--- title: TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies | TIME description: Going through China-withdrawal after the Olympics? TIME's Movie Critic Richard Corliss can help canonical: https://time.com/video/bvnXzN7d/ og:title: TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies og:description: Going through China-withdrawal after the Olympics? TIME's Movie Critic Richard Corliss can help og:url: https://time.com/video/bvnXzN7d/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/bvnXzN7d/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies twitter:description: Going through China-withdrawal after the Olympics? TIME's Movie Critic Richard Corliss can help twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/bvnXzN7d/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies [Watch (HLS stream): TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/bvnXzN7d.m3u8) (7:05)  _Published 2008-08-24. Going through China-withdrawal after the Olympics? TIME's Movie Critic Richard Corliss can help_ --- Jul 27, 2023 12:59 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [TIME's Favorite Movie Kisses](/video/bl2FyODa/) ### TIME's Favorite Movie Kisses [TIME's Favorite Political Movies](/video/XDJ9vmLw/) ### TIME's Favorite Political Movies [TIME's All-Star Movie Baseball Team](/video/WX8j67eA/) ### TIME's All-Star Movie Baseball Team --- ## Transcript This is Richard Corliss, known critic for TIME magazine. You know there are two things we should have learned from the Beijing Olympics. One, it is pronounced as Bei- Jing, as in jingle. Two, China has much more to offer than gymnasts and smog. It has great movies too. Dramas to century, China, and then Hong Kong and Taiwan have been producing wonders that the world is just beginning to appreciate. So if you are in withdrawal from the runners and jumpers, the swimmers and the beach volleyballers. Take refuge in your video store. From the Three Chinas, here are 10 movies that have earned the gold. Ruan Lingyu was the diva of the flourishing Shanghai silent cinema in the 1920s and 30s. And the grandeur and passion of her performances, she was compared to Greta Garbo. But Lingyu's private life was much more chaotic. Denounced in the press for her loose woman roles, Ruan took an overdose of sleeping pills and was dead at 24. Her suicide note read, " Nothing matters ." She mattered though, to her millions of fans, certainly to the tens of thousands who crowded outside the funeral. Three women killed themselves in homage to the first great star of Chinese cinema. For decades, Hong Kong cinema was dominated by star actresses. Well, director Chang Cheh changed that with one film. As the one armed swordsman, actor- athlete Jimmy Wang Yu established the martial arts machismo that would dominate Hong Kong films for the next 30 years. The director kept bending genres and discovering new stars, until Jackie Chan's roughhouse comedies changed the landscape again. Taiwan produced the most popular action films of the 60s, and its top director and portraitist was King Hu. His masterpiece was A Touch of Zen, a 3- hour epic featuring martial arts choreography on a grand poetic scale. It starred 19- year- old Hsu Feng, a beautiful doll with great Kung Fu moves and had action scenes that influenced Ang Lee when he came to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The star of Chang Cheh's movies and Bruce Lee, who was the first big star to break through to the United States were very serious people. Their dialogues were a series of grunts and Hai- yah! But Hong Kong films needed a little levity to go with the action, and Jackie Chan provided it-- a little guy who wasn't afraid to go 'ow' when he got hit. Jackie was the hero every other little man could imagine himself to be. Jackie was not only the star. He was the writer, director and action coordinator for most of his movies. Here is one of the best, Police Story, and watch him chase a bad guy by sliding down a four- story pole, strewn with Christmas tree lights. Ow and Wow! It was so fabulous, he shows it three times, one of the first instant replays in movies. Jackie's great rival as martial arts star was Jet Li. The Wushu champion from the mainland who was made into a star by producer- director Tsui Hark in the series Once Upon a Time in China. Eventually, there were six episodes. But the first three are terrific. Li, who later became a Hollywood star, here uses his power and grace to kick every butt in Canton. Mainland China vanished from the world movie map for decades, and emerged only in the late 80s with films by two marvelous directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Raise the Red Lantern is Zhang Yimou's drama about a rich man and the four concubines he keeps. The newest concubine is played by Gong Li, a young film student Zhang Yimou discovered and promoted, and who became the face and sultry body of Chinese cinema. The other great director of China's cinema renaissance was Chen Kaige, whose Yellow Earth was the first Chinese film shown abroad in more than a decade. It won prizes everywhere. But the mainland's cinema status was validated by Farewell, My Concubine, an epic of art and politics that spanned 50 years in the careers of two Peking opera performers. The film won the top prize at Cannes and its holding power is due largely to the performance of Leslie Cheung, who was magnificent as the more feminine of the two actors. Director John Wu made the heroic bloodshed gangster movies into a genre that rivaled Hong Kong's hand- to- hand martial arts film. His slow- mo, gun- fu scenes, his fluttering doves and the long coats his gangsters wore have been imitated a quillion times by Hollywood, was recently in Tropic Thunder. This wildly entertaining melodrama stars the colony's coolest killer, Chow Yun- Fat. Director Wong Kar- Wai's dreamy, smoky, hyper- romantic movies made them the most influential films in the 90s. Chungking Express is a two- part comedy drama that showcases some of the most beguiling stars in the three Chinas, Brigitte Lin and Takeshi Kaneshiro from Taiwan, the mainland's elf in Faye Wong, and Hong Kong's Tony Leung Chiu Wai. Ang Lee was born in Taiwan, schooled in the United States, and made a hit movie, Sense and Sensibility in Britain. But he went to China for his biggest success ever, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which takes the films of King Hu and Chang Cheh, and brings modern technology to it. With fabulous star turns by Chow Yun- Fat, Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the all- time top grossing foreign film in the United States. So there you have it, 10 Chinese masterpieces. a veritable decathlon of cinematic arts and martial arts. This is Richard Corliss, your Western guide to Eastern films, saying Xie Xie everybody. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies","description":"Going through China-withdrawal after the Olympics? 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