'Shadow,' a darkly hued stunner

Director Zhang Yimou's latest stands as a foray into intrigue, warfare, martial arts and cinema aesthetics.

It's arguable that Zhang Yimou, who made his reputation as part of China’s vaunted fifth generation of filmmakers, never has equaled the achievement of some of his early work: movies such as Red Sorghum (1987) Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991).

A series of smaller, less formally structured movies such as To Live followed Zhang's international breakthrough. Then, he shifted gears. In 2002, he released Hero, a martial arts spectacle. Now comes Shadow, Zhang's latest costume/martial arts drama, a darkly hued epic in which heightened moments of intrigue play against fight sequences that are vivid, memorable and inventive.

Some rightly have seen the movie as a return to form for Zhang after 2016's deeply miscalculated The Great Wall, which starred Matt Damon as a white warrior battling monsters on (what else?) The Great Wall.

Set during China's Three Kingdoms period, Shadow pits rival factions in a battle to control a city that will cement the unity of the Kingdom of Pei. An insufferably egotistical and apparently incompetent leader, the king of Pei (Zheng Kai) wants peace at any price. He refuses to engage the other side in combat, even after its leader insults the king’s sister (Xiaotong Guan) by proposing that she become a concubine for his son.

Such is the story’s framework, but the spine of the tale involves the king’s main warrior, Commander Yu (Chao Deng). Gravely wounded in a battle that precedes the movie, the Commander wants to fight the foe for possession of the city of Jing. But — and here’s the plot’s main twist — the Commander is a doppelganger, a peasant selected by the real Commander who has been too weakened by battle wounds to carry on. Chao plays both roles.

The ruse forces Yu to feign a relationship with the Commander's beautiful wife (Sun Li), a woman known for playing zither duets with her husband. Not surprisingly, the double begins to fall for the Commander's wife, a woman he tries to keep at a distance.

Seasoned with high-toned melodrama and a purposefully exaggerated performance style, The Shadow builds toward an incomparably presented siege of Jing featuring images that are unlike anything I’ve seen before, including the use of umbrellas that open into a whirl of lethal blades. Zhang also offers an ingenious take on warfare's fabled Trojan Horse.

But it’s not just the weapons that make victory possible, it’s a martial arts move discovered by the general’s wife, a sashaying maneuver that adds thematic heft. Based on distinctly feminine gestures, this signature martial arts move looks almost comical when executed by men. No matter: Defeat can be avoided only if the feminine and masculine are conjoined.

The Shadow lies somewhere between the grandeur of Shakespeare and the melodrama of Douglas Sirk, but the movie emerges as a visually towering work, perhaps even a fertile middle ground between Zhang’s earlier and later efforts. Searing battles bolster an intimate drama about power grabbing at the royal court.

Now 69, Zhang fuses spectacle and drama in a work that brims with intrigue and visual invention and reminds us what can happen when a master makes a movie that's steeped in conflicts so grand they feel as if the world's entire order hangs in the balance.

This 'Wall' is far from great

Matt Damon joins director Zhang Yimou for a giant helping of spectacle -- and little else.

Can a wall protect a country's capital from being overrun by hordes of lethal monsters?

No, we're not talking about a debate on the Senate floor, but about a large-scale movie that turns Matt Damon into a western warrior enlisted in a Chinese battle to preserve humanity.

Directed by Zhang Yimou and shot entirely in China, The Great Wall may not totally crumble, but it doesn't rise to epic standards, either.

And for cineasts, the movie hardly marks a milestone. Zhang made his entry on the international stage with Red Sorghum (1987). He continued with Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Shanghai Triad (1995). He was regarded as a young master of what was known as the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, and his work was bolstered by the presence of the beautiful and talented Gong Li.

In later movies such as Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), Zhang began turning out highly stylized martial arts films. And in 2008, he directed the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

Now comes The Great Wall, a movie whose only virtues involve costumes, spectacle and CGI-enhanced action. It seems to derive less from Zhang's earlier work than from his spectacular Olympic contributions.

Burdened by stock characters, wooden dialogue (much of it in English), and lame attempts at humor, the movie offers a less-than-stirring rendition of a legend about creatures that storm China's Great Wall in an effort to reach the capital.

The movie's dragon-like creatures -- Tao Tie by name -- are connected to a finger-wagging theme. It seems the monsters emerge every 60 years, which evidently coincides with society having become too greedy for its own good.

The Great Wall feels overly calibrated for international success with lots of action, some of it impressive. The first assault on the Great Wall (here serving as a fortress protecting the capital) involves archers in red armor and women in blue armor who leap off towering platforms to spear the dragons. If color could kill, these warriors would have no equal.

There's a whisper of a story. Damon portrays William, a western mercenary who has traveled to China with his warrior pals in hopes of cornering the gunpowder market. After most of his comrades are killed in early-picture skirmishes, William and his pal Tovar (Pedro Pascal) become prisoners of the Nameless Order, the army that occupies the Wall, executing its various maneuvers to a variety of compelling drum beats.

There's spectacle, but much of it feels underlined to elicit oohs and aahs: a scene in which thousands of lanterns are borne skyward in tribute to a fallen general, for example.

Willem Dafoe signs on as a character who also came to China in search of gunpowder, but who has been kept inside the great Chinese redoubt for 25 years. He wants to help William and Tovar escape so that he, too, can make his way back to the western world with plenty of gunpowder in tow.

