Ti Lung - The Chinese Cinema

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Ti Lung

A collection of 15 posts

The Avenging Eagle (Sun Chung, 1978)

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The Avenging Eagle (Sun Chung, 1978)

The Bare-Footed Kid (Johnnie To, 1993)

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The Bare-Footed Kid (Johnnie To, 1993)

Swordsman and Enchantress (Chor Yuen, 1978)

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Swordsman and Enchantress (Chor Yuen, 1978)

2022 Spring/Summer Festival Compilation

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2022 Spring/Summer Festival Compilation

The Tiger on the Beat Series (Lau Kar-leung, 1988 & 1990)

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The Tiger on the Beat Series (Lau Kar-leung, 1988 & 1990)

The New One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1971)

The New One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1971)

Even at the warp speed of Hong Kong generic cycles, it’d be weird to remake a movie that came out only four years earlier, so Chang Cheh, in the midst of probably the most frenetic period of production of any great director ever, didn’t remake his smash hit

Chang Cheh Capsule Reviews

Chang Cheh Capsule Reviews

The Magnificent Trio (1966) — November 5, 2017 Chang Cheh’s second wuxia film, and the oldest one to survive. The first, Tiger Boy, was a low-budget black and white film for which he did the choreography himself. By all accounts it has been lost. The Magnificent Trio is in color

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)

After an up and down decade as a director for hire, working alternately in the wuxia and wacky comedy genres, John Woo finally hit it big in 1986 when he teamed up with Tsui Hark and the Cinema City studio to remake Patrick Lung Kong’s 1967 drama The Story

Ten Tigers of Kwangtung (Chang Cheh, 1980)

Ten Tigers of Kwangtung (Chang Cheh, 1980)

Well, there’s actually 15, if you count the five descendants of the Ten Tigers. Which could make this a bit confusing, but Chang Cheh gives us some friendly faces and nicely spaced exposition to emphasize that this is actually a very simple story. In the present, a guy and

The Duel (Chang Cheh, 1971)

The Duel (Chang Cheh, 1971)

Every time someone talks about David Chiang in The Duel (aka The Duel of the Iron Fist), they use his full name: Jiang Nan, “The Rambler”. The film’s other star, Ti Lung (paired with Chiang again and again through the early 1970s) finds himself caught up in an overly

A Better Tomorrow II (John Woo, 1987)

A Better Tomorrow II (John Woo, 1987)

After its formation in 1980 by actors Dean Shek, Karl Maka, and Raymond Wong, the first film released by Hong Kong studio Cinema City & Films Co. was 1981’s Laughing Times, a comedy starring Shek as “the Chinese Charlie Chaplin” that is a kind of mashup of The Kid and

The Heroic Ones (Chang Cheh, 1970)

The Heroic Ones (Chang Cheh, 1970)

A lavish Chang Cheh fable set in the Tang Dynasty (in the late 9th Century) and based more or less on actual historical events. The Empire is in turmoil as an upstart general has rebelled and captured the imperial capital at Chang’an. The Emperor and his advisors call on

Vengeance! (Chang Cheh, 1970)

Vengeance! (Chang Cheh, 1970)

This Chang Cheh thriller provided star-making performances for Ti Lung and David Chiang, actors who had played small supporting roles in some prior Chang films (you can spot them clearly in 1969’s Return of the One-Armed Swordsman) but who Chang gave a big push to in 1970, where Chiang

Five Shaolin Masters and Shaolin Temple (Chang Cheh, 1974 and 1976)

Five Shaolin Masters and Shaolin Temple (Chang Cheh, 1974 and 1976)

Five Shaolin Masters circles back and starts at the beginning of another 1974 Chang Cheh film, Heroes Two, with the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, but then goes off in the other direction. A narrator helpfully informs us that the Chen Kuan-tai character in that film went south and met

The Sentimental Swordsman (Chor Yuen, 1977)

The Sentimental Swordsman (Chor Yuen, 1977)

An exceptionally well-written wuxia film, one in which the characters are motivated by psychology rather than fulfilling roles as mere mythological character types, where the tsunami of exposition that swamps so many other films in the genre is distilled into action with the expeditious use of a MacGuffin (a mysterious