ANG LEE - MOVIE REVIEWS: LUST, CAUTIOIN

MOVIE REVIEWS: LUST, CAUTIOIN

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, which recently won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival despite mixed reviews from critics there, didn't do much better with critics in New York, where it opened this past weekend. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times said that it "feels at once overpadded and underdeveloped: it's all production design and not enough content." Likewise Claudia Puig in USA Today called it "beautifully mounted but rather unmoving." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post admitted that after 90 minutes of the 2 1/2-hour film, "I was struggling to stay awake." Moreover, he wrote, the performances "are so flat that you don't really much care what happens to anybody." On the other hand, John Anderson in Newsday commented that "there is an unstinting integrity to Lee's imagery, be it seductive, violent or violently erotic."

01/10/2007