75
A movie stuffed to bursting with sumptuous movie-movie atmosphere, the swoony charge of ideas about art, love, and espionage, and good-enough storytelling solutions.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
This moody, black-and-white period piece always intrigues, even if it only intermittently catches fire.
58
Mesmeric but frustrating ... An explosive third act shootout may be the most remarkable sequence that Lou has ever shot, but all of the hard-boiled fireworks in the world can’t diminish the feeling that he can’t identify his muse on a canvas this big.
20
[A] grandiloquently incoherent misfire
80
Saturday Fiction certainly demands patience, shrouded at first in a smog of exposition.
40
Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney
The narrative would be sufficiently daunting to follow if the film didn’t make such heavy play on the thin line between fiction and reality; the frequent blurring between the two Saturday Fictions – Lou Ye’s and Tan Na’s – is muddily executed to begin with, without the play being so unconvincing as a piece of stage drama.
88
The hegemony of history is rigid, but Lou Ye is still able to disrupt it in the form of its representation.