Μύ 
As Hollywood, and increasingly Britain, specialises more and more in the utterly obvious, it is a blessed relief to enter not only a quite different world but one which is filmed quite differently as well. The grand historical epics which engage us (or not) normally include battles which, for maximum impact (the director believes), have to last an age and have blood spilling everywhere. In "The Emperor and the Assassin", battles are briefer and far less bloody, yet the severe violence of this, to us, unknown era is still captured by director Chen Kaige who also made "Farewell My Concubine". Chen achieves surprise by shifting from one scene to another in ways you just can't predict, but this originality never once threatens the coherence of the film.
The director's one mistake is his fondness for pretty pictures which are either harnessed to powerful, surging drama (often communicating the instability of China in the third century BC) or to moments of inertia which mean Chen should have moved much more quickly on to the next scene.
A tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, "The Emperor and the Assassin" centres on the antics of King Ying Zheng whose decency soon gives way to violence as he tries to subjugate the other Chinese states, even going so far as to plan - with his concubine - a phoney assassination attempt on his own life so as to give himself a raison d'Γͺtre. Becoming known for the fairly trivial fact that it is the priciest picture ever made in Asia, "The Emperor and the Assassin" in fact gives us striking insights into an unfamiliar period of history, thus reminding us just how little of the world most films cover.
