Hero: Critic Reviews

It's easy to become bewitched by sheer movie grandeur.

Roll over, Chairman Mao, and tell the comrades the news: in Hero, the history of the empire now comes wrapped in kaleidoscopic kung fu cool.

A movie just good enough to keep nurturing rooting interest as you watch it.

More than 90 minutes of gushy joy, of old-time movie pleasures.

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.

An exemplary feat of filmmaking.

The action is wittily aestheticized, with swordplay variously compared to music, calligraphy, and theater.

A knockout.

So self-consciously beautiful that it's distracting, but it elevates the material nevertheless.

Filled with unforgettable scenes.

Hero is not a long movie, yet it is persuasively epic.

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.

Demonstrates how the martial arts genre transcends action and violence and moves into poetry, ballet and philosophy.

An action movie for the ages.

From beginning to end, Hero is a painting in motion, its fight scenes a ballet with blades.

A stunning epic of China that serves up both a visual feast and fascinating narrative.

Hero reminds us all why filmmaking is called an art.

I wouldn't have missed this spectacle for the world, and neither should you -- despite an admitted quirk in my political sensibility in these contentious times that keeps me from admiring the film wholeheartedly.

A dazzlingly lensed, highly stylized meditation on heroism and the point at which individualism conflicts with the common good.

Full of passionate performances, sizzling swordplay, bold and dazzling hues, and breathtaking landscapes.

Though Yimou never achieves the romance of Ang Lee's dabble in martial arts, he reaches new heights of spectacle with the combat.

If martial arts movies have always seemed like musicals with full body contact, Zhang Yimou's Hero is the closest the form has yet come to a full-blown Vincente Minnelli MGM extravaganza.

As brilliant and ephemeral as a fireworks display.

It's not too much to say that Hero is one of the most ravishing spectacles the movies have given us.

This is an amazingly stylish and vivid motion picture, where images move the story forward more forcefully than the traditional methods of exposition, dialogue, and character development. If there's a drawback, it's that the plot is trite.