Popular reviews

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  Review by CinemaCl🎃wn ★ 46

  There is no denying that The Assassin is one of the most beautiful-looking films out there, for every frame of it qualifies as a masterwork of breathtaking photography. But there is also no refuting that it is an insufferably boring film, for just being able to sit through this snail-paced arthouse offering is an achievement in itself.

  Set in 8th century China during the Tang Dynasty, the story follows Nie Yinniang, an exceptionally skilled assassin who was raised by a nun from the age of 10 and kills on her command. But when she fails to perform her duties on one occasion, she is tasked with a ruthless mission that requires her to kill the man she was once betrothed to.…

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  Review by I.V. ★★★★ 1

  Simply gorgeous. Takes wuxia, the most over-played genre in Chinese film, and makes it seem completely alien without subverting any of its gestures or values.

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★★ 11

  I'm trying to be a bit more stingy with my stars, especially for movies I've just seen for the first time. But I simply can't think of a single thing I didn't like about this movie.

  If you wanted to design to film perfectly and specifically for me, it would probably be something like The Assassin. A film by my favorite contemporary filmmaker, one from whom I spent months earlier this year studying and writing about in detail for a theatrical retrospective, working in one of my favorite film genres, the one I’ve spent the better part of the last three years exploring. There was simply no way this wasn’t going to be a movie I liked. But since whether…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 1

  Very much a Hou film, social controls and political troubles disrupt relationships and estrange people from their homes and pasts. The fights are sudden and brief but simultaneously graceful and full of physicality and weight, King Hu's verdant bamboo forest now an autumnal wood. You'll have to excuse me but wuxia taking a hard-art turn is probably the best thing for the genre right now.

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★★ 7

  Rewatch confirms that what i thought was the plot the first time around actually is the plot. Only thing that isn't more or less explicitly stated is the identity of the masked woman. Hou explains in this interview in Film Comment:

  "The character’s name is Jing Jing’er. She and Kong Kong’er, the wizard with the white beard, were kung fu masters in the original story. But Jing and the wife were two different characters in the story. In the film, I wanted to show the fact that the Yuan family married their daughter to the Tian family in order to seize power in Weibo, so the wife was actually a matchless assassin too. Only when something happened, when she felt…

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 7

  A level of cinematographic skill that hasn't been on display since the likes of Sven Nykvist.

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  Review by David Sims ★★★★ 3

  i’ll say it: this is a good looking movie

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 4

  88/100

  The Assassin is an elemental force of a movie, contrasting the swirling expanses of nature with the unrelenting labyrinthine dangers of society in 7th Century China. Directed by Hsiao-Hsien Hou, foreboding drum beats diverge from an overwhelming soundscape of birdsong, aurally tackling the mindset of an assassin and the surrounding realm in which she is enclosed. It's so goddamn pretty too. Easily one of the most accomplished films that I've seen image-to-image. Starting with a B&W prologue, Hou crafts scenery out of kaleidoscopic globes, obscuring simple, basic images with sudden beams of light and the drive of a vengeful breeze, swelling the tight limitations of the Academy Ratio into a painterly canvas of dread and eventual violence.

  It's a…

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 2

  perhaps the most filled empty spaces have ever felt. yinniang's presence always stirring, emotional exposition always interrupting or being interrupted by sudden bursts of expertly cut/choreographed (anti)violence. so fucking good. wish i could hang every rich, detailed frame on my wall.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★½ 2

  definitely the most crushingly disappointed 3.5 stars i've awarded. but dense wuxia epics from master filmmakers who spent an eternity in production tend to blossom for me in time, so who knows.

  would have been an ideal segment of FOUR TIMES. (it's four, now).

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  Review by Mr. DuLac ★★½ 16

  Your skills are matchless, but your mind is hostage to human sentiments.
  -Jiaxin

  A breathtaking disappointment. When I first read about The Assassin I automatically had it pegged as a surefire entry in my top 10 of the year. A martial arts film that won Hou Hsiao-hsien best director at Cannes and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. My expectations were through the roof.

  Here I am now after failing miserably to connect with this film. There's no questioning it's cinematography as it's gorgeous beyond compare with unparalleled set and costume design. The film is just inhabited by characters that are in a constant mental state of calmness. A character can either have a glass of water brought to them…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 3

  wuxia is typically a genre that seeks to question and heal china's historical wounds, the assassin wants to open the wound up completely and shatter our reactionary assumptions. paradoxically with what would expect of hou's cinematography of stillness, this is a film primarily concerned with motion towards an unseen climax: the combat & choreography is always being drawn into an ambiguous horizon, past the shade of a garden, in the entangled vines of a forest, echoes of candlelight flickering in the breeze, a pitch black figure standing within a world of airy colors.

  it's a deeply futurist film, taking the superficial presentation of a period drama's absence of movement (which hou has already mastered in films such as the puppetmaster and…