Metacritic reviews

Handsome, passionate and fun. It's everything we go to the movies for.

This is a great movie, but it needs a sales job because it's in Mandarin.

You have never seen a movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because there has never been a movie like it.

Ang Lee, a world-class director working at the top of his elegant form, has done something thrilling. For all the leaping action, it's the film's spirit that soars.

Rarely has combat been portrayed as beautifully as in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Taiwanese director Ang Lee's thoughtful meditation on menace, mortality and the martial arts.

Brilliance of the action and effects are supplemented by a consistently superior and resourceful score by Tan Dun.

The picture is more fun than it has a right to be.

My first viewing left me dazzled but slightly confused; a second deeply impressed; a third rhapsodic. I wish I hadn't needed to rediagram it in my head to turn it into the masterpiece it so obviously wants to be.

The film satisfies on both visceral and emotional levels.

Crouching Tiger's dramatic line is so blurry that the central character is only a bystander to the climactic fight between forces of good and evil.