From the saturated melodramas of Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern to the monochromatic precision of Shadow, Zhang Yimou’s films refuse to stay in one place. The Next Reel covered seven of them across two seasons.
Zhang Yimou trades empire for intimacy in this wuxia companion to Hero—two officers fall for the same woman, loyalties collapse, and the visuals are almost too gorgeous to look away from.
Zhang Yimou trades his visual spectacle for raw naturalism—and Pete Wright and Andy Nelson dig into why that restraint is the whole argument.
Zhang Yimou’s monster-movie blockbuster The Great Wall surprised Pete and Andy—more visually distinctive and more entertaining than its terrible trailers suggested.
Zhang Yimou’s stunning wuxia epic Hero brings his visual mastery to a Rashomon-style assassination story—Pete and Andy dig into the politics, the craft, and the lake shoots.
Andy loves it, Pete finds it gorgeous and unbearably slow—Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern is a 1920s period tragedy that divides hosts and devastates viewers.
Zhang Yimou’s stunning 1990 tragedy Ju Dou—shot in three-strip Technicolor—layers forbidden desire and political allegory inside a story that helped launch Chinese cinema to the world. Pete and Andy dig in.
Zhang Yimou creates cinema that burns itself into your memory. The Next Reel began building a portrait of his work in 2017. Season 6 covered four films: Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Hero (2002), and The Great Wall (2016). Season 15 returned to add To Live (1994), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Shadow (2018).
The early collaborations with Gong Li—Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern—are intimate, politically charged melodramas painted in vibrant, suffocating color. Their roots in Chinese history were provocative enough to get them banned on the mainland. Hero and House of Flying Daggers move into wuxia territory, pushing the boundaries of action choreography and color theory into something operatic and mythic. To Live is quieter, spanning decades of one family's endurance through upheaval. Shadow strips the palette down to black, white, and ink-wash painting, finding new formal territory in the process. The Great Wall is the outlier—a Hollywood production with a complicated reception—and the series doesn't look away from that.
What Pete and Andy track across the full run is the signature that holds even as the scale and genre change. Yimou's masterful eye. His deep emotional resonance. His ability to use color, movement, and space to say something about power and individual longing.
If Yimou is new to you, this series is an excellent starting point. If you already love one of his films, the conversation will deepen it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Next Reel's Zhang Yimou series complete?
The Season 15 run brought the total to seven films—but a series is only ever as complete as we decide it is. Yimou has one of cinema's most distinctive bodies of work, and Pete and Andy may well return to it in a future season.
Which Zhang Yimou films did The Next Reel cover?
Seven films across two seasons: Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, and The Great Wall in Season 6 (2017); and To Live, House of Flying Daggers, and Shadow in Season 15 (2026).
Where should I start if I'm new to The Next Reel?
Raise the Red Lantern is a strong entry point—it's among Yimou's most celebrated films and the episode captures both the visual power and the political charge that runs through the whole series. Each episode works as a standalone.
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Related Listening
If the Zhang Yimou series brought you here, you might also want to explore the Foreign Language Best Picture Nominees series—The Next Reel's look at films from around the world that earned Oscar nominations in the Best Picture category.