The supporting cast is uniformly fine and excels at creating an emotional spectrum appropriate to the wildly variegated tonalities of Summer Palace's very realistic milieu.

| Jun 17, 2013

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

| Original Score: B- | Sep 7, 2011

Though made in 2006, its American release could not have been better timed.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 21, 2008

Search out this vivid film in a theater. Don't let the sacrifices he [Director Lou Ye] made be in vain.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 29, 2008

I still must recommend Summer Palace, especially for the remarkably strong performance by Hao Lei as Yu Hong, the daughter of a shopkeeper in the provinces.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2008

Lou Ye's Summer Palace examines youthful idealism and its unhappy aftermath.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 18, 2008

In Yu Hong (Hao Lei), the film also has a vibrant heroine.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 17, 2008

Combines flashes of insight and scintillating cinematography -- grainy, fumbling, light-blinded -- with stretches of inscrutable mediocrity.

| Jan 15, 2008

In truth, I've never seen so much lovemaking in an aboveground film, but the revelation, and great triumph, of Lou's work is that these scenes are never pornographic -- that is, never separated from emotion.

| Jan 14, 2008

With Summer Palace, Lou Ye speaks more plainly in his own voice, tired at last of affecting Wong Kar Wai's florid style of filmmaking, though he is still treading the Wongian terrain of lovelorn melodrama.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 11, 2008

| Original Score: B- | Oct 10, 2006

An occasionally involving but way over-stretched tapestry.

| May 18, 2006

Lou has created a remarkable portrait of a headstrong woman and a generation of Chinese that still finds itself at a crossroads in that country's history.

Full Review | May 18, 2006