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| | The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective. |
 | | Further, the film's focus on the conflict of traditional values, represented by the King of Qin, with the more modern aesthetic, represented by the "selfish" agenda of the Nameless Assassin, sounds remarkably similar to the central concerns of many Bollywood epics as well. |
 | | While the question of what is true or real teases us throughout the film as the stories of the assassins are told and re-told; each shares enough similarity to suggest that certain things appear to have happened, but they differ just enough to provoke confusion and uncertainty as to what those events really mean. |
 | | The film's exquisitely choreographed mano-a-mano battles are, oddly enough, reminiscent of a Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire musical, or, perhaps more accurately, a ballet with medieval weaponry. |
| www.thefilmjournal.com /issue10/hero.html (916 words) |
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