Venice. Lust, Caution
"Too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, a 2½-hour period drama that's a long haul for relatively few returns," writes Derek Elley for Variety. "Wartime Shanghai was far more realistically drawn in Lou Ye's Zhang Ziyi starrer Purple Butterfly, which also conveyed a stronger sense of resistance and collaborationist politics. Lee's 40s Shanghai, though immaculately costumed, has a standard backlot look; the Hong Kong sequences, largely shot in Malaysia, are much more flavorsome."
"The Taiwanese director's adaptation of a novella by Eileen Chang is an uncompromising and incredibly seductive piece of filmmaking that is too long but has so a number of good elements going for it that it is hard to really care that on certain points the director seems to have thrown caution to the wind," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "Acting and technical credits are more than first-class and newcomer Wei Tang, starring alongside veteran Tony Leung, is simply riveting."
Updated through 8/31.