Bafflingly entertaining and politically reprehensible, this antiwar epic follows a Chinese chef through a whirlwind of absurd and brutal events at the outbreak of the Iraq War.
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Dirty Monkeys Not since Zhang Yimou’s 2002 wuxia spectacle “Hero” has China landed an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature — and this dry spell surely won’t be broken with this year’s bombastic submission “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East.” Like most of the country’s entries over the past decade, this blockbuster epic — a summer box office hit at home — makes for an extravagant display of the strength of the nation’s commercial film industry. Strength, in the sense that no modest operation could conceivably pull off the technical wizardry and large-scale worldbuilding showcased here, where an entire city is at one point turned into an inferno of crumbling buildings, and a massive military base is, in a later scene, ambushed in a rain of blazing pyrotechnics.
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