These are violent, bloody films, and anyone offended by depiction of violence, hatred and cruelty should look to another auteur and genre.

Take the superior martial arts choreography by Yuen Kwai and add the tremendous master of wushu, Jet Li, and the result is superior, if lightweight, entertainment.

This is not a film to approach literally: it is Noodles Aaronson's (Robert De Niro's character) story told as he knows it, remembers it, or thinks it was. I can't say what "really" happened. Neither can Noodles. Do not step away from the picture or turn it off before the final image: it is important. I think I may know what really happened, but maybe not.

Hey, it has Ti Lung. That's enough to counteract a large number of flaws.

Most of all, if you want to see Donnie Yen at his best, this is the right place to look. He's the only performer I've seen who can stand up to Wu Jing at his type of fighting and Sammo Hung at his own.

This is among the best films in several different genres, and well worth being in any library.

A mischievous boy is forced to protect his family and friends from the master of the Eagle Claw style. Through hard work and the inspiration of seeing a house cat fighting a snake, he develops a new style.

The training sequences are not quite so good as those in "Drunken Master", but the stunts and the originality of the fight choreography are at the same high level. Jackie Chan and Yuen Wo Ping made a much better team than JC and Lo Wei.

Chan plays a veteran hotshot police detective whose bravado led to the death of his previous team and his own descent into shame and abject alcoholism. Now he finds himself facing the same master criminals with a new, smaller group.

Nicholas Tse is a less dominant presence than Jackie Chan, and the other co-stars are less prominent still. That is the weakness of much late-period Jackie Chan cinema: he is much too large an eminence for the balance of the films. When the spotlight leaves him, it finds very little of interest.

I like Mark Dacascos: usually.

I like DMX: rarely.

I like Anthony Anderson: occasionally, now, but not in this heap of garbage.

I like Tom Arnold: never, ever, under any circumstances.

Once again, Joel Silver has taken Jet Li's Beijing-style wushu and forced it down the throats of the American public, interspersed with third-rate hip-hop and tenth-rate writing. Jet Li is marvelous to watch, even in trash: this is trash.

Chen Kuan Tai gives his usual excellent performance, but this film rises or falls on the performance of Fu Sheng, and his performance is extremely good.

I salute this excellent film for three things: it is very well written; the acting is generally of high quality; and the ending is not sweetened to satisfy the supposed public taste for happy endings. If people like those presented in this film faced the situation here, this is what would happen. Bravo!

What has traditionally been best in both Hong Kong and Japanese action cinema can now most often be found in South Korean film. The general quality of recent HK film has declined, and that of Japanese film has declined appallingly. Let's see how long South Korea can maintain this streak.

This is a rewarding adventure. The second and third films are lesser reflections of it.

Ting is a backwoods orphan raised by the local monk to be a devout protector of his village and its sacred image of Buddha, the Ong-Bak. He must go to Bangkok to recover the Ong-Bak and save his village, which is rapidly declining without the protection of Buddha.

Perhaps this story is nothing but a framework on which to hang Tony Jaa's spectacular moves. That's all right. It's a delightful movie.

This is a rewarding film if one can get past the old school swingy arm style.

A hard, corrupt, and sentimental cop comes up against a hard, corrupt, and sentimental hood, and their enmity goes beyond police procedure as well as current ideas of physics. The cop needs enough money to afford his daughter's medical treatment. So what? The gangster needs enough money to protect his brother and remain above their tawdry beginnings. So what? These two men must face each other. They do.