Country: China

Rarely has the simple theme of love been given such a spellbinding presentation as Zhang Yimou’s ‘The Road Home’.

Fairly tame fun that will easily appease the ADD generation who are hooked on special effects. Go into it with that frame of mind and it’s likely that you’ll find an adequate time filler.

If you’re looking for a film that has superlative action and you’ve seen the famous classics that have come from Hong Kong, ‘The South Shaolin Master’ is worth searching far and wide for.

‘The South Shaolin Master Part II’ is a nice little film that most MA fans will surely enjoy. Perhaps not quite as good as the original but a worthy follow-up nonetheless.

After being subjected to western productions where kids are annoyingly precocious and completely uninteresting, ‘The Story Of Xiaoyan’ reminds us that there are valid stories about youth to tell.

It’s a languid, leisurely swordplay film that advances at a glacial pace and is defiant in doing so. Yet that is, along with the crisp cinematography, its greatest strength.

From the opening frames to the denouement, this is a production that sucks you into its strange universe, style dripping out of every shot.

‘The Tai Chi Master’ has all the components you expect – an impressive budget, a handful of beautiful actresses, and plenty of action – but never quite convinces.

While the episodic narrative fails to engage, the short vignettes of the Dai culture and the stunning cinematography make ‘The Taste of Rice Flower’ a more bearable experience.

‘The Unity of Heroes’ is a slipshod update of the Wong Fei-Hung myth, a film wholly lacking in not only chemistry but also everything else that made the Tsui Hark chapters so influential.

‘The Village Of No Return’ is stuck between two stools – too disjointed to appeal to the mainstream, but too flat to be considered anything particularly out of the ordinary.

Despite a rushed prologue setting up what is going on and the issues Liu and his son have, the filmmakers have still created an incredible futuristic and lived in world with a combination of slick CGI and colossal sets.