The Chinese display a variety of weapons, but William pretty much sticks to archery. His skill as an archer impresses his captors. Eventually, his prowess is recognized by Lin (Jing Tian), a woman commander. She leads the squads of blue-clad female warriors who leap off the side of the Great Wall, doing their lethal work before being hoisted back up.

There's a bit of a moral here -- albeit a hackneyed one. Will William cling to his mercenary values or will he fight for a higher ideal, as in helping to save the unsuspecting residents of the capital? The Chinese understand higher ideals: trust and sacrifice. The Westerns are decidedly more crass.

A lack of stand-out performances (Damon included) doesn't help to turn the movie into anything more than a display of visual extravagance. And there's virtually no suspense in wondering whether -- in the end -- Damon's William will do the right thing.

I won't say more about whether the Tao Ties eventually reach the capital. But I will say that our president might do well to watch this movie because it says something about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of walls when it comes to defending the populace from invasion.

Some traumas never seem to end

Director Zhang Yimou again reunites with actress Gong Li for a look at the impact of China's Cultural Revolution.

For more than a decade, filmgoers wondered whether Chinese director Zhang Yimou would ever again work with Gong Li, the actress who starred in some of his best movies: Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern to name three landmark films from the late '80s and early '90s.

Zhang and Li did reunite for 2006's Curse of the Golden Flower, a spectacle-heavy costume drama of the kind that Zhang seemed to be gravitating toward.

Nine years later, Zhang and Gong have teamed again, this time in an intimately scaled drama about the devastating ramifications of China's Cultural Revolution.

Oddly, Coming Home, which should have knowledgeable audiences quaking with anticipation, hasn't set off a roar of anticipation on the art house circuit.

I'm not sure why. Although Coming Home doesn't match the emotional heft or exquisite beauty of the best of Zhang and Gong's collaborations, it certainly carves out a worthy place of its own.

Gong plays Feng Wanyu, a woman whose husband (Chen Daoming) is imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. When Daoming's Lu escapes, the couple's ambitious, teen-age daughter Dan Dan (Zhang Huiwen) shrugs off any association with her supposedly subversive father.

With Zhang compressing time, Lu is recaptured; the Cultural Revolution ends; and Lu is free to return home.

By this time, Dan Dan has shed the infection of rabid Maoist ideology, but Feng no longer recognizes her husband. She even mistakes him for a sadistic interrogator from Maoist days.

We're never sure whether Feng suffers from dementia or from some narrowly focused form of amnesia, an uncertainty that encourages us to view the movie as a meditation on the psychological toll of Mao's vicious cultural purge.

A persistent Lu tries to re-establish his life as a husband, an activity that eventually centers on scenes in which he reads Feng letters he wrote from prison. She still doesn't recognize him, but they become linked in this exercise at restoring lost memories.

Although there are images of sad beauty in Coming Home, the film takes on some of the modesty of its meager settings, notably Feng's small apartment or the street-level room Lu rents to be near her.

In its quiet way, Coming Home raises important questions about how to re-define normalcy in the wake of the kind of upheaval from which some never recover.

One can only hope that Gong, 49, and Zhang, now 63, will find material that allows them to collaborate again. They may never recapture the magic of the movies that helped announce the international rebirth of Chinese cinema almost 30 years ago, but they clearly know how to tap into each other's best artistic instincts.

Two from the art house circuit

THE COEN BROTHERS CHINESE STYLE -- SORT OF

There’s plenty of visual talent on display in Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop, but that doesn’t mean the movie’s any good. Zhang has taken on the oddball task of remaking the Coen brothers’ debut movie, Blood Simple. Zhang already has done his version of film noir with the gorgeous Ju Dou (1990). Maybe that’s why so much of this strange hybrid seems to be straining to be different. Zhang treats his characters as pawns in an antic comedy that’s reliant on slapstick, overly broad acting, devious plot twists and cartoonish directorial ploys. Some of the terrain surrounding the noodle shop is astonishingly sparse, but this story about a woman trying to free herself from a beastly husband -- the owner of a noodle shop in the middle of nowhere -- lacks the sexy allure of noir, the undertow of eroticism and even the sustained fun of good comedy. Zhang is too talented to make a movie that’s totally without interest, but this one’s a miss.

DON'T SELL HER SHORT: SHE FOUGHT THE MOB

A far more successful effort can be found in The Sicilian Girl, the story of Rita Mancuso, a real-life woman who battled the Mafia by trying to put one of its chiefs in jail. Ably played by Veronica D’Agostino, Rita gets crosswise with the Sicilian mob and finds herself buried in the witness protection program in Rome. She’s estranged from familiar surroundings and from her family. But Rita's a determined young woman who insists on channeling her fierce energy into the pursuit of revenge against the man who ordered her father’s murder. The fact that Dad also was a Mafia chieftain doesn’t deter Rita from seeking vengeance, but events ultimately force a shift in her consciousness. Her thirst for revenge gives way to a yearning for justice. Director Marco Amenta’s camera tends to crowd in on the movie’s many characters and the narrative isn’t developed in the most fluid of ways, but the raw determination of D’Agostino’s performance keeps Sicilian Girl firmly on track.