Lust, Caution

TV Guide Ken Fox

Lee has perfectly captured the details, textures, sights and sounds of a China caught between East and West, occupied by an ancient enemy and quaking on the eve of an earth-shaking revolution.

Slate Dana Stevens

Lust, Caution is both a cannily constructed spy thriller and a grim kind of love story, but it harbors no illusions about the transformative potential of either revolutionary violence or sexual passion.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The sex is REALLY hot. Not hardcore pornographic (at least by my definition of the term) but close.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Lee is a true master, and his potently erotic and suspenseful Lust, Caution casts a spell you won't want to break.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A rich, beautifully detailed espionage thriller that captures the bygone days of Shanghai - and 1940s Hollywood noirs' romantic evocations of same - Lust, Caution is also one of those rare movie experiences: Its scenes of the trysts between Yee and Mak, from their rough-stuff first encounter to the long, tangled love-making sessions of subsequent meetings, are truly erotic.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A brooding meditation on the unnerving power and terrible cost of emotional and political masquerades, the Chinese-language Lust, Caution gets under your skin with its examination of what qualifies as love and what does not.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Though Lust, Caution resounds with these disconcerting themes, it operates on the same principle that distinguishes all lasting romances, be they "Wuthering Heights," "Casablanca" or "When Harry Met Sally."

Empire Damon Wise

A beautifully rendered, long, drawn-out but ultimately very satisfying story of betrayal and revenge in an uneasy setting of wartime paranoia.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Stylized and visually arresting, with intense sex scenes that earned the film an NC-17 rating, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is an immersion into another time, place and mentality.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

The film is never less than beautiful, but it's never truly absorbing.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Film by film, Ang Lee, from Taipei out of the University of Illinois, has become one of the world's leading directors. This film was his second Golden Lion winner in three years at the Venice Film Festival. But it is not among his best films. It lacks the focus and fire that his characters finally find. Less sense, more sensibility.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

I didn't feel the love between the flowering idealist and the ruthless killer. If I did, I would have given the movie four stars. Everything else is wonderful.

USA Today Claudia Puig

But reserve dampens the passion in Lust, Caution, his beautifully mounted but rather unmoving film. It feels surprisingly cold, despite this erotic thriller's ultra-explicit sex scenes.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

After seeing "Brokeback Mountain," with its sanctified couplings against a backdrop of purple mountain majesties, some of us felt that Ang Lee owed us a dirty movie with more bodily fluids. Lust, Caution is that movie--for maybe 10 of its 158 minutes. The rest of the film is absorbing, though.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Sumptuously produced and beautifully visualized, this is a filmmaker's meditation on the culture that nurtured him. As a piece of entertainment, however, it's hoist by its own paradox -- an almost thrill-free thriller that seems seductive, yet stays resolutely remote.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

The perfectly dressed surfaces couldn't be more lovely, but the long fashion show to the finale smothers the emotions under the length and the look, and Lee's insights into the messy feelings that simmer and stew in the hothouse of sex are, frankly, fairly mundane.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II, Ang Lee's uneven new film is a bit like a Chinese variant on Paul Verhoeven's "The Black Book." The sex scenes in this otherwise overly prim period piece are extremely graphic.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

Conceptually, Lust, Caution has been thoroughly thought-through, down to every lipstick stain Wei leaves on her teacups.

Premiere Howard Karren

It might have been better to have played it straight — small instead of epic, chronological instead of deconstructed — and to give his characters some explicitness in history instead of the bedroom.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

This is a movie guaranteed to turn you into a vacillating commitment-phobe, embracing it passionately one moment and then backing off cautiously the next.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

There's too much caution and not enough lust.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Running two hours and forty minutes, never finds the same balance: by the time he gets to the lust, it is too late to throw caution to the winds.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Tang Wei brings a terrible and awe-inspiring purity to an impure character.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Lust, Caution wants us to feel the erotic ping of buttoned-up people ripping open those buttons, but too often it's the film's drama that's under wraps.

Newsweek David Ansen

There’s a great, piercing story here, but too often you feel you’re watching it through the wrong end of the telescope.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Outside the bedroom, the wartime swirl of intrigue never develops beyond postcard imagery, however. This is one of the major disappointments of the film-going year.

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

Ang Lee's lugubrious spy epic Lust, Caution brings to mind what soldiers say about war: that it's long periods of boredom relieved by moments of extremely heightened excitement.

Variety Derek Elley

Too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, a 2½--hour period drama that's a long haul for relatively few returns.

Village Voice Robert Wilonsky

Ang Lee's latest foray into forbidden love is as monotonous and disaffecting as "Brokeback Mountain" was gripping and immediate.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Lust, Caution is a disappointment coming from director Ang Lee, but it's a watchable one, and it rattles around in your head for a long time after you've seen it, as much for what it does right as for where it goes wrong.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The bursts of sex and violence that earned this picture an NC-17 rating offer only temporary respite from the encroaching dullness.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It’s one of the most cautious readings of lust ever put to film.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Lust, Caution could have done with a lot more lust and a lot less caution.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

The sex scenes -- intense, affecting and emotionally raw -- are the best thing about this frustratingly limp movie.