Criterion Collection (Firm)

With rousing martial-arts action and wild comedy, Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To₂s most personal film is a thrilling love letter to both the cinema of Akira Kurosawa and the art of judo.

A fugitive noblewoman seeks refuge in a remote, and allegedly haunted, village. The sanctuary she finds with a shy scholar and two aides in disguise is shattered when a nefarious swordsman uncovers her identity, pitting the four against legions of blade-wielding opponents.

Two cops share their stories at a snack bar in Hong Kong.

A day in the life of Ming Ding begins as a pair of hammer-wielding loan sharks come to the door of Ming's squalid apartment. Their ultimatum, delivered in Mandarin, is as simple as it is virtually impossible to fulfill, needing to give them $800 by the evening or the debt will be doubled. With the family he supports half a world away, Ming has a single rain-soaked shift at his job in which to pay off his thuggish creditors. Ming Ding anonymously and...

Follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-aged father, NJ's tenuous flirtation with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang's attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera.

Originally tapped as a potential successor to Bruce Lee, Hong Kong martial-arts phenom Jackie Chan soon established his own unique screen persona, blending goofball slapstick and bone-crunching kung fu into intricate feats of supercharged athleticism. Tracing his rise from breakout star to full-fledged auteur, these six unabashedly silly, unstoppably entertaining early-career highlights find Chan refining the lovably mischievous image that would make...

"Ka-Kui is a Hong Kong police inspector whose methods are unorthodox, which creates havoc for his much-put-upon girlfriend, May. A drug lord frames him for the murder of a dirty cop, but after he successfully clears his name, the villains return and put him in the path of some blackmailing bombers."--Provided by publisher.

Set in the early sixties in Taiwan, it is based on the true story of a crime that rocked the nation. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centers on the gradual, inexorable fall of a young teenager.

A look inside the New Taiwan Cinema movement, featuring interviews with Hou Hsaio-hsien; Sylvia Chang; Tsai Ming-liang; and many more directors.

The gorgeous period reverie by Hou Hsiao-hsien traces the romantic intrigue and jealousies swirling around four late-nineteenth-century Shanghai "flower houses", where the courtesans live confined to a gilded cage.