‘Once Upon in the Middle East’ Review: China’s Oscar Entry Is a Breakneck Blockbuster That Mixes Food Porn With Wartime Devastation

‘Once Upon in the Middle East’ Review: China’s Oscar Entry Is a Breakneck Blockbuster That Mixes Food Porn With Wartime Devastation hakkında magazin dünyasında yaşanan en son ayrıntılar ve sıcak gelişmeler netleşti. Oct 13, 2026 3:21pm PT ‘Once Upon in the Middle East’ Review: China’s Oscar Entry Is a Breakneck Blockbuster That Mixes Food Porn With Wartime Devastation 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. By Beatrice Loayza Plus Icon Beatrice Loayza Latest ‘Sense and Sensibility’ Review: Georgia Oakley Puts a Moody, Naturalistic Spin on the Jane Austen Classic 3 weeks ago ‘Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie’ Review: Alex Gibney Profiles the Controversial Author During His Harrowing Hospitalization 4 weeks ago ‘Hombre al Agua’ Review: Gael García Bernal Directs and Stars in a Sputtering, Screwball-y Dramedy About One Man’s Identity Crisis 1 month ago See All Add us as a Google Preferred Source Comments 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.

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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. Related Stories Music Industry Moves: Frank Briegmann Gets a Big Up at Universal Music; Warner Mexico Promotes Yusim Aladro to GM The film is also, as expected from this state-backed production, blatantly propagandistic — but in a way that is particularly baffling, and shockingly tasteless.

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If those sound like the elements for a good time, in the B-movie sense, then you are also correct. Against the odds, “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” is also, both regrettably and miraculously, extremely watchable.

The Jekyll part of your brain will tell you to leave but the Hyde-side will keep you seated in morbid, twitchy-eyed fascination over the film’s two-and-a-half hour runtime. Popular on Variety To cut straight to the point, this is a film in which China symbolically emerges from the rubble of the Iraq War as a pacifistic patriarch and guardian of all the world’s children.

Director Wen Muyue delivers this subtext through the story of Xu Fu (Shen Teng), a debt-ridden chef who agrees to temporarily take over a Chinese restaurant in the fictional Gulf-region city of Bahata, intending to return to his daughter and mother in China in two years time. Flash-forwards to an elder Xu Fu with liver spots and a conspicuous scar on his cheek tell us that he will indeed make it back to his family, but it’ll take much longer than a few years — the frankly absurd reasons for his delay a consequence of his, let’s say, geopolitical misfortunes.

He’s a man in the wrong place at the wrong time, though, cleverly, the film makes the point that a good Chinese meal is never unwelcome. In fact it’s globally in demand — a lifeline that ensures Xu Fu’s survival through the film’s whirlwind of events.

Before we get to the grisly images of dead children covered in ash, the film starts out as a feel-good dramedy in which Xu Fu adapts to his new surroundings.

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