Crushing almost sixty years of twentieth-century turmoil into less run time than the equally decade-skippy first season of HBO's House of the Dragon, Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine joins the Criterion Collection this week in a new 4K transfer. The film was the first Chinese feature to win the Palme D'Or at Cannes, but was later banned, then censored, then banned again in its home country. It remains a bravura act of filmmaking, which fuses two men's personal longings to the end of China's Imperial era and the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. The first hour is exquisite, if agonizing. Young Douzi -- already so androgynous as to be easily mistaken for girlish, with bright red ribbons in his hair -- is given by his...

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