Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

David Ecklein "Shadow Magic" (2000 award-winning co-production of mainland China, Germany, Taiwan, and US) is an epic melodrama about the coming of cinema to Old Peking. The year is 1902; the era of pigtails, the Empress Dowager, and the Boxer Rebellion aftermath distrust of foreign influence and domination. One of the more benign influences was photography, already somewhat accepted by those who could afford to have their pictures taken by the few Chinese professionals setting up shop in Peking and other large cities. Not so with motion pictures. Foreign entrepreneurs, usually small scale individual efforts, brought in movie equipment with early French silents and ran what amounted to raucous side-show entertainment on the teeming streets. This juxtaposition of modern novelty to Asian cultural tradition resulted in misunderstandings, sometimes tragic, but often hilarious.

Charles Herold (cherold) A very sweet movie about a young Chinese man enamored of western technology and an Englishman trying to make his fortune showing movies in China. It's a very interesting story that is presumably based on true events, although I'm assuming it's more fantasy than real. It's got a fairy tale quality you rarely get in real life, and it's also got 8 people credited for the script, so they must have been making up stuff right and left.This is a very likable movie that conveys how magical film was to people who had never seen it before. It is not an especially deep movie, touching briefly on the loss of tradition and the encroachment of western culture but mainly just being a pleasant little movie. It's actually a movie I enjoyed very much that is already beginning to disappear from my mind 15 minutes after seeing it. Light as a soufflé, but I enjoyed every minute.

Carolyn Bloomer An enjoyable but shallow film based only in the loosest way on historical facts and Chinese culture at the turn of the century. A lost opportunity -- differing cultural perceptions as well as the early days of Chinese cinema could have been explored in a deeper and more meaningful way.

amurph12 This is a beautiful, funny, vivid film. It's even better than "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso" -- which it parallels but doesn't replicate. The story completes a full circle and had the theater beaming as the credits rolled. A hundred years after this story takes place, we're just as intrigued by flickering images in a dark theater.