Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Ang Lee's martial-arts romance became the first film not in English to pass $100 million in American cinemas, and won four Oscars, Best Foreign Language Film among them. The theft of a legendary sword, the Green Destiny, sets it going, but the pleasure is Yuen Woo-ping's fights, performed mostly by the actors themselves with only the safety wires removed by computer, and the restraint of Michelle Yeoh, who learned her Mandarin lines phonetically without it ever showing. Everyone remembers the duel in the bamboo canopy. I'd take Yeoh working through a rack of weapons against Zhang Ziyi.