'Lust, Caution'

IT'S unnerving to see "Lust, Caution" as the title of Ang Lee's provocative new film because these states, each capable of obliterating the other, exist at the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. They can never be reconciled, and characters who are forced by circumstance to live on the knife's edge between them not only endure unbearable tension but risk savage emotional destruction as well.

By Kenneth Turan

October 5, 2007