With a penchant for moody music, colorful imagery, decorated interiors, and splendidly unique cinematography, Kar-wai brings those talents to a totally new genre for him with The Grandmaster.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 14, 2024

Yuen Wo Ping provides the choreography, which Wong turns into something more like a dance on screen. To Wong, the power of the movement is not just in its effect upon a rival fighter but in the way the man moves through the world.

| Aug 19, 2023

Captivating. With the absorbing ghost of the biggest export in the history of China: Bruce Lee. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 11, 2023

A case of style over substance. But, oh my, what style.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 9, 2020

[The American Cut] wants to fit itself within the confines of a specific genre, but the director is one whose ambition transcends beyond that.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 23, 2020

It is a poetic martial arts epic, crowded with philosophical dialogues that makes one meditate on the issues surrounding the destiny and tradition of an art. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 25, 2020

The Grandmaster is both masterful and a masterpiece.

| Nov 27, 2019

Wong has crafted a stunning spectacle, a film that employs some of the most arresting martial arts sequences perhaps ever put to film. But neglecting to clearly relate to us the life and times of Ip Man reduces the film to a fragile bauble.

| Aug 22, 2019

Ultimately, it's a kung fu film about wit and cunning and life and art and love. The focus is on the relationships between these characters, and the historical fiction element serves merely as a backdrop.

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | Jul 16, 2019

An intoxicating exploration of love and honor, and Wong's finest film since his 2001 masterpiece, In the Mood for Love.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 9, 2019

Wong Kar-Wai delivers an emotional, but explosive, love letter to the master of Wing Chun.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 31, 2019

The Grandmaster strikes me as Wong's strongest film since In the Mood for Love and surprisingly credible as an exercise in kung fu stylistics as well as temps perdu.

| Feb 25, 2019

Nonetheless, this remains a stunning biopic with multi-skilled actors that carries Wong's signature style.

| Dec 14, 2018

Wong's finest work finds grand emotions in intimate subjects, and we never get close enough to the characters here to approach those heights.

| Aug 30, 2018

Even at its best, "The Grandmaster" suffers from bloat. Spending years on a film doesn't bring out the director's best qualities.

| Feb 20, 2018

For those outside the genre, The Grandmaster is at its best when it offers context for its story, such as the scenes that reference World War II, lending weight to circumstances that are more relatable than regional Kung Fu rivalries.

| Nov 29, 2017

The Grandmaster is a martial-arts film, whose complicated narrative strategies and ambitious attempt to re-stylize a form that looks to be increasingly moribund, sets it apart from its generic brethren.

| Oct 2, 2017

Wong Kar Wai's latest film is by turns elegant and frustrating, beautiful and hard to track, sumptuous and spartan.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 14, 2016

The Grandmaster thrives on the raw talent of its author.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 28, 2016

Kung fu masters kick dents in iron railings. These 'magical' things are artist renditions of the super-normal abilities that can be developed through years of practice.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 18, 2016