| 100 |
Time
Hero is the masterpiece. It employs unparalleled visual splendor to show why men must make war to secure the peace and how warriors may find their true destiny as lovers.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
Swooningly beautiful, furious and thrilling, Zhang Yimou's Hero is an action movie for the ages.
|
| 100 |
Charlotte Observer
Breathtaking masterpiece.
|
| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
A walloping entertainment, brimming with the magic-realist action that made Ang Lee's somewhat similar "Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" a hit.
|
| 100 |
Los Angeles Times
Led by director Zhang Yimou and dazzling cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the unseen Hero production team has made what just might be the most artistically sophisticated, most formally beautiful martial arts film the genre has seen.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Reader
The result is both thrilling and thoughtful.
|
| 100 |
Baltimore Sun
Hero is a movie that lives up to all the nobility of its title, a gift to movie audiences who cherish the opportunity to be transported to a heretofore unimagined world and absorbed totally into what happens there.
|
| 100 |
Salon.com
One of the most ravishing spectacles the movies have given us.
|
| 100 |
Premiere
Hero is one of the most beautiful and involving films of the year.
|
| 100 |
Empire
Adam Smith
The comparisons are inevitable, so let's get them out of the way. Hero is a better film than "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
|
| 91 |
Portland Oregonian
Perhaps the most beautiful film to hit Portland movie screens this year.
|
| 91 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Yimou plays his images like a visual symphony, and turns a potential costume pageant into an exhilarating national myth.
|
| 90 |
LA Weekly
Tim Appelo
Hero is an epic, evocative of another epoch and of landscapes beyond time. It's overwhelming. And yet I miss the animating anger of Zhang's early masterworks, in which penniless young lovers were oppressed by impotent old men.
|
| 90 |
The New Yorker
This is a leap into grandeur.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
You can feel the movie's sensibility and its powerful emotions in every aching image, which leaves you so caught up in these ancient times, you're loath to return to present-day normalcy.
|
| 89 |
Austin Chronicle
A terrific piece of work.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
A visual poem of extraordinary beauty.
|
| 88 |
Miami Herald
If you found "Crouching Tiger" a stunning bore, you probably won't fall under Hero's spell. But the rest of us, well, we'll be more than happy to savor every moment of its strange, ravishing beauty.
|
| 88 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Its stars - especially the photogenic Leung and Cheung, fresh from Wong Kar Wai's jazzy romance In the Mood for Love - are wonderfully charismatic. And wonderfully athletic.
|
| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly
I wish 'Hero's emotional heat rose more intensely -- more recklessly. There's something grand but distant and almost fetishistic about the operatic solemnity with which Zhang approaches the Rashomonic story of assassins attempting to kill a king.
|
| 80 |
Film Threat
G. Allen Johnson
Hero is not a CTHD clone; it’s a wonderful movie in its own right, staking its own territory as a dreamlike meditation on motivation and love.
|
| 80 |
Variety
A dazzlingly lensed, highly stylized meditation on heroism.
|
| 80 |
Slate
If his (Zhang's) fight scenes don't fully intoxicate, though, his color and compositional rigor compensate for much. See Hero on the biggest screen you can find, and sit close enough for all that spiraling silk to tickle your nostril hairs.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
As gorgeous and contemplative as it is, Hero is a genre picture and needs to deliver the action goods. To that end, there are plenty of clever, lovingly choreographed sequences.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
It's full of passionate performances (except for the wooden Li), sizzling swordplay, bold and dazzling hues, and breathtaking landscapes.
|
| 75 |
ReelViews
If there's a drawback, it's that the plot is trite. Hero is an exemplary example of visual poetry. The narrative is clearly of secondary concern.
|
| 75 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
In the end, the spectacular martial-arts epic seems to signify nothing much more than its own beauty, as brilliant and ephemeral as a fireworks display.
|
| 75 |
Boston Globe
These people may be really, really dangerous, but they're also really, really polite.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Not as profound as it is pretty, Hero nevertheless gives us something to ponder beyond Zhang's feat in mounting such a magnificent production.
|
| 75 |
Rolling Stone
The film never musters the intimate feel the gifted director brought to such early films as "Raise the Red Dragon" and "Ju Dou." You cheer his accomplishment in Hero without ever feeling close to it.
|
| 70 |
Washington Post
It's a brilliant movie, fluent, spectacular, breathtaking and basically, uh, wrong.
|
| 70 |
New York Magazine
So deliriously chockablock with high-flying, color-coordinated fight scenes that non-aficionados may find it all a bit bewildering--a gorgeous abstraction. It sure is gorgeous, though, and it has a dream cast
|
| 70 |
Wall Street Journal
Joanne Kaufman
Rich in motion -- the very clothes of the characters seem under a choreographer's direction -- as well as imagery.
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
Though the specifics of the story may be unfamiliar to Western viewers, its broad outlines and underlying themes are universal, and Christopher Doyle's ravishing cinematography transcends language.
|
| 70 |
Village Voice
Zhang Yimou's impeccably crafted, all-star martial arts extravaganza, is the essence of shallow gravitas.
|
| 70 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Brilliant in flashes, thinned out as a whole, the film seems ideal for the DVD revolution, where the greatest hits can be compiled at the touch of a remote.
|
| 70 |
Dallas Observer
Hero keeps its characters stiffly archetypal, like chess pieces sent whizzing through outrageous maneuvers. Unfortunately, this apparent choice of spectacle over intimacy put me at a slight remove.
|
| 63 |
USA Today
A movie just good enough to keep nurturing rooting interest as you watch it.
|
| 60 |
The New York Times
Hero is easy on the eyes, but it's too segmented to gather much momentum and too art-directed to convey much urgency.
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