So protracted was the production period of Ashes of Time, that not only did Wong Kar-wai find time to produce Eagle Shooting Heroes, he also managed to squeeze a masterpiece into a break in editing in the form of Chungking Express (1994). Strictly speaking, wuxia should probably be confined to stories of code-following traveling knights-errant, but genres are a fluid and conventional thing, especially in Hong Kong, where films regularly mash together comedy, action, romance, melodrama and horror elements into a single impure whole, and as such, stark lines are difficult to draw. At the other end of the joviality spectrum lies this two-part Jeffrey Lau farce. Sanitised codswallop. 13. The Butterfly Murders (Tsui Hark, 1979). Seemingly a response to Wong’s experiments, at least visually, Tsui Hark retold the story of The One-Armed Swordsman as a post-apocalyptic blur of sand and blackness, cutting to the nihilistic heart of Chang Cheh’s cinema. ( Log Out /  Hero (2002) Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” starring Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Maggie Cheung, Chen Daoming, Zhang Ziyi and Donnie Yen is perhaps the zenith of all the previous films in this list. Keeping the same group of stars (they would collectively become known as The Venom Mob in several more films together), Chang tells a typical kung fu story of defeat, practice and revenge, but with a supernatural twist (each hero is crippled in the first half of the film, only to turn their disability to their advantage in the second half, like a super-sized version of The One-Armed Swordsman). House of Flying Daggers is a pure romantic melodrama, largely nonsensical in plot, the sins of which are forgiven for the sake of the sheer gorgeousness of Zhang’s images, and that of his cast (Zhang Ziyi, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau). With the heart of one of his more traditional melodramas (lovers kept apart by social codes they don’t necessarily understand but nonetheless feel bound to) melded onto a series of spectacular action set pieces in a wide variety of styles, the film is a perfect distillation of wuxia for a Western art house audience. Earning him his 2nd Oscar, back to back. The prettiness is grafted onto an uneasy story, one that seemingly argues in favor of totalitarianism for the sake of internal peace. You can also see hints of this dynamic in Lau Kar-leung’s kung fu films with Kara Hui in the early 1980s. There’s an undeniable elegance to Ang Lee’s direction even through the film’s amorous longueurs, and while the eyelid-threatening, pan-pipe moods of Dun Tan’s score often invite the occasional blackout, Yuen Woo-ping’s fight choreography is suitably timed to pull one back from the brink. 17. A genre as synonymous with the supernatural and the philosophical as the codes of honour and justice under which its heroes fight, it’s often characterised as much by its melancholy romanticism as by its fantastical, high-flying clashes of sword and fist. Subscribe now for exclusive offers and the best of cinema. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The woman, played by Brigitte Lin, turns out to be an evil kung fu master whose quest for power as made him not merely a eunuch but has actually turned him into a woman. The first half plays out in what would become one of the genre’s most iconic locations (an inn), as she meets an array of increasingly powerful villains. Known generically as Dragon for its American release, Peter Chan’s variation on David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence makes explicit many of the conflicts at the heart of the genre. It’s difficult to underestimate the influence Chang Cheh’s classic would have on the Chinese martial arts film. He has the sole credit on the sequel, and it’s this film that is the much more well-known one. Yet in keeping with his adoration for the Beijing Opera, Hu’s is a cinema of movement. For Hong Kong gangster movies, please check out my other list, The Best HK Gangster Movies.For other Chinese-language movie genres, please throw an eye here, The Best Chinese-Language Movies. He was the Josef von Sternberg of wuxia. These are the best Hong Kong movies ever. Reign of Assassins is OK. 1. Tsui imported Hollywood technicians to develop the effects for the film, and it set a new standard for Chinese cinema. In what remains to this day the highest-grossing foreign language film in US box office history, Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee fashioned a conscious homage to the films of King Hu with a first-rate cast (Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen and Come Drink with Me‘s Cheng Pei-Pei), career-best choreography from Yuen Woo-ping (who had the year before become internationally-famous for his work on The Matrix), and all the lush locations and state-of-the-art effects possible in a Hollywood-China co-production. Hou pulls us away from the destruction, as his assassin recoils from the jianghu. Find out about international touring programmes, BFI Film Academy: opportunities for young creatives, Get funding to progress my creative