Film Review: Forbidden City (La città proibita) 紫禁城 (2025) - Italy
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
Gabriele Mainetti loves Rome the way Fred Astaire loved a tuxedo: as something to be tested, stretched, and sent spinning into places it was never meant to go. In They Call Me Jeeg, he gave the city a radioactive superhero. Now, in Forbidden City (La città proibita), he gives it a wok, a cleaver, and Liu Yaxi—and watches the cobblestones catch fire.
This is not a martial arts movie. This is a Roman opera staged inside a neon-lit Chinatown dream. Mainetti calls it "spaghetti-fusion," and the name fits. The film doesn't just mix genres; it tosses them in a hot pan, adds garlic and oil, and sets off the smoke alarm. That it mostly works is a small miracle. That it sometimes doesn't is part of its charm.
The soul of the picture, and there is no polite way to say this, is Liu Yaxi. She does not simply act; she inhabits motion the way a flame inhabits a match. Mainetti, smartly, does not try to cheat us with quick cuts or jittery epilepsy-inducing edits. He plants the camera at a respectful distance and lets her move. There is a sequence set in a night market—stalls, steam, unsuspecting pedestrians—that belongs in a time capsule. She turns a frying pan into a shield, a bamboo steamer into a distraction, and the Roman pavement into a stage. Her speed is not a trick. It is her language.
The cinematography, by Michele D'Attanasio, understands that Rome has never looked quite like this. The usual postcard angels are absent. Instead, we get Esquilino after dark: red lanterns bleeding into wet asphalt, gold light spilling from takeout windows, the humid weight of a summer that refuses to end. The film breathes in long, slow exhales—and then Liu Yaxi punches someone through a fruit cart.
And yet. At 138 minutes, the plate is too full. Mainetti has more ideas than the runtime can comfortably digest. Subplots involving the human trafficking ring multiply like pigeons in a piazza. Every time the film finds its rhythm—every time Mei and Marcello share a look that says more than dialogue could—the screenplay remembers it has three other stories to service and hurries off to feed them. The second act does not so much stumble as wander into the kitchen and forget what it came for.
But here is the thing about audacity: when it lands, you forgive the wobble. Forbidden City is messy, yes. It is also alive in a way that most franchise filmmaking has forgotten how to be. It is a movie that believes in the poetry of a well-thrown cleaver, in the romance of a city that has seen everything and is still surprised by a woman who can fly through the air with a wok in each hand. Not perfect. But bold enough to make perfection seem timid. (Neo, 2026)