"Hero," the new movie by Zhang Yimou (he also directed the marvelous "Raise the Red Lantern"), gives a whole new meaning to color coding. With different sections shot entirely in slate, red, blue, ...

In the first phase of his career, Chinese director Zhang Yimou made carefully crafted films (such as Raise the Red Lantern and To Live) that revisited painful periods of his country’s recent past. In ...

Zhang Yimou sounds defensive when he speaks of Hero as “a genre piece.” The implication is: just a genre piece, a diversion, a long sword fight played by grownups. Perhaps the director is thinking of ...

Chinese director Zhang Yimou, whose epic martial-arts adventure Hero (2002) broke through to a mass audience in the U.S. last summer, returns with this small but visually grand drama set during the ...