Cannes Review: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 'The Assassin' Is An Epic Visual Poem

A film not to watch, but to gaze at, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "The Assassin" has famously been 25 years in gestation and five years in production. It seems extravagant — until you see it, at which point you start to wonder how he possibly can have dashed off something of such extraordinary beauty and observation so quickly. The pacing is geologically slow (as though every minute of those 25 years is distilled into every shot) and the story is a game of join the dots in which the dots are spaced so far apart it's hard to connect them into a bigger picture. But what bigger picture can there be than almost any one of these individually colossal frames (not literally, Hou shoots in Academy ratio), so packed with layers of painterly detail that foreground-middleground-background hardly covers it (Hou and DP Mark Lee Ping Bang adhere to the Christopher Doyle school of shooting from behind billowing curtains sometimes, I must say, nearly to the point of distraction)? The...