Assassin. The film's Chinese title is best translated as "Our Best Moments", and Hou has said the stories are somewhat inspired by his memories. He has said, "It seems to me that by contrasting love stories from three different times, we can feel how people's behavior is circumscribed by the times and places they live in. [...] I'm pushing sixty, and these things have been hanging around for so long it seems like they're part of me. Maybe the only way I can discharge my debt to them is to film them." Discussing Three Times in an interview for Artificial Eye’s UK DVD edition, Hou said: I feel that every era has its own distinctive sense. These eras will never come again. Time keeps moving forward. One’s environment and one’s thoughts keep changing as well. They’ll never come again. It’s not that they’re good times, it’s because we’re recalling them that we call them good times. It has been reported that there was not enough time for the actors to learn their dialogue for the second segment, so Hou chose to use inter-titles instead. Critical reception Three Times received generally positive reviews when it was released in North America. It holds an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Most critics agreed that the opening segment, A Time for Love (which is often likened to the works of Wong Kar-Wai), was the most successful, and that the final segment, A Time for Youth (which was compared to Hou's 2001 film Millennium Mambo) was the least, but it was still praised. Response to the second segment, A Time for Freedom, was in between, with many critics comparing it to Hou's 1997 film Flowers of Shanghai. Roger Ebert, who championed the film at Cannes, gave it four stars out of four in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times:"Three stories about a man and a woman, all three using the same actors. Three years: 1966, 1911, 2005. Three varieties of love: unfulfilled, mercenary, meaningless. All photographed with such visual beauty that watching the movie is like holding your breath so the butterfly won’t stir." Kay Weissberg in Variety wrote:"Synthesizing Hou Hsiao-hsien's ambivalent relationship with time and memory, Three Times forms a handy connecting arc between the Taiwanese helmer's earlier work and the increasingly fragmentary direction of his recent films. Best appreciated by those familiar with his slow rhythms and pessimistic take on contempo life,