Variety tears apart China's Oscar film: 'Once Upon a Time in the Middle East'

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents Variety tears apart China's Oscar film: 'Once Upon a Time in the Middle East'.

China is sending an unusual entry into this year's Oscar race: "Once Upon a Time in the Middle East" — an epic that, according to Variety, swings with full force between scenes of war and opulent food shots. In its current review, the film is described as a "breakneck blockbuster," a fast-cut grand spectacle. The mix of "Food Porn" and wartime devastation is as unusual as it is risky — and that's precisely what the Variety review is debating.

What Variety criticizes about the film

The criticism is pointed. The film is classified as "bombastic," a submission that relies more on pace, opulence, and audience pressure than on the quieter tones often rewarded in the Oscar category for international film. Variety places it in a line with "most of the country's entries over the past decade" — that is, in a tradition of Chinese submissions built along similar lines that, according to the trade publication, have failed to convince. For you, that means: a pattern is repeating here that the Academy has not been won over by so far.

Why this submission carries extra weight

There's more at stake than a single film. Variety points out that China has not received a nomination in the Best International Feature category since Zhang Yimou's wuxia epic "Hero" in 2002. A nomination for "Once Upon a Time in the Middle East" would therefore be a historic moment — but Variety says plainly: "this dry spell surely won't be broken." You can read it this way: the trade publication considers the chances that this particular epic will end the drought to be slim.

What remains is a film that demands attention. The mix of brutal pace, sensual food scenes, and the pain of war is unusual enough not to disappear in the crowd. Whether that will be enough for the Academy, the nomination phase will show. What's clear is: China is not entering the race quietly — just, according to Variety, not with the film that could seal it this time.