Fuzzy Mushroom › Films of 2000 › Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Spore Score: 96/100 · The Pros: 98 · The Punters: 86 · 3 sources
Must-see. Spore Score 96/100. The Pros rate it 12 points higher than The Punters.
By Fuzzy Mushroom · Updated 11 November 2026 · The Pros 98 · The Punters 86 · Spore Score 96 · How we write our takes
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the most admired martial-arts films ever made, and The Pros give it 98. The Punters are cooler at 86, for a Spore Score of 96. The 12-point gap is easy to explain. Critics loved Ang Lee's blend of wuxia action and slow, sad romance. Some viewers who came for a fight film found the pace stately and the famous wire-work, in which fighters skim over rooftops and treetops, hard to accept.
In Qing dynasty China, the swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) decides to give up his life of fighting and hands his legendary sword, the Green Destiny, to a friend in Beijing. It is stolen the same night. Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), a warrior who has loved Li Mu Bai for years without ever saying so, sets out to recover it, and the trail leads to Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a young aristocrat about to be married against her will.
The fights, choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, are graceful and inventive: the night chase across Beijing rooftops, the duel between Shu Lien and Jen with a rack of weapons, and the swaying fight at the top of a bamboo forest. Between them, Lee makes room for a lot of silence. The real subject is people who never say what they feel until it is too late, and the ending is quietly devastating.
The long flashback to Jen's desert romance stalls the story. The floating is a convention of the wuxia genre, not a mistake, but it puts some viewers off. Watch it in Mandarin with subtitles if you can; the English dub flattens the performances.
It won four Oscars in 2001, including Best Foreign Language Film, and became one of the most successful foreign-language films ever released in the US.
Must-see, with a Spore Score of 96. The Pros are right. It is a beautiful, melancholy film with some of the best fight scenes ever shot.
Genres: Action, Drama, Romance, Sci-fi/Fantasy.
| Site | Side | Site score | Adjusted /100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rotten Tomatoes | The Pros (critics) | 97% | 94 |
| Metacritic | The Pros (critics) | 94/100 | 100 |
| IMDb | The Punters (audiences) | 7.8/10 | 86 |
The Pros' sites said 95, adjusted to 98; The Punters' sites said 78, adjusted to 86. Every review site has habits: some score high, some low, some bunch everything in the middle. We measure each site's habit across thousands of films and iron it out, so a 7/10 from a generous site and a 7/10 from a harsh one aren't treated the same. Then critics and audiences each get one figure, and the Spore Score sits between them. How the Spore Score works.
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