Directed by the insanely prolific Hong Kong action veteran Wong Jing, Chasing the Dragon (China, 2017) is the filmmaker’s crime epic, a historical drama that charts the rise and fall of two notorious gangsters who thrived in the rampant corruption enabled by Britain’s colonial rule of Hong Kong in the 1960s. The title is slang […]
An enigmatic epic set on the vast, empty plains and in the treacherous mountains of Tibet, the meandering but visually enthralling Soul on a String (China, 2016) combines spiritual odyssey, revenge film, and redemption quest. Reluctant hero Tabei (Kimba), a former convict who turned his back on society as a wandering hunter, is sent by […]
The Final Master (China, 2016) – Set in 1932, just before the Japanese invasion of China, Haofeng Xu’s martial arts drama stars Fan Liao as a Wing Chun master who challenges the martial arts schools of a Chinese city for the right to teach his style of kung fu. He chooses a protégé from the […]
For Kung Fu Yoga (China, 2017), Jackie Chan returns to the Indiana Jones-inspired adventure comedy of his 1986 hit Armour of God, albeit as an older, more modest archaeologist adventurer, for this co-production between China and India. Jackie is Professor Jack Chan, ostensibly the same character he played in The Myth, who is lured back […]
Ringo Lam made his name as Hong Kong cinema’s grittier, leaner alternative to John Woo’s flamboyant action films with Prison on Fire (1987) and City on Fire (1987), the latter most famous as one of the primary inspirations of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (the heist, the undercover cop, and the image of the multi-gun stand-off […]
Jackie Chan stars in Railroad Tigers (China, 2016) as the leader of a scruffy band of rural railroad porters who stage raids on Japanese trains running through occupied China in World War II. They drop into moving trains, steal food for the villagers, and leave their mark by drawing flying tigers on the bodies of […]
It took so long for Hollywood to finally find a way to harness the unique mix of martial arts mastery, dance-like grace, playful humor, and giddy charm that had made Jackie Chan a superstar throughout the rest of the world that he was almost too old to show off the extent of his physical prowess […]
Cold War 2 (Hong Kong, 2016) is an odd—and oddly entertaining—type of cop thriller: interdepartmental power play directed like an action film. Aaron Kwok stars as the newly-appointed Police Commissioner Sean Lau and Tony Leung Ka Fai is M.B. Waise Lee, his rival for the position in the first film and now on a retirement […]
The Assassin is a martial arts drama as cinematic poem. Chinese filmmaker Hou Hsiou-Hsien won the Best Director Award at Cannes for his direction, which reimagines the genre from a spectacle of action and choreography and acrobatic skill to a vision of stillness and tension. The first film from Hou in eight years, and the […]
Drug War (2012) relocates Hong Kong director / producer Johnnie To, the most rigorous and disciplined (and the most socially observant and politically savvy) of Asian crime movie auteurs, to the Chinese mainland. He trades the urban overcrowding and overheated capitalism of Hong Kong for the open plains and lonely highways of Tianjin but otherwise […]
