Convoluted, cryptic and confusing, but it looks and sounds amazing.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 2, 2019

Without a comprehensible plot, Ashes of Time Redux feels like a waste of time.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 13, 2018

...mostly this is a movie that wants to linger on mesmerizing movement.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 29, 2016

If Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Redux (2008) is not the most beautiful movie ever made, then at least its beauty is sufficient to obliterate, for the moment, the memory of all others.

| Jun 1, 2015

It's hard to recommend a film as frustratingly inaccessible as this one, but if you go into the theater expecting a trip to an art gallery, you might be pleasantly surprised.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 30, 2009

Redux clocks in at a slightly shorter running time than any of the previous versions Wong has offered. The tighter edit is a better fit, but ultimately, it's not enough.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 12, 2009

The film's imagery is its most striking asset, creating an impressionistic sense of both vastness and intimacy that frequently overwhelms the characters and their problems.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 12, 2009

It's like watching paint dry--which isn't very exciting, however pretty the colors.

| Original Score: C- | Dec 30, 2008

Ashes of Time Redux, like that line from Hey Jude, takes a sad song and makes it better.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 19, 2008

Wong Kar Wai could make even a compost heap look as gorgeous as a Vermeer.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 12, 2008

I know Kar Wai's got a fanbase, but to me he's equivalent to a recent film school graduate using all of the post-production tricks that he's learned, either to show off what he's learned or to cover up his lack of talent.

| Original Score: .5/4 | Dec 12, 2008

Wong's film is to be appreciated as poetry on film, an aphorism-filled ode to lovestruck dreamers, and for its beautifully rendered images.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 12, 2008

The motion picture as mood ring.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 26, 2008

Maybe something gets lost in the translation, as often happens, but Wong may be giving us the first Eastern.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 21, 2008

Unfathomably gorgeous; perhaps even the most gorgeous film Wong Kar-Wai has yet made, which is not a bit of praise I hand out lightly.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 20, 2008

Beautiful to look at, with painterly compositions, gorgeous, emotionally charged close-ups and slick, elegant transitions. It's all for naught because the story seems no more coherent than the flourishes of a kaleidoscope.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Nov 20, 2008

In the end, it's not unlike a Jackson Pollock painting. No matter how close or how far away you stand from it, some people just get it and some people don't.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 14, 2008

For this director's cut, Wong has trimmed several minutes and reorganized the narrative according to the passage of seasons, though the plot is still impenetrable.

| Nov 14, 2008

Wong Kar-Wai doesn't supply much of a plot with a narrative engine to pull us through.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 14, 2008

Even drastically altered as it has been in Ashes of Time Redux, the strengths and weaknesses of the film are the same.

| Nov 14, 2008