Asia's crouching cinematic tiger

This film has something that its American counterparts lack. Its apparently unlikely combination of song-and-dance, fantasy, spectacle and balletic violence somehow works. It achieves the kind of ironic distance from all of its subject matter that Hollywood has groped for and failed dismally to pull off. This enables it to transmute the violence and tragedy on which so much cinema depends into a continuous feel-good experience.

from the guardian