Moreso than most historical epics, we feel the real pull of history and the whiplash of violent social change, but most of all the steady march of life.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 3, 2024

This is no dull, dusty biopic that’s forced to solely fall back on its good looks.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 20, 2024

There's a fascinating story to be told about Puyi and what he went through during this turbulent period of China's history, but in the end, even with all of its flourishes, The Last Emperor isn't quite able to get to the heart of it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2024

Bertolucci makes pretty pictorial music, but two hours and forty-six minutes is a long time for a movie to dance. Maybe it wouldn't be if his sense of rhythm hadn't become erratic.

| Sep 15, 2023

The Last Emperor is a gorgeously shot, decade-spanning biopic with an international cast and an incredible propensity to recreate the Qing Dynasty China era. It’s one of those films I admire more each time I view it.

| Jun 14, 2023

A beautiful portrait of a young man who is burdened from the beginning from a country he knows nothing of as radical change sweeps up around him.

| Mar 8, 2023

An absolute odyssey of a film, it is as intriguing visually as it is storywise.

| Feb 26, 2023

Yet there’s also a great sadness in the film, as it tracks Puyi, the emperor of the title (played by four actors at different ages), through a state of permanent lifelong imprisonment, from gilded cage to Red Army capture.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 17, 2023

When this film really sings, it's as if Bertolucci had tapped the wellspring of cinema and, ecstatic, discovered the eroticism at its essence.

| Aug 8, 2022

A spectacle that evokes respect and even admiration rather than genuine movie-movie affection.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 8, 2022

The end of this near-masterpiece leaves one uneasy. It's hard to accept that Bertolucci, with his exhilarated sense of beauty, his love of pleasure, could accept the graying of China for any reason.

| Aug 2, 2022

A fabulous facsimile of a movie, a frosting without a cake.

| Aug 2, 2022

The director and his screenwriter Mark Peploe have included but simplified a lot of complexities in this mammoth detailing of nearly 60 years of 20th-century Chinese history without sacrificing entertainment value.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 2, 2022

The Last Emperor [is] one of the most beautiful-looking films ever made. Yet the style is so chill and remote its very beauty keeps the audience at a distance. This is a movie waiting for an idea, or passion, to bring it fully to life.

| Aug 2, 2022

If at times The Last Emperor is closer to DeMille than Dostoevsky, and its parts greater than the whole, when was the last time a pageant offered such splendors?

| Aug 2, 2022

The result is a tendency to inertness that might not have mattered in a film of smaller scale... Yet the film gets by on the oddity of its story, the quality of the acting, and its good looks.

| Aug 2, 2022

Bertolucci's camera magnificently captures the scene. His script, written with Mark Peploe, is less successful.

| Aug 2, 2022

The movie, however, belongs to John Lone. Like all great actors, he's a chameleon, and his occasional nobility as the Emperor is brilliantly, comically, contrasted with his Westernization as a playboy.

| Aug 2, 2022

Like Shakespeare's Richard II, Bernardo Bertolucci's lush epic The Last Emperor is, in a sense, a meditation on monarchy as a sumptuous swan song.

| Aug 2, 2022

It offers more striking panoramas than anything in the old costume epics of the 1950s. But The Last Emperor is inert; the pictures, while lovely, don't move.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 2, 2022