The Assassin shows up a few "best of" lists and practically defines an "Art House" film. Beautiful visuals combined with a glacial pace (actually a little slower then glacial), this is one film that a viewer should read about as much as possible including the plot because there is very little dialog and nothing is explained. I went in cold and slowly figured out what was happening but also started reading the plot summary about 3/4 the way through.
The Assassin is director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 18th and final film and considered his best. Hou won the award for Best Director at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for The Assassin.
"Hou Hsiao-hsien (Chinese: 侯孝賢; born 8 April 1947) is a Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is a leading figure in world cinema and in Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for his film A City of Sadness (1989), and the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Assassin (2015). Other highly regarded works of his include The Puppetmaster (1993) and Flowers of Shanghai (1998).
"Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics by The Village Voice and Film Comment. In a 1998 New York Film Festival worldwide critics' poll, Hou was named "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hou_Hsiao-hsienA visual poem for patient viewers only
