Starting in just a few weeks, Hollywood will attempt to continually up the ante each summer weekend to deliver popcorn-munching thrills. While a certain third chapter of a franchise will hopefully deliver the goods, one need not look much further the rest of the season for excitement than the first weekend of May, when Zhang Yimou’s wuxia epic Shadow will arrive in theaters.

A mystic thriller that takes place during medieval China and tells the story of a king and his people’s struggle for their rightful land–all told through the perspectives of the king, his sister, his commander, the entrapped women of the palace, and a commoner–this ensemble features Ryan Zheng, Xiaotong Guan, Chao Deng, Li Sun, Qianyuan Wang, Jun Hu, Lei Wu, and Jingchun Wang. Ahead of the U.S. release, Well Go USA has now released the U.S. trailer.

Leonardo Goi said in his review, “With its gorgeously choreographed sword duels, sabers slicing through paddles of blood and rain, watercolor bi-chromatic palettes and sumptuous costumes, Zhang Yimou’s Shadow (Ying) is a film of visual charms. To enter into the Fifth Generation maestro’s latest period piece is to be invited to marvel at a 116-minute long dance – a stunning return to form from a director who’d previously ventured into semi-autobiographical terrain with the 2014 moving Coming Home, and later veered into the bombastic Chinese-cum-Matt Damon blockbuster epic letdown The Great Wall (2016). Shadow brings heart and spectacle together, and the result is a bombastic martial arts wuxia replete with duels of breath-taking beauty that will please longtime Zhang acolytes and newbies alike.”

See the trailer below.

With SHADOW, director Zhang Yimou (HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS) once again pushes the boundaries of wuxia action to create a film like no other, masterfully painting a canvas of inky blacks and greys punctuated with bursts of color from the blood of the defeated. In a kingdom ruled by a young and unpredictable king, the military commander has a secret weapon: a “shadow”, a look-alike who can fool both his enemies and the King himself. Now he must use this weapon in an intricate plan that will lead his people to victory in a war that the King does not want.

Shadow opens on May 3.

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