Hero, by the way, is the most visually beautiful movie I've seen all year, edging out The Dreamers and Collateral, and it has the best orchestral score I've heard in a long time. These are largely due to a couple of Western ringers: cinematographer Christopher Doyle, whose work with Wong Kar-Wai has already made him one of the immortals, and Itzhak Perlman, who fiddles beautifully on the soundtrack. All in all, though, this is Chinese filmmaking at its very best, and it should serve to introduce a much wider audience to Tony Leung, my favorite living movie star (well, almost) and clearly the dominant presence in Hero, even if Jet Li's name is above the title.

In answer to Noah's question below, it doesn't seem that Tony Leung knows much in the way of martial arts, but he fakes it splendidly. Besides, for Leung, training with a sword would only waste time that would be much better spent in other pursuits, such as cultivating his aura of quiet intensity.