Sheldon C Featuring some of the best cinematography and choreography in the past decade, EXILED is visual satisfaction at its finest. Johnnie To's gangster actioner includes a fun story that, with its hyperrealistic style, is brooding, tense, emotional, and entertaining. People withstand plethoras of wounds and live to laugh about it, policemen are useless, and protagonists are gangsters. The result? An ideal plot for sustaining gorgeously crafted scenes of bullet and bloodshed ballets - beautiful from the slow-motion photography to the hard and precise lighting to the variety of different and constantly-interesting color palettes. The exquisite and warm production design brings 1998 Macau - a Portuguese colony in Southeast China about an hour long boat ride from Hong Kong - to life. It allows Cheng Siu- Keung - To's reliable and excellent DP - to design shadows and balance the dark atmosphere with evocative lighting setups in order to consistently emphasize danger and insurmountability for the protagonists. Anthony Wong leads a great cast with his subtle and imposing presence, complemented by Francis Ng's staccato outbursts and feisty demeanor, and offset by Simon Yam's fun and villainous role as a Triad boss. To top it off, Canadian composer Guy Zerafa provides a score filled with stringy and metallic guitar riffs that intricately builds the tension and results for an even more stylized experience. With actors who are suave, fitting, and flat-out cool, combined with the experienced technical team at Milky Way Images helping to realize the eloquent vision of their prolific director, EXILED is a fantastic action film where To's signature touch is unmistakable.

c_s_p_r My first thought after watching the movie was that I had seen a new Tarantino movie about gangster life in Hong Kong. So if you like Tarantino movies I think you will like this also, although it is not good as best Tarantino movies.The best things in this movie are the believable characters and the sudden surprises in the plot. There is also nice humour found here and there to cheer up the viewer. The plot worked nicely but after the movie I had the feeling that the script could have been also better to make this a real classic. However, the movie is entertaining and has something in the atmosphere that Hollywood action movies do not have. Worth to watch.

Roland E. Zwick Good luck trying to make any kind of sense out of "Exiled," a largely incoherent Chinese mob drama that at least boasts exquisite photography by Cheng Siu-Keung and uber-stylish direction by Johnnie To to hook and enthrall us. In fact, so riveting are the movie's visuals that you won't even mind that you can't tell who's who without a program or figure out how any of the characters are related to one another in the context of the narrative. It all has something to do with a gang of assassins trying to protect one of their own from the very mob boss who has sent them on a mission to take the man out - but I'll be damned if I can explain anything more that happens in the movie.Suffice it to say that with its meticulously composed, wide screen framing, its stylized action scenes - kind of a cross between Quentin Tarentino and Robert Rodriguez - its visual correlatives, and its dark, velvety colors, the movie makes it hard for us to tear our eyes off the screen for a single second.Almost a textbook case of style triumphing over substance, "Exiled" is a true cineaste's delight. And hang the story.

Quentintarantado I've seen this three times and I love it more each time. I see the nods to spaghetti westerns, to Scorsese (who last year just gave a nod back to Hong Kong for adopting the tone and look of the gangster films he made in the seventies, eighties and nineties), to samurai flicks. It's full of testosterone, the macho code of honor, boyish hi-jinks and barely simmering, under the surface homo-erotic subtext (yeah, you can call it male bonding, I'm calling it the most uncomfortable tag there is). There's so much sexual tension in this movie. Guns as phallic substitutes, a doctor getting it off with a whore (there are two whores? or was she the same one in the hotel?), but the men, they smile in admiration of women, they protect them, they never hurt them, they are gallant to a fault. Yet they can't seem to waste their seed making love to a woman. Their true love is gun-play and their compadres at war. If John Woo has his pigeons, Johnny To has his meals between unlikely comrades. I saw Breaking News, he had a meal there and he has one here too. And the ending. A can of Red Bull goes up, the blazing climax (even in slow motion, surely that's three, four minutes?), the can goes down. Standing ovation!