Due to a high volume of active users and service overload, we had to decrease the quality of video streaming. Premium users remains with the highest video quality available. Sorry for the inconvinience it may cause. Donate to keep project running.
Do you have a video playback issues?
Please disable AdBlocker in your browser for our website.
The film depicts the life of Pu Yi (John Lone), the last emperor of China, from his ascent to the throne as a small boy to his imprisonment and political rehabilitation by the Communist Party of China.
It is a hesitant, conservative approach that yields great elegance and a rhythm that carries the viewer along. Yet the film is haunted by a sense of opportunities not taken, of an artist deliberately reining in his artistry.
It is the grandeur of the boy king and his unreal opulent world that is best remembered, splendid and isolated, and at last, because of its loneliness, sad.
At last a real, thought-provoking, eyeball-popping movie epic.
January 07, 2014
Philadelphia Daily News
Even though its ambitions sometimes get the better of it, the film succeeds often enough to make us grateful that, even in our MTV age, a director like Bertolucci is still willing to get on the mat and grapple with Personality and History.
If there is such a thing as voluptuous detachment, Bertolucci and John Lone have found it. Lone's achievement in his absorbing account of Pu Yi is to place him at a distance and yet make his plight totally involving.
There's probably a truly great movie in the story of Pu Yi, but The Last Emperor is not that movie. Still, what director Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) has accomplished here is both ambitious and impressive.