Center Stage (Ruan Lingyu)

casting Maggie Cheung in your movie is basically tantamount to cheating

David Sims

Watched the extended version. Everything that Judy should have been. This is a subtle but crushing exploration of how media eventually drove Ruan Ling-yu to suicide. It exposes a lot of the nasty sexism towards actresses back in the silent film era. It is announced at…

Jason Huang (黃擎元)

“During pre-production, Maggie herself was dealing with intense media scrutiny over her private life. That gave her a unique connection to Ruan Lingyu’s experience. At the same time, Maggie had a much more modern outlook on celebrity and the press. I realized the film…

Brandon Streussnig

a movie that’s explicitly in conversation with not only film history, but preservation — feels less like an elegy for its depicted era than a sincere document of it and its inherent politics, rather sublime

Justin LaLiberty

That the real Ruan died at such a young age from the pressures of scandal emphasizes how the public often scorns actors who fail to live up to their arbitrary standards, and the scenes of Cheung and Kwan discussing the actress’s life and their own responses to her reflect…

Jake Cole

Ruan’s funeral featured [an] image that complicates the relationship between the photographic image and the “real” world. The enlarged photo of Ruan used to accompany her actual funeral procession was in fact an image from within the fictional world of her film New Women…

reibureibu

Hong Kong born director Stanley Kwan wields a fascinating assortment of viewpoints and strategies in building this biopic of Chinese silent film actress Ruan Lingyu, commencing with black and white stills of the actress herself. There's a superb performance from Maggie…

Paul Elliott

Maggie Cheung, one of the most iconic actresses in Chinese cinema, channels another silver screen icon decades prior. Ruan Lingyu, the Chinese silent era legend, thrived and perished in the public's eyes, and Center Stage is director Stanley Kwan's inquiry into a woman of…

nick

Belongs on more lists of the greatest biopics ever made, but the interesting thing about how Center Stage functions can be best summed up by the fact that it feels like in its own making-of, you're seeing the film break apart the notions of what a biopic is intending to set…

Jaime Rebanal 🇵🇸