career, Search the BFI National Archive collections, Read research data and market intelligence, Search for projects funded by National Lottery, Apply for British certification and tax relief, Get help as a new filmmaker and find out about NETWORK, Find out about booking film programmes internationally. Movies. The film cycled through a series of directors, including Ann Hui, before ultimately being credited to Ching Siu-tung. The film made a star out of leading man Jimmy Wang Yu, and while his acting chops were never going to turn him into the next James Dean as Chang had hoped, the film’s many sequels and spin-offs still saw him become an icon of alienated youth in his native China. Moving in another direction entirely is Wong Kar-wai’s first effort at a martial arts film,  which had a legendarily protracted shooting schedule that spawned not only a comic parody of the same source material starring the same actors (Jeffrey Lau’s The Eagle Shooting Heroes) made in the hopes of recouping some of the costs of Wong’s film, but also one of the greatest movies ever made, Chungking Express, shot on a break from the editing of Ashes of Time as a way for Wong to try to clear his head. Chang brings a morbid psychology to the genre, obsessed with death and honor, his films are bloody and operatic. I actually saw it about two years ago. Before he became the dove-bothering godfather of the new wave of Hong Kong action cinema in the 80s and 90s with the likes of A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989), Woo earned his stripes on the roster of Golden Harvest as one of the studio’s go-to guys, directing over a dozen features for the studio in its heyday. Taking the pictorialism of wuxia one step further was mainland director Zhang Yimou in this pair of crossover hits. I bet you will never lose interest as one after other interesting events keep on happening which keeps you completely engrossed in the novel. 1995- Apollo 13- Another great, iconic movie that was nominated for Best Picture. Or rather, the type isn’t new, but is instead a rediscovery of the scholar-heroes of King Hu’s greatest films. She returns in the third film a year later (The East is Red), a work even more semiotically dense. Swordsman II is most significantly an action film, making extensive use of the system of wire stunts and rapid editing Ching had perfected over the previous decade. This character, significantly named “Asia the Invincible”, is one of the most famous in all of Chinese cinema. The cynicism may belong to Chang, but the furious kineticism and blood-drenched insanity of the choreography are entirely Tsui’s. Best of the best Chinese Wuxia dramas that will statisfy your c-drama addiction The greatest film in the genre’s history, and one of the greatest Chinese-language films of all-time, King Hu’s epic begins small, following a decidedly unheroic scholar as he investigates some mysterious happenings around the abandoned castle he shares with his mother. The 20 Most Complex Movies … The sequel is not as successful, and Chor’s later films would become increasingly imprisoned in their own ostentatious ornateness, with movies like the two-part Alexander Fu Sheng-starring Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre seeming to take place in a world entirely of their own, existing only in the minds of fantasy novelists, places only realizable on studio sound stages. They follow the eponymous detective as he investigates seemingly supernatural mysteries during the Tang Dynasty rule of Empress Wu (Carina Lau). Notable for its explicitly feminist take on the genre, there’s plenty here to enjoy, if little to trouble the crowns of the best of its antecedents. The list here is chronological, not best to worst. I'm quite hesitant to group the classical wuxia dramas with those with fantastical themes (aka xianxia) too. Around this same time Tsui and Jet Li revitalized the likewise moribund period kung fu genre with Once Upon a Time in China, and in the series of films that followed it directors like Ching and Yuen Woo-ping freely mixed wirework with traditional kung fu performances, melding the two forms in films like The Tai Chi Master, the two Fong Sai-yuk films and Iron Monkey. Following the phenomenal success of first Jimmy Wang Yu’s 1970 film The Chinese Boxer and then the quartet of Bruce Lee smash hits, the wuxia genre was displaced by the kung fu film for the first half of the 1970s. Title: New The Smiling, Proud Wanderer 2018 / Xin Xiao Ao Jiang Hu / 新笑傲江湖 Episodes and Genre: 30, Wuxia Broadcast Period: February 26, 2018 Youku Starring: Ding Guan Sen as Linghu Chong Xue Hao Jing as Ren Ying Ying. Like Sammo Hung, Yuen is better known for his work in the kung fu genre, but this 1982 film is arguably the greatest movie ever made about Taoist magic. Most vibrant among this New Wave was Tsui Hark, and his debut film is a horror mystery wuxia quite unlike anything that came before it, more Roger Corman than Chang Cheh. A widely encompassing term – literally translated as martial (wu) chivalry (xia) – what was made famous in the west as a subgenre of martial arts cinema, finds its roots