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‘Ju Dou’

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Chinese director Zhang Yimou is to his country’s film industry what Kurosawa is to Japan, Satyajit Ray to India. His movies, pictorially bewitching and culturally trenchant, open China up for us cinematically, while his star (Gong Li, pictured, with Li Bao-Tian), is a face for her nation: radiant, mysterious, ambivalent. This film, one of Zhang’s breakthrough pictures, is a dazzling, disturbing tale of infidelity and murder in a dye factory (Bravo Monday at 8 p.m., again at 1 a.m.).

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