Popular reviews

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★★ 2

  casts nature as mysterious, tangled but carefully deliberate, and casts reformers combating totalitarianism as potential ghosts, the past returning to claim its place, the dead returning to vanquish their living betrayers. Hu famously continues to restore to film from Chinese literature the female knight, another piece of the past that now points forward. and the male hero finds his strength only after he sleeps with her and meets the Abbot; the power here is sexual, literally balls to bones, naturally emanating from within. the villain, corrupt and unseen, is a eunuch; his power is baseless, empty, founded on lies. sex vs death. the film folds themes in so gradually that you truly float down the river without ever seeming to get wet.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 2

  100

  As dreamy as the rivers in which we seek nourishment and as haunting as the figures which impede the voids which we yearn to observe in the darkness. One of those movies that check every box on the list and even invent a few new categories just for the hell of it.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  I love how this starts as something of an horror mystery develops towards earthly matters and later achieves heaven.

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  Review by kailey ★★★★½ 9

  the story begins with a spider-web.

  there is a man, with weak smiles and expert painting hands. there is a doctor who only arrived in town last month and holds mysteries in his eyes. there is an agent who hides behind laundry-lines and mercilessly hunts for his prey. there is an old fort with ghosts lurking in the rafters. and there is a woman armed with nothing but determination and steel, running for her life.

  the story will not end with defeat.

  the army is marching across rivers and plains and rocks. they claim they stand for the laws of the land and they hide behind the rules so they can commit injustices. earthly matters of greed and power are…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 5

  a corporeal, elemental and mystical dance of death... and eventually life. not quite the movie i was expecting after Dragon Inn which despite having higher aesthetic ambitions as well is almost a pure, rollicking kung fu action movie in comparison to this which seems interested in the fighting in so much as it contributes to the larger sense of feeling and dreaming these characters, locations, histories, myths. but one hell of a movie nonetheless and one the genres most transcendent finales. "humans can't fight ghosts."

  full discussion on ep 226 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★

  It's probably a good five minutes before we see any human beings in A Touch of Zen - before that it's the title sequence, then some close-ups of insects in spider's webs, and various shots of water, trees, light, nature at rest. It's like a soft prayer before the story begins, and it's your first clue that this is no typical kung-fu action movie, containing almost none of the genre's usual concessions to audience attention spans. Even when the action does start up, it's pretty removed from the expected Shaw Bros. athleticism, instead punctuated by long stretches of patient waiting in between the jump-cut-aided fight choreography, just outside physical reality as we (think we) know it.

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★★ 10

  Someday, some enterprising company is going to restore and rerelease these King Hu movies and then they're going to get a whole lot of my money.

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

  A spineless nerd who takes a backseat to his own story until he gets to play armchair Napoleon/Home Alone using all his military history reading. Having found his confidence from getting laid and setting a bunch of traps, he walks through the aftermath howling with laughter at his brilliance until he sees all the bodies his creativeness has left behind. Another classic Hu heroine emerges in a whirl of steely looks and vicious lunges, acquiescing to partnering with our protagonist but leaving him before social mores can sap her of her fierce independence.

  And the interest in nature's beautiful indifference that cropped up at the margins of Dragon Inn is now arguably more centered than the ostensible lead, starting with…

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  Review by elena ★★★★★ 1

  An ambitious work, transcending all genre conventions, in both its philosophical exploration/s and its filmmaking techniques...

  Exploration:
  (Among many other topics) rural life during the Ming Dynasty, political intrigue and Daoism vs Zen Buddhism.
  Like Hu’s other movies, a message about working in harmony with others as a collective, against government officials.

  Techniques:
  The first two acts feature wonderfully staged dialog exchanges, superb art direction and camerawork.
  The action scenes remove wires and replace them with trampolines, cutting between jumps and lands for a more grounded feel (completely unique for wuxia).
  The dancelike choreography and symbolic violence, early Soviet era inspired montage editing (fragmenting the action to constituent moments and parts, whilst maintaining continuity). Characters moving through each frame like a…

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★ 2

  Using what critical facilities I have when it comes to 1960s-70s Asian cinema (ie. fairly limited), what is striking to me in the work of King Hu is how pointedly different it is from an action choreographer like Lau Kar-Leung. Notably, Hu's action is at one more simple and more fantastic. The sequences here (which the first only happens after an hour of set up) are built on notably longer takes (meaning at least a 4-5 ASL during action), often shot from a distance, and most notably are built around pausing. The too oft-repeated "kung fu like ballet" doesn't seem as appropriate here - the action is built around one or two careful blows followed by long pauses where the…

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★★★ 6

  Trees shimmer. Sword glints. Light winks off water. Blade blurs. A body falls. The wind blows. Struggle ties us to this world, knots us to this dominion. Once untangled, we bleed gold.

  A landmark in the elevation of wuxia. There are sequences so impressionistic, so hypnotic and mesmerizing, that watching them delivers on the title of the film completely.

  Told in three separate acts, each so distinct from one another as to almost be three short stories. Yet, as character perspectives shift and the narrative blooms, we realize everything is part of a larger connected tapestry, rich and wide and singularly conscious.

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 3

  Matthew Ekstrom's #1 Film Selection for Edgar

  Impossible to fight against its power... Impossible to be overwhelmed by its technical brilliance...

  I cannot fight against it!

  Screened at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, and winning a Technical Grand Prize, King Hu's massively influential, multifaceted work of art Xia nü became the first Mandarin language film ever to win a major western film festival award.

  Still, the size and scope of the film overshadow this fact, almost transforming it into a futile piece of trivia.

  With a massive array of both philosophical and technical offerings, the massively underappreciated Taiwanese treasure has the most unusual capacity to transform itself into something else with each episodic advancement it makes through time:

  1) It…