1911

Chan has not injected any of his playful charm or physical virtuosity into Wang Xingdong's and Chen Baoguang's insipid, poorly structured screenplay. Full Review

This drama, as traditional as its subject was epochal, is earnest and studious to a fault. Rarely has a film about upheaval felt more like a textbook. Full Review

Resulting mish-mash of exposition and speechifying opts to summarize rather than dramatize; one spends nearly as much time reading indigestible lumps of onscreen text as one does listening to the often distractingly post-dubbed dialogue. Full Review

It swoops, it pans, it noses around. The camerawork is almost as agitated as the editing. The directors seem to be trying to compensate for all the speechifying with as much random motion as possible. Full Review

If the success of epic storytelling were determined by the sheer number of unnecessary on-screen name tags, 1911 would be a masterpiece. But the small matters of characterization, audience identification, and scene-making are entirely absent here. Full Review