Items23The creator’s order
  1. 1Come Drink with Me (1966)Come Drink with Me (1966) 6.9/10 on IMDbReleased Apr 7, 1966Cheng Pei-pei's Golden Swallow walks into an inn full of bandits and takes them apart without losing her poise, and that entrance is still one of the genre's great introductions. King Hu cast a ballet dancer rather than a fighter and said his combat was always keyed to the notion of dance, so every…0
  2. 2Dragon Inn (1967)Dragon Inn (1967) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 23, 1967Most of the film unfolds in a remote inn where loyalists, a eunuch's agents and wandering swordsmen sit down to eat while sizing one another up. The pleasure is the tension before the blades come out, built from glances, doorways and suspicious cups of wine. King Hu made it in Taiwan for the Union…0
  3. 3The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) 7.2/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 26, 1967Jimmy Wang Yu's maimed swordsman relearns his art one-handed with the broken blade he kept as a memento of his father, and the film's wounded, brooding heroism changed the genre's temperature. Chang Cheh traded graceful heroines for bloodier, more stoic sacrifice, and audiences responded: it is…0
  4. 4A Touch of Zen (1970)A Touch of Zen (1970) 7.5/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 10, 1970King Hu's masterpiece takes its time: a scholar and painter drifts into the affairs of a fugitive woman warrior, and the story slowly widens into ghost tale, political thriller and Buddhist parable. The bamboo forest sword fight, built from leaps cut into fragments of motion and light, is the…0
  5. 5The Magic Blade (1976)The Magic Blade (1976) 7.0/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 10, 1976Ti Lung's poncho-wearing swordsman looks as if he wandered in from a spaghetti western, and that mix is the fun of Chor Yuen's Shaw Brothers adventure. Based on a Gu Long novel, it moves from one trap to the next as rival fighters chase a deadly weapon called the Peacock Dart, each encounter staged…0
  6. 6Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979)Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979) 7.0/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 22, 1979Before his gangster films, John Woo made this swordplay tale of hired killers, betrayal and sworn brotherhood, and you can watch his later obsessions forming. Woo intended it as a tribute to his mentor Chang Cheh and to Akira Kurosawa, and the slow-motion action and wipe transitions show…0
  7. 7Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983)Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) 6.6/10 on IMDbReleased Feb 5, 1983Tsui Hark threw everything at this fantasy: flying swordsmen, a Blood Demon, magic mountains and an Ice Queen played by Brigitte Lin. He hired Western effects artists, including one known for Tron, who helped train Hong Kong film students in miniatures, optical compositing and matte painting, and…0
  8. 8Duel to the Death (1983)Duel to the Death (1983) 7.2/10 on IMDbReleased Jan 13, 1983Every ten years, the story goes, the greatest swordsmen of China and Japan meet in a duel to the death, and this time ninjas acting for the Shogun are kidnapping fighters to sabotage the contest. Ching Siu-tung's directing debut is wild and inventive, full of ninja trickery that borders on the…0
  9. 9A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) 7.3/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 18, 1987A timid tax collector spends the night in a haunted temple and falls for Joey Wong's ghost, and only Wu Ma's gruff Taoist swordsman Yan Chixia stands between them and the demons. Drawn from Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, it is wuxia at its most romantic and supernatural, with…0
  10. 10The Legend of the Swordsman (1992)The Legend of the Swordsman (1992) 7.1/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 26, 1992Best known in English as Swordsman II Brigitte Lin's Dongfang Bubai, a master who has paid a terrible price for a sacred scroll's power and whom the hero mistakes for a woman, is one of the most mesmerizing villains in the genre. Ching Siu-tung directs and Tsui Hark produces this loose adaptation…0