Reception
Though perhaps less well known than some of Zhang Yimou's more celebrated films (notably Ju Dou, To Live and Raise the Red Lantern), Shanghai Triad was nevertheless generally praised by critics upon its release, with an 85% "fresh" rating on the review-database, Rotten Tomatoes. With its headline position in the New York Film Festival, The New York Times' critic Janet Maslin opened her review that despite the cliched genre of the "gangster film," Shanghai Triad nevertheless "movingly affirms the magnitude of storytelling power." Derek Elley of the entertainment magazine Variety similarly found the film to be an achievement, particularly in how it played with genre conventions, calling the film a "stylized but gripping portrait of mob power play and lifestyles in 1930 Shanghai." Roger Ebert, however, provided a counterpoint to the film's praise, arguing that the choice of the boy as the film's main protagonist ultimately hurt the film, and that Shanghai Triad was probably "the last, and ... certainly the least, of the collaborations between the Chinese director Zhang Yimou and the gifted actress Gong Li" (though Gong would again work with Zhang in 2006's Curse of the Golden Flower). Even Ebert however, conceded that the film's technical credits were well done, calling Zhang one of the "best visual stylists of current cinema."
Read more about this topic: Shanghai Triad
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)