Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rating of 6.9/10 from 6 reviews and 83% on the tomatometer.
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The film received mostly positive reviews from the New York Times, BBC, Washington Post and internet sites Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, with most critics commenting on the deeply surreal and disjointed nature of the film.
Schmitz is currently the weekly columnist of The Weekly Ketchup for Rotten Tomatoes and a contributing columnist for Fandango.
Williams who, according to Rotten Tomatoes, is syndicated in over 100 black newspapers and magazines in the United States, Canada and Caribbean, is the chief critic at NewsBlaze.com, and regularly contributes to the Los Angeles Sentinel, Houston Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, AALBC.com, and the historic Tennessee paper, the Tri-State Defender.
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a score of 11% based on the review of 11 critics.
Though perhaps less well known than some of Zhang Yimou's more celebrated films (notably Ju Dou, To Live and Raise the Red Lantern), Shanghai Triad was nevertheless generally praised by critics upon its release, with an 85% "fresh" rating on the review-database, Rotten Tomatoes.