Avaliações do Metacritic

A gorgeously shot, ambitious epic.

As atmospheric and moody as a film noir, the stylish, sometimes perplexing Purple Butterfly is a remarkable period piece, evoking the bustling, dense and increasingly dangerous Shanghai of the '30s

Mr. Lou synthesizes a wide range of styles and influences - from "Casablanca" to Wong Kar-wai - resulting in a movie that, for all its haunting strangeness, seems curiously familiar.

Hectic, lyrical, swooningly romantic and almost unwatchably brutal, Purple Butterfly deploys a modern Asian gangster-movie aesthetic to tell a love story of Shakespearean dimensions.

Director Lou Ye, who gave us the lilting "Suzhou River," doesn't care much for dialogue. He lets Wang Yu's pulsating camerawork do the talking.

Too often, Purple Butterfly is as impenetrable as Zhang's placid, obdurate beauty.

Rich with emotional turmoil and searing beauty, but it could have used a little more time in the editing room to make sense of it all.

An often remarkable, often infuriating lateral spin on genre material that desperately needs another sesh at the editing table.

The effect is hypnotically disorienting, but the less familiar you are with this period in 20th-century Chinese history, the easier it is to get hopelessly lost in the tangle of personal and political loyalties and betrayals.

Ye bites off substantially more than he can chew.