House of Flying Daggers Reviews
A dazzler -- and almost as exciting as its title promises.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
One of the most visually astonishing martial-arts fantasies ever made.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
About as viscerally and visually exciting as film can get, and yet it is also fully, ripely romantic in a way that few modern films would dare.
| Original Score: A
Detroit Free Press
Top CriticAs stunning as it is, it also serves notice that House of Flying Daggers will have none of the complexities of Hero.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Zhang proves that Hero was no accident with House of Flying Daggers, another Chinese period piece resplendent with a dazzling palette and soaring, ambitious fight sequences.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
An intoxicating cocktail of splendid visuals, spectacular action, state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery and some old-fashioned swashbuckling worthy of Hollywood's Golden Age.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Zhang ... mixes old-school inventiveness with cutting-edge special effects.
It's the ravishment of romance, adventure, nobility, betrayal, all those big, primary-colored old-fashioned movie emotions.
If pure action is your game, this House is your home.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
This is the sort of film we're intended to wallow in, barely coming up for air -- so dazzled, we barely need to breathe.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Like an extraordinary-looking but intellectually limited fashion model.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's action opera, sword-and-sorcery song-and-dance, and it's a heart-pumping, jaw-dropping thrill.
| Original Score: 4/4
We get a movie that's easy to look at but that leaves us emotionally cold.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Though less of a virtuoso work than Hero, House of Flying Daggers is much more emotionally immediate.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
In a way, Flying Daggers might be compared to the great old MGM musicals that were driven in part by showy set pieces.
| Original Score: A-
Delivers many of the absurd pleasures of opera.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The film is so good to look at and listen to that, as with some operas, the story is almost beside the point, serving primarily to get us from one spectacular scene to another.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It has sequences of balletic martial arts action that can knock you back, open-mouthed, in your comfy multiplex chair. Yet the movie amounts to frustratingly little by the time it's over.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
House of Flying Daggers pierces the mind's eye with its crazy beautiful images, then rends the heart.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
House of Flying Daggers is loaded with the kinds of visual wonders that make adult moviegoers feel like giddy kids.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
The director has taken the martial-arts genre to its ultimate flowering: to ennoble women as full-fledged warriors capable of defending their own honor before deciding on the man they chose to love.
Offers more of [Zhang Yimou's] beautiful photography, graceful staging, intricately choreographed fight scenes and metaphorical imagery.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's as thrilling and lushly beautiful a movie as has been released all year, matched only by Zhang's epic Hero.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
This is the most intoxicatingly beautiful martial arts picture I've ever seen.
Zhang could not shoot an unbeautiful scene if he tried.
[An] even zippier, more cunning kung fu caper [than Hero].
If this isn't the most visually stunning film to be released in the U.S. this year, it's second to Yimou's Hero.
House of Flying Daggers is the rare film that inspires audiences to suspend a sense of reality and allow themselves to be transported, as if under a spell, to an alternate, fantastic world.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The romantic adventure catches the eye but never penetrates the psyche.
An emotion-charged epic of style and sophistication that is exciting and at times humorous.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Eye candy at its thickest, richest and exotically spiciest.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The director is an audacious stylist, and the intricate, carefully constructed, special-effects-enhanced martial-arts sequences are riveting.
An outrageously gorgeous spectacle of balletic aggression.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
You'll either think that Zhang's new sumptuous, digitally Botoxed roustabout is simply doing what Hong Kong movies have been too fast, cheap, and out of control to do before or that it's commodifying the tropes into a streamlined McSpectacle.
Combined with Hero, this gives Zhang an amazing one-two stylistic action punch.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Prepare your eyes for popping.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Though it is in constant, breathtaking motion, Zhang Yimou's gorgeous entertainment is not especially moving.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The action set pieces really are the core of Daggers, and these hit the mark with eye-popping accuracy and sonic elan.
Chinese master Zhang Yimou creates a gem in House of Flying Daggers.
