Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin (Wuxia Epic Starring Shu Qi)

[jvince]

Director:
Hou Hsiao-hsien

Stars:
Shu Qi
Chang Chen

Originally Posted by Variety

...a mesmerizing slow burn of a martial-arts movie that boldly merges stasis and kinesis, turns momentum into abstraction, and achieves breathtaking new heights of compositional elegance: Shot for shot, it’s perhaps the most ravishingly beautiful film Hou has ever made, and certainly one of his most deeply transporting.

Originally Posted by The Playlist

These are pictures that feel like time (which will make them hard to sit through for the impatient) — they feel steeped, marinated in time, as though Hou has waited, not 25 years, but eleven centuries with his camera parked on this hillside or beside that thatched barn, to get just exactly the right combination of light and cloud and movement and stillness, just the right fall of a sleeve or tremble of a drape in the breeze... "The Assassin" is the literal embodiment of the rewards, for the film and for the viewer, of patience and held breath. [A-]

Originally Posted by A.V. Club

Here, Hou takes wuxia, the most over-played genre in Chinese fiction and film, and makes it seem completely unfamiliar, without subverting any of its outsize gestures or values. In certain respects the most conventional movie Hou has made in decades, The Assassin is also enigmatic in ways some will find absolutely mesmerizing, and others might think is infuriating.

Originally Posted by The Hollywood Reporter

Its bursts of lightning-fast swordplay interrupt long, still stretches of misty moonlit landscapes and follow a pure literary style more than current genre expectations. Detailed period costumes and art direction make it extraordinarily beautiful to watch, but its refinement may weigh against it for fans hungering after spectacular kung fu.