Mum's the word

Curse of the Golden Flower: Miles removed from Hero and House of Flying Daggers, as the focus isn't on the lives and loves of outsiders cruelly twisted by the hand of empire but rather the royal players themselves behaving badly, causing the deaths of faceless thousands in the process. So, really more histrionically tragic than nobly so. The first two-thirds is a slowly-revealing palace intrigue that manufactures plenty of compelling drama even without much hand-to-hand combat, but the run-up to the denouement is numbingly vast in a bloodletting that offers neither emotional sustenance or real visceral thrills. I'm guessing Gong Li won't get any Oscar love, but it's hard not to juxtapose her performance against Mirren's in The Queen, one literally poisoned into hysterical madness, the other culturally poisoned into disconcerting calm.

Most delicious irony - given the film's subject matter, that the only genuine bond of self-sacrificing love occurs between a mother and her son.