in seventh-century romantic literature and poetry, evolving through hundreds of years of oral and written tradition. Hand-picked. Bursting on to the scene in the late 70s was a group of directors moving from television to movies and reinventing Hong Kong cinema along the way. Wuxia dramas often tell adventures of martial artists and they are popular in Chinese-speaking communities around the world. At their best, the new films repackage Tsui’s defiant anarchist spirit within the comic book aesthetic of the 21st century action film. If you want to watch true Wuxia, don’t watch these Hollywooded versions (even when made in China). Stephen Chow had crossover hits in the US in the early 2000s with Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, the former badly mangled (as usual) by Miramax, but those films are cartoonish farces, utilizing digital effects to warp the already plastic universes in which Chow performs. Resolved to retire from the world of violence, he is sucked back in by the need for revenge after that same master is murdered. Chow’s wit is dizzying enough (featuring a lot of wordplay that gets lost in translation), but combining it with Lau’s gonzo plotting and some first-rate special effects makes for a vibrantly, overwhelmingly silly bit of cinema. Set in 1917, Takeshi Kaneshiro plays an ultra-rationalist detective who suspects that a local papermaker (Donnie Yen) who defeated a gang of thugs in self-defense may have unsuspected martial arts skills. The two Detective Dee movies (the other is Young Detective Dee and the Rise of the Sea Dragon) have a better reputation than Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (Tsui’s second stab at remaking Hu’s Dragon Gate Inn), though I like that one more than most critics. The anti-Confucian value systems of wuxia literature, with their emphasis on the attainment of personal freedom, saw much of it repressed and reconfigured throughout history. Like his other films, a dense mise-en-scène envelops his hero (this one marked especially by tangles of spiderwebs); no one at Shaw Brothers made films as ravishingly gorgeous as Chor Yuen. Top Actors Add New Person. People. A historical epic set in the late Tang Dynasty, the Emperor invites a Northern barbarian chief to help put down a domestic insurrection. Search thousands of wuxia by your favourite tags and genres, publishers, years, ratings,read reviews and more! Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. If you’re familiar with the work of the great Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, you’ll have caught snatches of King Hu’s wuxia masterpiece illuminating the fumbled passes of a picture palace’s dying days in Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003). She is a truly new wuxia hero: others  in films by King Hu or Chang Cheh had attempted to reject the world of violence, to retreat into the isolation the monastery (A Touch of Zen) or the remote farmhouse (The One-Armed Swordsman), but this is the first time one has fully succeeded in reentering the world. Ching’s rapid montages will by the end of the 80s dominate the wuxia form, leading to dizzying phantasmagoric works and exerting a pernicious influence on the Hollywood action film. Then hold tight, readers – here (in descending order and with trailers where available) are KFK’s Top 15 Most Anticipated Martial Arts Movies for 2019! A couple of children are on the run from sinister Ming Dynasty agents and an array of heroes gathers to protect them. Before kung fu, there was wuxia. Woo’s return to Hong Kong was marked by this epic two-part war movie, based on one of the most famous passages from the classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Jia Zhangke tells a quartet of loosely connected stories set in modern China, all based on A scholar goes to work in a remote location, only to find himself the pawn of dueling spirits hoping to steal his work for their own benefit. Here are my picks of the top 10 best Wuxia series ever. There are tons of Wuxia TV series during the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s. You'll note below that I list the genre for each series (e.g., romance, adventure, fantasy, etc.). There is any chance that you will make 30 Essenial Kung Fu Movies or something like that? Registered charity 287780. The comic elements and hints of steampunk are turned up to eleven in Stephen Fung’s tremendously fun Tai Chi Zero and Tai Chi Zero, the best non-Tsui iterations of this new CGI-driven wuxia. 26. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark, 2010). My all time favorite wuxia movies, in no particular order. An exposé on the horrors of life in the brothels that makeup the background of so many Chinese period films, Chor Yuen’s masterpiece is a wrenching film in which our heroine is kidnapped, forced into prostitution and, eventually, embarks on a quest for bloody revenge. Red Cliff is actually mocked in China. Sake of internal peace, the film inspired John Carpenter to make Big in. 13. the Butterfly Murders ( Tsui Hark, 1983 ) your favourite tags genres... 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