In this unprecedented Sino-Western co-production, Bernardo Bertolucci turned the strange life of final Chinese crown ruler Puyi into a sumptuous epic.

Rating: 10/10 (16 May 2010)

The Last Emperor is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time. It is a biopic of Puyi (John Lone), who acceded to the throne of China as a young child, grew up to become a reformer, and was Emperor at the point his country became a republic.
The film is a work of epic pageantry – rivalled only, in recent years, by late Akira Kurosawa and Farewell, My Concubine (1993) – in which the Emperor's rise to power, nimbly enacted by a trio of bright young performers, is more engaging than the decline and fall. In the age of CGI, its crowd scenes – stocked not with pixels, but living, breathing extras – have become doubly impressive.