Reviewed by Tim Wong

VAGUELY, I can trace my first experience in martial arts cinema to a half-empty Chinese restaurant, a bored Maître d', and the climactic last third of Dragon Inn, beamed out in non-subtitled Cantonese via an in-house Karaoke system. Don't get me wrong – it was an ambience killer, for sure, and although in my early teens, I couldn't help but feel a little shocked at the all the impaling and blood spurting and male eyeliner going on. But as strange encounters go, I owe a lot to Serendipity for that afternoon – she shoved me through the looking glass, and taught me from that day onwards there's more to martial arts than Ralph Macchio and Enter the Dragon.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

SERVING AS an elusive release, Hero (Ying xiong) is a Zhang Yimou film that for once is neither sentimental, nor starring Gong Li. All those beautified laments over the Cultural Revolution set to semi-didactic undertones he's famous for did eventually turn apolitical – the post-Not One Less romantic afterglow of The Road Home, or the soggy tissue bittersweet-ness of Happy Times, for instance. And judging by Happy Times – believe it or not, a contemporary present-day film – Zhang must have been fidgety, waning or in desperate need of a new muse (so it's all Gong Li's fault). Turns out, all he ever wanted to do was make a martial arts movie, finally submitting to those withdrawn boyhood fantasies, and offloading any social conscience and historical obsessive compulsiveness along the way.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

HOW they got children cast in this film, I'll never know. Driven by self-gratification of the green-backed variety, parental ambition, it seems, considers nothing sacred anymore – not even an offensive, alcoholic, self-defecating version of that most beloved childhood institution: Father Christmas. As Bad Santa, Billy Bob Thornton not only does the unthinkable in shattering the myth of global chimney-hopping for every kid that bypasses his urinated lap, but swears at them. Profusely. Frankly, I had thought the "F" word was an overused, spent force in the movies, considering it's deployed with such nonchalance these days. That was until now.