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 […]
The Assassin (China, 2015) 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, […]
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 […]
Hong Kong martial arts star Donnie Yen plays the legendary Ip Man (Hong Kong, 2008), teacher and grandmaster of Wing Chun, in this biographical drama (one in a long line of such tributes) based on the master’s life during the Japanese occupation of China. Yen is a superb screen fighter with an often bland presence. […]
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 […]
Now well over 60 years old, Jackie Chan remains a charismatic actor with some impressive moves that he puts on display in Bleeding Steel (China, 2017), a colorful but awfully silly science fiction action thriller from writer/director Leo Zhang. Jackie plays a Special Forces officer whose duty takes him from his dying young daughter to […]
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 […]
