Aches with melancholy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 11, 2023

It's a wise, moving love story--marred only by a rather arbitrary twist of fate at the end--played out with an emotional honesty that would be unusual and adventurous in any language.

| Mar 31, 2008

Hu and Liu offer natural, matter-of-fact performances that glint with sorrow, longing and love.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 16, 2003

The movie is gorgeously made, but it is also somewhat shallow and art-conscious.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 17, 2002

It's probably worth catching solely on its visual merits. If only it had the story to match.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 4, 2002

Assured, vital and well wrought, the film is, arguably, the most accomplished work to date from Hong Kong's versatile Stanley Kwan.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2002

In the end, we are left with something like two ships passing in the night rather than any insights into gay love, Chinese society or the price one pays for being dishonest.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 16, 2002

There is much that is touching in the affair of Lan Yu and Handong.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2002

While it is welcome to see a Chinese film depict a homosexual relationship in a mature and frank fashion, Lan Yu never catches dramatic fire.

Full Review | Jul 29, 2002

Kwan makes the mix-and- match metaphors intriguing, while lulling us into torpor with his cultivated allergy to action.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 26, 2002

Lan Yu is at times too restrained, yet there are moments it captures the erotics of intimacy in a way that makes most American love stories look downright unfree.

| Original Score: B | Jul 26, 2002

Deserves high marks for political courage but barely gets by on its artistic merits.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 26, 2002

Like a less dizzily gorgeous companion to Mr. Wong's In the Mood for Love -- very much a Hong Kong movie despite its mainland setting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2002

Kwan is a master of shadow, quietude, and room noise, and Lan Yu is a disarmingly lived-in movie.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2002

Pulpy and mesmerizing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 3, 2002