Painted Faces (1988)

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Painted Faces (1988)

A brilliant straight performance from Sammo Hung – worthy enough to earn him a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor – playing his own sifu, Master Yu Jim-yuen, a Beijing Opera (née Peking Opera) teacher who immigrated to Hong Kong from northern China in the 1940s. By all accounts, Sammo’s portrayal paints Master Yu in a somewhat reverential light. Yu was known for being a strict disciplinarian to the young boys enrolled at his China Drama Academy, leading brutal training regimes which would turn his ‘Seven Little Fortunes’ into a popular Beijing Opera performance group in the 1960s when …

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The Furious (2026)

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The Furious (2026)

Kids are going missing “somewhere in Southeast Asia” (it’s quite clearly Thailand), and the city’s cops are not only inept but corrupt, with a high-ranking police chief in on the deal. One of the stolen girls is the infant daughter of a mute single dad (Xie Miao) – a kung fu fighter with a mysterious past – who turns into a one-man-army to duff up the bad guys in a protracted effort to get her back. He forms an alliance with an undercover journalist (Joe Taslim), whose wife (played by an under-utilised JeeJa Yanin) is also taken by the gang. …

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Blades of the Guardians (2026)

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Blades of the Guardians (2026)

At the age of 80, you might suspect that a director with the proven track record and highly influential resume of someone like Yuen Woo-ping might want to take it easy for his first proper directorial outing in nearly a decade. How wrong you would be. This wild wuxia film moves at a mile-a-minute – good luck keeping track of the storyline – with the sort of furtive, gob-smacking action sequences that would exhaust a director a third his age. He doesn’t scrimp on spectacle, throwing everything and the kitchen sink at desert-bound set-pieces involving swathes of extras on horseback, hulking …

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Boy Kills World (2024)

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Boy Kills World (2024)

Zany dystopian actioner which treads that fine-line between being both a violent gore-fest and a screwball comedy (note the producer credit for The Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi). Kick-Ass was the high watermark for this sort of thing – and although this leans into similar comicbook territory, it never delivers the same emotional heft. Action-wise, it more than competes, with brutal gun-fu and weapons duels provided by fight choreographer Dawid Szatarski, protégé of Brad Allan and his game-changing work on similarly outrageous films like Kingsman. The highly trained cast deliver extra authenticity, with silat master Yayan Ruhian playing another mystical sensei …

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Kung Fu Games (2024)

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Kung Fu Games (2024)

Five martial artists in kung fu uniforms wake up in a windowless room with no idea of how they got there. They are periodically released from the room into seemingly different locations, and forced to fight for their lives against various lethal opponents. Each environment seems to resemble notable scenes and backdrops from classic kung fu movies, like the bamboo forest in A Touch of Zen, or the golden ninja from Five Element Ninjas. As the battles continue, their number slowly depletes. It is soon revealed that they are, indeed, on a sound stage, being forced to fight by a rich …

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Panda Plan (2024)

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Panda Plan (2024)

Presenting Jackie Chan, the philanthropist, in a sickly show of gurning corporate brand-building which will test the patience of even the most hardcore of Chan fans. Jackie has now seemingly done away with even the most flimsy pretence of playing two-dimensional characters. Here he simply plays “Jackie Chan”, the ageing international action star who seems to live a life not too dissimilar to the ker-razy characters he plays in his films. The premise is flimsy to say the least: he adopts a baby panda from a Chinese zoo and mercenaries break in and attempt to steal it. There is at …

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The Shadow’s Edge (2025)

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The Shadow’s Edge (2025)

Larry Yang’s second film with Jackie Chan (following 2023’s schmaltzy hagiographic Ride On) is a twisty crime caper which, despite being an epic two and a half hours, never outstays its welcome. This is a grittier, bloodier Jackie Chan film than we have been used to seeing (no CGI pandas here, that’s for sure), and its thoroughly pleasing to see Chan (at the age of 71) refusing to settle down with his pipe and slippers just yet, turning in the type of violent/goofy martial arts cop film he might have made in his athletic heyday. Many of his more recent, …

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Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

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Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

An enjoyable exercise in retrofitting two iterations of The Karate Kid story into a wholly new chapter: the 2010 remake which introduced the character of kung fu teacher Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), a proxy for the show’s original Asian American sage, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita); and the original 1980s film series and subsequent Cobra Kai TV show, which continued the duelling relationship between star pupil Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and his high-school nemesis, Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka). It is a credit to the film that it feels both akin to the same cinematic universe while also competing as a worthy entry on …

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KFMG Podcast S08 Episode 108: Tribute to King Hu

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KFMG Podcast S08 Episode 108: Tribute to King Hu

“No one has really captured the pinnacle of the artform of wuxia filmmaking like King Hu did… That’s why we’re still talking about King Hu, because he did it better than anybody else.” Michael Berry

King Hu is one of China’s most influential filmmakers, famous for his historical martial arts films which helped to popularise the wuxia (‘martial chivalry’) genre in the 1960s and 70s with classic films like Come Drink with Me (1966), Dragon Inn (1967), and A Touch of Zen (1971), for which he would receive the ‘Technical Grand Prize’ at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. His work has inspired …

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Raining in the Mountain (1979)

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Raining in the Mountain (1979)

Undercover agents, double-crossing monks and corrupt officials duck, dive and duke it out within the hallowed halls of a Buddhist monastery in King Hu‘s last significant film. Made in South Korea simultaneously with Legend of the Mountain, this is a martial arts movie only in the loosest sense (the first fight scene occurs nearly an hour into the film), with action scenes filmed in the wuxia tradition, choreographed by Beijing Opera-trained Ng Ming-tsui, who was part of the Seven Little Fortunes with Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan. Always keen to dabble in genre, Hu’s film is more of a caper …

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