Rating: 
Summary: Sumptuous
Review: "Temptress Moon" is a feast to the eyes. Gorgeously photographed, it is defintely worth watching even if the plot is a little hard to follow. Gong Li and Leslie Cheung deliver top-notch acting. Their chemistry is palpable and, needless to say, both light up the screen with their beauty. "Temptress Moon" is a true tragedy all throughout, but nothing can prepare you for the horrifying ending.
Rating: 
Summary: Fruitless Destination
Review: "Temptress Moon" is like the erant traveler one meets on a long train journey. During the first few minutes of conversation you are fascinated by this person and eager to learn more of the journey ahead. But gradually, you realize that something does not quite fit. As attractive or atriculate as the traveler maybe, you can sense a gnawing quality of shiftlessness and aimlessness. This person doesn't really know where he or she is going. It seems that during the conversation, the traveler has come to depend on you to validate the unmapped future. And when you part you feel deflated by the enormous promise that was never realized. So it was with "Temptress Moon"."Temptress Moon" has a lot of beautiful touches but essentially lacks a story. So much of this movie should have worked and just didn't. The premise of the young man, Zhong Liang escaping from his incestuous sister only to become a gigalo in Shanghai was fascinating. Unfortunately the story lost steam when Zhong Liang returned home to seduce his childhood acquaintance played by a mature, robust Gong Li. Somehow it doesn't add up when the thirty something year old Gong Li is referred to as "Gu Niang" (young girl). The innocence and naivite she displays when she is being seduced by Zhong Liang is not believable. From the start she seems like a woman on the make, as though she never stopped playing the wiley prostitute in "Farwell My Concubine". Similarly, the various layers of deception and sexual confusion in the film just lead nowhere. As much as I love Chen Kaige's work, not to mention the amazing cast in "Temptress Moon", I parted from the film with enormous dissapointment.
Rating:
Summary: Love on the (Opium) Rocks
Review: Chen Kaige creates another period masterpiece with TEMPTRESS MOON, the story of a wealthy family struggling to maintain their history on the outskirts of Shanghai.
Due to her brother's condition resulting from an addiction to opium (or so we're lead to believe), Ruyi (the ever glowing Gong Li) is granted leadership over the family fortune at a time when women were relegated to secondary roles. However, Zhongliang -- a close relation now grown up and playing a con man to perfection in Shanghai -- returns home to bilk her out of the family fortune at the demand of his boss. When Zhongliang discovers he has fallen in love with her, he chooses to alter her fate ... but his choice only secures his own fate in the eyes of the triad he serves.
MOON is wonderfully photographed, though this image transfer is a bit grainy at times. It is a contemporary 'Romeo & Juliet,' with gangland influences and wonderful period photography. The lovemaking -- while pushing the boundaries in a mainstream foreign release -- is relatively tame but beautiful captured with powerful emotion and vivid lighting. At points, the film feels almost like a narrative valentine to the family and the viewer; but don't look for any happy ending here.
The ending poses a small handful of tight flashbacks that gives new meaning to some of the events depicted in the film, defining more greatly the motivations of the main characters, once again demonstrating how meaningful small decisions are in the pursuit of daily life and how tragic their consequences may inevitably be in the day, months, and years ahead.
While it arguably may be a bit hard to follow at times, TEMPTRESS MOON nonetheless delivers as a truly spectacular, moving experience that should not be missed.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesante juego de pasión, costumbres y reflexión
Review: En español esta película se titula Tentación, título que no describe todo lo que la cinta encierra. La actuación describe con bastante claridad las emociones, muchas veces conflictivas, con que cada personaje vive: amor y odio, fraternalidad y ambición, inquietud y seguridad, indiferencia y deseo... Es una historia interesante, fácil de seguir pero no por eso menos cautivante.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting tale -- Gong Li shines as usual
Review: Excellent ideas but there is some primitive (by Hollywood standards) transitions and scene cuts that could have been greatly improved upon. The film has an incredible dark haunting feel to it and really captures the horror of opium addiction and extorsion. While it is an interesting study with some fine acting, western editing would have greatly improved the overall appeal. Gong Li is tantalizing!
Rating:
Summary: Good, a little hard to follow at times..
Review: Good movie, interesting subject, great acting. If you love Gong Li, or never had the pleasure, please be sure to add this to your list of must see's. I own it, but Rent it first then decide if you want to own it.
Rating:
Summary: The Great Wall
Review: Gorgeous, decadent, sensual, at times psychologically incoherent, Kaige Chen's "Temptress Moon" is nothing if not always fascinating to watch because at the very center of this film, at it's core, is a story about family, desire and the things we do to each other in the name of love.
Set mostly in Shanghai in the 1920's when China was opening up to the world outside of it's borders, it is reminiscent of Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor," in it's surface beauty and rich, idle, beautiful characters: Zhonglaing (Leslie Cheung), a gigolo and his cousin Ruyi (the incandescent Gong-Li) a recent heiress. Chen is a director who is more interested in showing than telling and his images are so dynamic and surprising that they smack you in the gut.
"Temptress Moon" is a film of uncommon grace and beauty, more of a tone poem than a symphony perhaps but always deserving of your time and attention.
Rating:
Summary: Temptress or Victim?
Review: I am not overly impressed with this movie because for some reason I could not follow the story as well as one would expect. I found that stories like "Farewell My Concubine" and "The Emperor and the Assassin" were much more intellectually fulfilling. Not sure why this movie didn't spin me. Maybe I just could not relate to any of the characters or their lives. Basically Zhongliang seduces and blackmails married women in the city and then falls in love with Ruyi who enjoys her share of opium. The basic story is set in the 1920s so it is sumptuously filmed, but lacked substance, an appealing plot and emotional appeal. Visually appealing.
Rating:
Summary: i love it
Review: i loved i
Rating:
Summary: Chen Kaige's most subtle work
Review: I think this film is in some ways an improvement over Chen Kaiges breakthrough film Farewell my Concubine. In the earlier film Kaige waters down a very good story with too many references to history. In Temptress Moon Kaige remains focused on his characters and keeps the tone of the film an intimate one. In fact the film rarely leaves the intimate corridors of the Pang family estate. It is within those mossy walls that Kaige tells this tale of three childhood cousins/friends/lovers whose intimate bonds to each other become poisoned by their changing roles within the family structure. History does play a part in this film but it is interwoven only very subtly. The family estate is isolated from the big cities but the corruption finds its way into the estate. In fact Chen Kaiges suggests by the nature and course of this story that corruption is built into the very nature of the old ways as well as the new. And this, in the end, becomes the theme of the picture. But this theme is so quietly fleshed out with such nice performances that by pictures end you find yourself amazed at what Chen Kaige has conveyed with his very intimate story. This is a much better crafted piece of filmmaking than Farewell My Concubine or the later Emperor & The Assassin.
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