But it isn't really about the people as much as about the pictures, and for once that does not seem to be a trade off that compromises the power of the resulting film at all. These are pictures that feel like time (which will make them hard to sit through for the impatient) — they feel steeped, marinated in time, as though Hou has waited, not 25 years, but eleven centuries with his camera parked on this hillside or beside that thatched barn, to get just exactly the right combination of light and cloud and movement and stillness, just the right fall of a sleeve or tremble of a drape in the breeze. It has been seven years since Hou's last film, "The Flight of the Red Balloon," and I hope it won't be as long till his next, but "The Assassin" is the literal embodiment of the rewards, for the film and for the viewer, of patience and held breath. [A-]
