Enter the Dragon (1973) – After years of supporting roles in Hollywood, American citizen Bruce Lee became a star in Hong Kong with a handful of hard-edged martial arts thrillers. He returned to conquer his adopted homeland with this American/Hong Kong co-production, a glorified B-movie mix of kung-fu fighting (choreographed by Lee himself) and James […]
Jackie Chan became an international action star without the help of Hollywood when he brought blockbuster movie values to his brand of martial arts action and comedy in a series of Hong Kong hit action spectacles in the 1980s and 1990s. By the time Hollywood made a second attempt to launch him in American movies, […]
Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film (as he insists in the credits) returns to his old passions with a new weapon in his arsenal: a visual eye. Tarantino created the role “The Bride” for Uma Thurman, who plays the lead with fierce intensity. A professional assassin left for dead, she wakes up […]
The Wolverine (2013) is both a sequel and a reboot of the solo spin-off from the X-Men movies. Hugh Jackman is back with the abs and the adamantium claws as Logan, the ferocious fan favorite of the team, and the screenwriters draw from the ninja storylines of earlier Wolverine comic books: the dark, brooding loner […]
A spin-off of the popular series of Ip Man martial arts dramas, Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy (China, 2019) follows the path of Cheung Tin-chi (Jin “Max” Zhang), the self-described master of Wing Chun who was defeated by Ip Man in Ip Man 3. As Master Z opens, he has turned his back on […]
Our story so far: the title character (played by Hong Kong martial arts maestro Donnie Yen) is the real-life martial Chinese arts teacher and proponent of Wing Chun style who was a hero during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria but is more famous to the western world for mentoring the young Bruce Lee. Which is […]
Ip Man 3 (Hong Kong, 2015) brings Donnie Yen back for one more portrayal of the real-life martial arts master who kept Wing Chun alive during the Japanese occupation in World II and went on to mentor a generation of students, including Bruce Lee. This third chapter is set in late 1950s Hong Kong, where […]
Martial arts movie star Donnie Yen returns to the role of legendary Wing Chun master Ip Man in Ip Man 4: The Finale (Hong Kong, 2019), the final film in the series based (very loosely) on his life. This film, set in 1964, sends Ip Man to San Francisco, where his student Bruce Lee (played […]
Ip Man was the martial arts master who became a hero during World War II and a respected teacher who mentored, among others, Bruce Lee. And there’s been a cottage industry in Ip Man films in the last decade, most famously with Donnie Yen in the lead as the modest, unassuming master martial artist. The […]
In the Hong Kong action movie explosion of the eighties, when the craziest, most kinetically energetic and narratively surreal action movies were pouring out of the Hong Kong film studios at a breakneck pace, Jackie Chan’s Police Story (Hong Kong, 1985) was one of the films that both defined and redefined the industry while firmly […]
