Hsing Lee's best-known film in the west has been called a masterpiece, deceptively spare and simple in telling of a complex emotional transformation. In Han Dynasty China, a hotheaded young man, Pei, is jailed for murder following a brawl. As the emperor has decreed autumn the season for executions, Pei must languish in jail for almost a year awaiting the inevitable. His wily grandmother concocts a scheme to see that at least the family line will carry on by sneaking a girl into his cell for conjugal visits. The relationship is the start of Pei's spiritual regeneration, a process in which the strict Confucianism with which his grandmother raised him is met by a more Taoist acceptance of his guilt and death. Beautiful art direction weaves these unspoken philosophical elements into the story: Dead Man Walking toward the proper season. Critic Tony Rayns, noting the film's "exemplary lack of sentimentality," added, "it is the film's carefully constructed ambience, its web of dreams, memories, possibilities, and imaginings, that makes it so potent."