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70So strong are the emotions - and, yes, the melodrama - that Snow Flower and the Secret Fan represents one of Wang's best films to date.
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67While indisputably beautiful and affecting in parts, "Snow Flower" is dominated by tame dramatic ingredients that never fully gel.
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63Snow Flower and the Secret Fan moves slowly, languidly; its art direction is often lovely, and despite their truncated screen time Lily and Snow Flower do make you care about their fates. But you would have cared more without all the distraction.
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63The connection between the two time frames and stories (the contemporary one with the addition of screenwriters) is flimsy as a frayed rope bridge, forced as the stepsister's foot into Cinderella's glass slipper.
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60This elegant weepie offers plenty for fans of melodrama, character-driven stories and period pieces.
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58Wang's high regard for women is intact, plus a keen eye for period detail making the 19th century sequences lovely to observe. But it's nothing we haven't seen before.
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55To invoke Pauline Kael's review of Diane Kurys's "Entre Nous," it's about two women not having a lesbian affair.
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50With Snow Flower, the filmmaker is forever torn between two childhoods, two adulthoods, two distinct political and social eras, and two complex relationships, unable to make both equally relevant.
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50Once we've quickly digested the fortune-cookie message that modern women are as bound by obligations as their grandmothers were, all we can savor is the scenery.
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50It's hard to tell whether this is a tribute to female solidarity or a lamentation.
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50The gentle erotic undertow in the friendship of Snow Flower and Lily has been toned down, and replaced by … niceness.
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50In this lavish adaptation of Lisa See's novel, the complex chronologies of the parallel narratives are skillfully handled by director Wayne Wang, which makes his reliance on unbridled sentimentality all the more irritating.
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50Soppy and sentimental, it evokes "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" without improving on it.
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50Hugh Jackman appears briefly as Sophia's Aussie boyfriend, and gets to perform a lively song-and-dance number. But for some strange reason, his name isn't in the credits.
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50The lesson of the lovely-looking, but disappointing, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is avoid tinkering too much with a novelist's work.
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50There are enough decent moments in "Snow Flower" that you can at times see the remains of a better movie amid the jolting transitions between past and present, but these eras never really speak to each other, much less to you.
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50While the action flashes back and forth in increments of centuries, years or months, we're adrift in the here and now, trying to get a grip on the characters and their relationships, yet finding it loosened with every new dislocation.
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Jul 14, 201150This latest film aims for "The Joy Luck Club's" crossover appeal but ends up stilted and emotionally remote.
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Jul 12, 201150As the parallel friendships evolve over time, both push and pull between platonic and erotic; it's to the film's credit that it never definitively suggests that love can only be one or the other.
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42Jumping repeatedly and randomly from present-day Shanghai to 1997 to 1829 and periods in between, the film has a pace that seems almost willfully tedious.
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Jul 23, 201140Wayne Wang directed "The Joy Luck Club," a fine, sentimental look at Chinese women. Now he presents another look at Chinese sisterhood in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and it feels like a shallow imitation: Imagine getting Kate Hudson when you expect Goldie Hawn.
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40Unfortunately, its present-day tale, involving a career woman seeking to mend her 20-year bond with a girlfriend injured in an accident, is lax and clunky, and its story-within-a-story - a tale of two laotong, or soul sisters, in oppressive mid-1800s China - is gorgeous but simplistic.
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40Mawkish, clunky and unenlightening about female suffering in this or any generation.
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40Set mostly in modern-day Shanghai and involving two other girlfriends (also Li and Jun), this parallel plot feels less like an attempt to broaden the book's horizons than to cash in on "Joy's" cross-generational appeal while doubling down on cheap-shot melodrama.
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38Rather than a moving story of sisterly love, we get little more than a grandly appointed disappointment.
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38Despite the locations and the informative narrative, almost every scene is missing that spark that would bring the characters to life and immediacy to the story.
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Jul 21, 201138The books-trump-movies camp knows where this is headed: The film version - contains two characters and one narrative too many.
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38Despite gestures toward modernity and clumsy humanism, the film feels regressive, presenting a version of modern China that's as much of an anesthetized fairy tale as its costume-drama past.
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Jul 16, 201133Sadly, rather than melding the best of two worlds, the film only takes the worst of their soap operas.
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30The film squanders any potential it had to be a revealing look into female intimacy and instead uses broad-scale melodramatic strokes.
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25This latest from director Wayne Wang, about the friendship of two young women, travels from 2011 to 1997 to 1829 to 1838, in search of a reason for the audience to keep watching and start caring. That reason is never found.