The Assassin's reviews
Media reviews
The Telegraph
"An immaculate treasure of light, texture and movement. This is one of the purest beauty films I've ever seen (...)"
Variety
"A hypnotic film martial arts film, mixing boldly calm and movemente, becomes the instant abstraction and achieved impressive new heights of visual elegance"
Cinemanía
"Torrente dazzling image (...) where beat stories piety, love and disobedience double corkscrew in China in the ninth century (...)"
The Hollywood Reporter
"Hou Hsiao-Hsien brings a pure and idiosyncratic to the martial arts genre (...) His detailed period costumes and art direction make it extraordinarily beautiful sight to behold."
El País
It establishes a deliberate tension between the overpowering value of their images and the density of a story waiting to be released-and Decrypt opaque gold jungle formalism.
El Mundo
"Unquestionably one of the most beautiful, elegant and magnetic films seen in a long time. (...) Uppercase cinema (...) What the director is basically reinvent an entire genre".
Fotogramas
"A postmodern reinvention of wuxia (...) A true masterpiece. Undisputed."
Indiewire
"The greatest achievement of today in 'The Assassin' is a kind of naturalism very unusual time, in which the director gets his historical past developed and exquisitely detailed, feel real, and the characters seem human."
The Wrap
Hou?s brand of reserve might not be for all audiences, but arthouse admirers of cinematic stillness will find themselves enraptured by this hypnotic tale.
El País
"I can hardly imagine Hou Hsiao-Hsien filming an action movie, (...) I'm not mistaken. 'The assassin' is so leaden uselessly beautician, vacuous, and incomprehensible as all his previous films."