinese film the festival has shown -- it would hold you: Its love story is as compelling as its politics, though not nearly so tragic. [05 Feb 1991, p.D8]
88
Ju Dou has an attention to detail, the “mise en scene” of set dressing and filming of an ancient, human-and-animal-powered dye works, a world of folk medicine, village gossip, rites and traditions, that raised the bar for the period pieces of Zhang and Chen, their contemporaries and the Chinese filmmakers to follow. And that attention to detail reminds us that nothing is on screen by accident.
88
A beautifully directed melodrama similar to Hollywood pictures of the golden era. [22 Dec 1991, p.5C]
83
The gifted Zhang Yi-mou directed this gripping and colorful drama, which mingles beauty and perversity in equal proportions. [15 Mar 1991, p.12]
80
The plot [from the novella Fuxi fuxi by Liu Heng] has all the elements of a Hollywood melodrama of the ’40s (both The Postman Always Rings Twice and Leave Her to Heaven come to mind), and the picture is, indeed, as deliriously enjoyable as it sounds, but with the added dimension of age-old tradition forcing the characters into roles they don’t want to play.
