Hong Kong martial arts star Donnie Yen landed the role of his career as the legendary teacher and grandmaster of Wing Chun in this rousing biographical drama.
Tag: China
Jackie Chan leads the ‘Railroad Tigers’ on Peacock
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 […]
Johnnie To’s ‘Drug War’ on Amazon Prime
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 […]
Hou Hsiou-Hsien’s ‘The Assassin’ on Amazon Prime and Hulu
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, […]
‘Bleeding Steel’ – Jackie Chan is still in action on Amazon Prime Video
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 […]
Donny Yen and Andy Lau are ‘Chasing the Dragon’ on Netflix
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 […]