The Assassin

For lovers of meditation and film as a painting art, this is 120 minutes of the deepest ecstasy. Ingenious work with a mise-en-scène, extra-terrestrial use of open-air scenes, a distinctive rewrite of the rules of the Wuxia genre as defined by Hollywood opuses of recent years, and a film vision from which you physically feel every second of the seven years that Master Chou devoted to film. [Cannes 2015] (24/05/2015)

Already at school, I really hated poetry analyses. "What did the author mean?" If I answered I didn't care, I was told to watch my manners, so I chose to keep quiet and avoid eye contact. Well, I felt the same way about this film. The visual aspect was perfect, but the story – dead boring. The plot itself was practically missing. Instead, I watched a number of long shots which often felt like my DVD got stuck. None of the dialogue was going anywhere, nothing was brought to a conclusion, and I refuse to ponder what the authors were trying to say. (10/01/2020)

These images are truly beautiful in some places, but the poetry in the film just doesn't appeal to me. That's simply because I'm more of an epic type who loves action and storytelling. This film with a promising international title didn't offer me that, so I settled for it being mostly a lengthy contemplation of characters and landscapes. (08/10/2015)