82
Metascore
29 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100The Hollywood ReporterDeborah YoungThe Hollywood ReporterDeborah YoungIts bursts of lightning-fast swordplay interrupt long, still stretches of misty moonlit landscapes and follow a pure literary style more than current genre expectations.
- 100Screen DailyAllan HunterScreen DailyAllan HunterThis is not a venture into wire-work and acrobatics but a contemplative, often ravishing-looking, immersion in the complex politics, power struggles and personalities of the Tang Dynasty as seen through the moral dilemmas facing an enigmatic trained assassin.
- 100The TelegraphRobbie CollinThe TelegraphRobbie CollinSilk curtains flutter and fall, candles glow, fires crackle softly in the grate. Every scene, every shot, has been composed with total, Kubrickian precision, and calibrated for maximum, breath-quickening impact.
- 100VarietyJustin ChangVarietyJustin ChangA 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.
- 91The PlaylistJessica KiangThe PlaylistJessica KiangIt isn't really about the people as much as about the pictures, and for once that does not seem to be a trade off that compromises the power of the resulting film at all.
- 88Slant MagazineJesse CataldoSlant MagazineJesse CataldoThe film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.
- 80CineVueJohn BleasdaleCineVueJohn BleasdaleLike the Barry Lyndon of martial arts movies, every shot has been composed, lit and executed with such care and attention by Hou and his cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing that The Assassin is totally absorbing in its spectacle, from the meticulous details of the interiors to the astonishing, breathtaking locations, from forests and waterfalls, to mountainsides and in one unforgettable moment cliff tops.
- 80The GuardianPeter BradshawThe GuardianPeter BradshawThe movie is a distillation of the assassin’s life of watchfulness, survival and fear. At other times, it has a dreamlike quality: a floating hallucination. The Assassin baffles, but more often it quietly captivates and astonishes.
- 80Time Out LondonDave CalhounTime Out LondonDave CalhounThe Assassin is a beautiful, beguiling film; it's impossible not to get fully lost in its rarefied world.
- 42HitfixGregory EllwoodHitfixGregory EllwoodHou and cinematographer Ping Bin Lee (“Renoir”) produce some stunning images on location (one conversation takes place as a fog beautifully emits from the bottom of a valley), but it’s hard to find a thematic connection between the directing style Hou has chosen and the story.