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[Lust, Caution] is a movie that showcases Lee's flair for period detail and genre stylisation. For his sheer muscular verve and ambition, Lee deserves a standing ovation. Orson Welles was described once as picking up a play with the confidence of a marksman picking up a rifle, and that is exactly how I felt Lee handles this source material.

It may seem like a long time getting there, but when Lust, Caution finally reels you in, the payoff is both provocative and satisfying. More importantly, you may find yourself heading for the door thinking, maybe, just maybe, you could have sat through just a little bit more...

[Lust, Caution] is a snooze of historically epic proportions. It is unfailingly beautiful, thanks to cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto... but oddly unaffecting. For all its patriotic, love-during-wartime fervor, Lee's film only ever really takes off when stars Leung and newcomer Wei take off their clothes.

For all its virtues, Lust, Caution feels emotionally remote, a film that is easier to admire than to adore... Even the film's notorious sex scenes, graphic and acrobatic though they may be, seem somehow cool and technical, bodies displayed but spirits far distant. Despite its considerable running time--well over two-and-a-half hours--Lust, Caution rarely gets under the skin.

Too long, too slow, too self-indulgent and too brutal in its graphic sex scenes, Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” is a film not to be missed. Whatever misgivings there may be about it, this festival-winning film is a mesmerizing, rich experience.

Intense, psychologically intricate and sexually explicit... [Lust, Caution] is a brooding meditation on the unnerving power and terrible cost of emotional and political masquerades... Lee has made a film of ambition and accomplishment, one that is both a summation of all he knows and a promise of even greater achievement in the future.

There is not a frame of the film that is not beautiful, but there may be too many frames. Why does Ang Lee go into such depth and detail to establish this world, and why does he delay the film's crucial scenes? [...Lust, Caution] is not among his best films. It lacks the focus and fire that his characters finally find. Less sense, more sensibility.

Like too many films that try to put a human face on history without really engaging with it, “Lust, Caution” feels at once overpadded and underdeveloped: it’s all production design and not enough content. The screenwriters... have puffed up and sexed up Eileen Chang’s original story without adding any psychological depth or sociopolitical heft.

For nearly an hour, Lust, Caution plays like an exceedingly well-made but conventional wartime spy drama... [until] the film turns into something rawer and stranger... Lust, Caution is both a cannily constructed spy thriller and a grim kind of love story, but it harbors no illusions about the transformative potential of either revolutionary violence or sexual passion.

Lustful sex scenes and enthralling performances enliven [the film's] otherwise cautious storytelling... Lee himself seems to want to show up Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, slightly amending that film’s sketchy sexual politics but flattening its stirring socio-cultural purview, ending up similarly half-cocked.

Ang Lee's new film promises much more than it actually delivers. Lavishly handsome and elegant, possibly too much so for its own good, this sprawling adaptation of a short story by Eileen Chang risks leaving audiences cold - despite the sometimes excessively passionate nature of its storyline.

[Lust, Caution] is an immaculately played but largely bloodless melodrama which takes an hour-and-a-half to even start revving up its motor... [and] lacks the deep-churning emotional currents that drove Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” and his best other works.