Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Feng's I Am Not Madame Bovary both premiered in China one week apart this month.[Photo provided to China Daily]

For Bovary, Feng designed a circular frame and complemented it with square and rectangular ones. This instantly creates a distance between the story and the audience, in that the audience would feel they are looking at a traditional Chinese fan or through a window.

On a subliminal level, the circular scenes all take place in the protagonist's rural hometown, signifying a culture of the rule of consensus, and subtly morph to square city scenes where the rule of law should be the norm.

In Chinese parlance, square and round often stand in for rules.

Feng's film is a story about the absence of such rules.

Both movies chronicle a person's journey, along which a dozen or more supporting characters appear and fill up a tableau of the protagonist's world.

Billy Lynn is a Texas teenager whose intuitive action in Iraq turned him into a national hero and who discovers the murky undercurrents that drive the hero business.

I don't have a problem with a British actor playing a Texan, but somehow I feel all the characters in this movie are filtered through the prism of the coastal elites.

Having lived in Texas, I could not help squirm at what I sensed were cardboard caricatures.

The phalanx of officials in Bovary left a similar impression on some viewers, but I tend to disagree.

They are among the biggest strengths of Feng's film, which is extremely acute in observation of China's bureaucracy.

The male stars－yes they are all male－delivered top-notch performances of restraint and authenticity. Yet, I wonder how a female official would react to a female petitioner.

Fan Bingbing as the only female character diverges sharply from her regular bombshell roles and gives a career-best performance.