Exiled

The success of Johnnie To’s films at the world’s leading festivals shows that there is no contradiction between taut, entertaining genre films and artistic achievement. Exiled returns us to the milieu of To’s 1999 classic The Mission. Two hitmen arrive at an apartment in Macao to kill Wo, who has been unwise enough to return after a failed hit on a local boss. Simultaneously, another couple arrive intent on protecting him. A stand-off of baroque proportions ensues before an explosion of gunfire, which then ends abruptly when the gunmen—all childhood friends—sit down together to dinner and try to find a solution. An immensely stylish re-working of the themes of loyalty, duty and the complications of doing the honourable thing.

In a mixed East Asian bag at Venice, it was by far the most popular pic...At least one sequence, a blackly humorous moment when both groups unknowingly converge in an operating room where a doctor's performing surgery, may become a classic.

Variety