Critics reviews

House of Flying Daggers shares Hero's balletic choreography, stunning palette, and innovative digital effects, but drops its deplorable politics... As with past Zhang Yimou efforts, the true stars are the sets, costumes, and scenery, a breathtaking banquet of colors and textures filmed with rapturous affection by cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao.

[In Daggers, Zhang] mixes old-school inventiveness with cutting-edge special effects. The result is a wonderfully visual adventure with fantastic martial arts choreography by Siu-Tung Ching; and the director's usual gorgeous use of composition and color.

House of Flying Daggers doesn’t have the grave import, the awesome stoicism of Hero, but I think that makes for a more entertaining picture... I don’t know if the many plot swerves withstand a second viewing, but I suspect the meat of the matter – the swooning visuals, the expert choreography, the teasing love story – does. It is those elements, at least, that continue to obsessively replay in my head, long after the lights went up in the theatre.

An extraordinary, swoonworthy spectacle... [Daggers] delivers what I can only call a narco-exotic rush; it has the power of Hero and the reach of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - and might simply surpass them both with its unexpectedly painful and complex love story.

Detractors [of the film] will point out that the plot is a half-baked series of clichés and that the characters are as psychologically deep as a puddle in the Gobi desert. They're absolutely right, but it hardly matters when every frame of this operatic movie is inflamed with such breathless sensuality... Martial arts have rarely been filmed with so much artistry.

The action [in Daggers] is exquisite, the cinematography sublime and Ziyi Zhang's balletic skills breathtaking... Yimou Zhang's use of slow motion and visual effects has an artistic integrity that compliments the romanticism of the story.

A singularly beautiful film... As a devoted Zhang Yimou watcher for nearly two decades, I am happy to report that my doubts about the director over his seeming conformism in Hero have been erased by The House of Flying Daggers.

''House of Flying Daggers" is, hands down, the most visually ravishing movie of the year. It has sequences of balletic martial arts action that can knock you back, open-mouthed... Yet the movie amounts to frustratingly little by the time it's over, and you come out treasuring the pieces while wondering where the movie went.

[In Daggers, Zhang] wins for mainland China a share of the martial arts glory long claimed by Hong Kong and its acolytes like Ang Lee and Quentin Tarantino. 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.

Zhang’s companion piece to ‘Hero’ remixes the colour palette and unfolds the starry cast and plot ploys, but it’s essentially a lookalike project that pushes the martial-arts lyricism of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ into even more rarefied designer terrain.

[A] small but visually grand drama... [in which] Zhang weaves both thrilling martial-arts set pieces and stunning studies of period silk tapestry and costume.

The most intoxicatingly beautiful martial arts picture I’ve ever seen... [Daggers] is a sword-and-dagger extravaganza with some wonderfully florid romantic melodrama: The big fighting sequences bloom out of the characters’ passions, the way song and dance numbers do in classic musicals.