Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

ctomvelu1 Odd little movie shot in Argentina about an American hit man sent to take our a general, only to find himself with time on his hands before he can take out the general and return home. To kill time, he takes up the tango, and the movie is as much about this unusual development as the impending assassination. Robert Duvall directed and starred in it, and it is worth watching for him and him alone. Ruben Blades costars. The dancing is great, but it's not enough to sustain a whole movie. This would appear to be a pet project of Duvall's. I hesitate to call it a vanity production like most Tom Cruise movies. The title is very literal with regardt the plot.

Wayne Dear Robert Duvall made two mistakes in making Assassination Tango. First, he hired the wrong director. So watch this some evening on the IFC channel and imagine Woody Allen behind the script and the camera.Really, people, it has the classic Woody elements: an older, ratty-looking leading man; way younger hot women as romantic interests; and barely suppressed angst.Oh, yeah...the second mistake: Duvall gives up the story in the title. So after viewing this film, compare it to his work and make up your own tag. How about Invasion of the Tango Snatchers?One more observation: Manuela, the tango teacher, is played by Duvall's wife, Luciana Pedraza. Never direct your wife in a movie, or her ass might look big as it does in some tango shots.

Joe Allen This film follows the well trodden path of an ageing hit-man (John J) sent on what may well be his last job in Argentina which also sets the backdrop for a second stand of the story: John J's love of Tango. Between the dancing and the hit-man underworld we move from light to dark and subsequently John J's character becomes difficult to like and yet difficult to dislike. And this is what makes this film stand out for me. John J is a real person. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. The interplay between characters has also got a fresh kind of realism to it ala Ken Loach. The touching café scene in particular between John J and Manuela feels like a docu-drama with its unscripted pauses and moments of awkwardness. If you are looking for action but are sick of the wooden black and white characters we get from Hollywood then this film is for you. I loved it.

Robert J. Maxwell Robert Duvall has turned in such interesting performances in films like "The Godfather," "M*A*S*H", and "True Grit" that "Assassination Tango" comes across as a disappointment. The plot, the direction, and the performances are weaker than we might have hoped.As an actor, Duvall lapses into too many of his familiar arid chuckles. He whooshes when he's out of breath, which is okay, but then he talks to himself in order to let us, the viewers, know what his character is thinking.The other performers, with one exception, seem as if they'd been recruited from among a crowd of extras with more attention being paid to appearance than to thespian skills.As a director, Duvall aims at a kind of street-level realism that winds up as what can only be called simulated vernacular. Actors repeat their lines. Not just something like, "Wait a minute, wait a minute," but, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute." Some of the banter sounds embarrassingly spontaneous, as in some of Casavetes' work. It isn't that Duvall doesn't expose himself to risks -- he doffs his shirt and murders several strangers without blinking -- but it's just that the risks don't pay off.Maybe it would be better if the dragged-out plot had the sinuosity and precision of the dance interludes. There's no particular reason for Duvall's developing obsession with the tango. It's just flatly there, as is his friendship and tentative amor with one of the dancers, Luciana Pedraza. And yet an emotional involvement with the dance is understandable enough. What elegance! If anyone thinks of the tango at all, the notion is likely to evoke an image out of "Some Like It Hot." Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemon (in drag) snapping around one way, then the other, switching a rose back and forth between their teeth. But the real tango is different. (Cf., Saura's "Tango".) The dancers clasp each other and seem glued together from the neck up while their torsos and legs execute these unimaginably complicated maneuvers beneath them and carry them around on the dance floor. One false move and they'd both be flat on their backs. (Come on, babuh, let's do da twist?)There is one outstanding performance in the film and that is Pedraza's. We first see her as Duvall does, when witnessing his first tango. She is dancing on stage with a partner, her shimmering black hair pulled back in a severe bun (?), a captivating, almost hallucinatory hologram of femininity.Afterward, when she takes her seat at the table with some friends, Duvall signals her from across the room. A friend brings this to her attention and she turns her face to squint at him through the smoke. If one is expecting a staggering young beauty, one will be disappointed. This is a thirtyish woman with a small dimpled chin and slightly flaring ears. But her stare is filled with curiosity, understanding, and warmth. Que mujer! Her performance has the faux spontaneous quality of most of the other actors but at times she manages to succeed in convincing us that this is the sort of voice you might hear across from you in a café -- ordinary, except for a certain insidious Spanish accent that causes her voice to undulate in unexpected directions, the way her feet slither and glide across the dance floor.You don't really get to learn much about the tango, and I'm not certain just how professional the dancers are because I know nothing of the dance form myself. The assassination is unpleasant, although we keep hoping that Duvall gets away with it. (He does.) The movie ends happily with Duvall back in New York with his girl friend and her child, and it leaves us wondering what the point of it all was.