On the whole, you'd be better off catching a couple of hours of 'Days of Our Lives.'

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 4, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 6, 2005

The only importance anyone is likely to associate with this overblown melodrama is self-importance.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 17, 2005

Melancholy and plodding.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 17, 2002

You have to wonder why this film has been targeted at American audiences at all.

| Original Score: 55/100 | Feb 8, 2002

In many ways, this is the East Asian equivalent of the old Europudding productions, where international players have created something that's more cacaphonous than melodious.

| Jun 11, 2001

Suffers from predictable plotting that occasionally heats to a soap-opera boil.

| May 23, 2001

The backdrop of exotic pagodas and wartime woe isn't nearly potent enough to buoy the feeble drama that plays out in the foreground.

Full Review | May 17, 2001

Even with the brilliant, Oscar-nominated Willem DaFoe in its cast, this movie amounts to nothing more than a waste of two hours.

| May 11, 2001

Despite solid performances and handsome production values, the picture ultimately feels like secondhand goods that have been refurbished for North American consumption.

Full Review | May 11, 2001

An instant antique.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 4, 2001

Suggests a sudsy version of The King and I without forceful personalities or fancy production numbers.

| Original Score: 1/5 | May 4, 2001

Gets bogged down in enough 'event' to choke a miniseries.

| May 4, 2001

A whole lot of bombast and phony exaltation in the name of entertaining enrichment.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 4, 2001

Viewers have to wade through many embarrassing moments (and performances).

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | May 4, 2001

All the peripheral drama in the world can't generate interest in a film with so little sense of melodramatic proportion.

| May 4, 2001

Its clumsiness turns it, against its best intentions, into half-baked operatic kitsch.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 4, 2001

Loaded with ... scenery-chewing melodrama, cornball pidgin dialogue and syrupy music.

Full Review | May 4, 2001

Plays as little more than a dated potboiler for all its backdrop of impending chaos and wrenching change.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 4, 2001

It's stiff and soggy at the same time, and Dafoe's priest-as-Superman performance is unintentionally funny.

| May 4, 2001