The greatest movie ever made..!

Memorable, crazy movie

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

i really really like this film, its so surreal yet it is set in the realistic city of shanghai..... i fell in love of it the first time i saw it. the story is so romantic yet so bleak about the idealisms of love...... i seriously couldn't go to sleep after watching that film...it makes me want to find a guy like Ma Da to fall in love with yet i dont want my love story to end up like theirs. so yeh if i was the camera dude, i would close my eyes and wait for the next when love arrives.the girl who plays peony is great, because she can differentiate her characters so well.

SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!!Beautiful to look at, touching to endure. The frequently POV and semi-handheld camera work is quirky but successful. The locations portraying Shanghai are deliciously chewed up, layered, soiled and water stained Pleasantly moist so to speak. Lurid and fetching the way Cyclo is, but delivers at a far faster pace like Swallowtail Butterfly, though without the humor generally. Really a nice though sardonic love yarn. Did I mention yet that many of the visuals in this need to be taught to our young ones IMMEDIATELY? The shot of the courier Mardar perched on the ladder leering down thoughtfully at unwitting hostage Moudan, their heads on diagonally opposite intersections of the grid, static yet breathing, a masterpiece to behold and a desktop wallpaper waiting to happen with the quiet disturbed power of Leon without quite the pedophiliac undertones (although perhaps not completely without). Excellent work, and some really interesting credits if you ever want to see how the Germans and the Chinese might work together to produce a tweaked out love story. Last note, really appreciate and respect the move to anchor the tale to a narrator that is a partial, biased yet generally passive voyeur. Certainly an exploration of existentialism, at least more candid and blatantly than most flicks, as truth be told all flicks are a degree of existentialist experience, the very notion of an audience of passive voyeurs vicariously living another's life through the medium. And so on.

Set in Shanghai on the banks of the Suzhou River, the story follows a motorcycle courier who one day is asked to deliver a 16yr old girl to her aunt. from this simple yet mysterious beginning a complex and unusual story of lost love and mistaken personality grows. Refreshing and evocative.

Suzhou River's beginning represents an extremely compelling film. It has it all - a great narrative, great acting, great score, and it is emotionally involving. But the director/screenwriter throws it all away when he decides simply to revert back to Sir Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Vertigo is one of those films that is impossible to top, so it is just a waste of time to try. Here is my experience during Suzhou River, after having enjoyed the first 30 minutes or so immensely: I hear the score sampling Bernard Herrmann's Vertiginous theme, and see the camera quoting the film, and my mind immediately jumped back on my dreamlike memories of Vertigo. It's as if Suzhou River disappeared. Near the end, the film started to become a little more original, and my daydreams faded, but I was pretty lost at that point.Don't get me wrong. Suzhou River is still a fine film. I would actually like someone to remake most of it, taking out the Vertigo homage and inserting something more original. 7/10