John Woo's melodramatic tragicomedy The Time You Need a Friend (1985) stands at the crucial crossroads in the director's career. Woo had been churning out innocuous comedies for more than a few years, and after establishing the "heroic bloodshed" genre, he'd never look back. But this tale of two...
Composed of three separate stories, the film vividly portrays Taiwan during the cold war period when the country developed its economy with help from the United States.
A poor army veteran in Taiwan adopts a daughter. She grows up and leaves him to enter show business. When she becomes famous she shuns her father and friends.
It is a school bus driver's last day at work. On a whim, he drives off to the seashore with the school's cook, a young teacher, and a busload of children. Facing an unhappy retirement, he seeks one great moment of happiness, which he finds on the road with the children. They encounter an aboriginal...
Yunpeng and his servant stay at a country inn one dark evening to escape potential robbers and ghosts. But Yunpeng chances into something far more dangerous! He accidentally happens upon the comely Anu naked in bed, and to make up for his rudeness he has to marry her. Because of her beauty, the...
Upon their invasion of Taiwan in 1874, the Japanese team up with a sinister tong to hold a martial arts tournament in a plot to root out and assassinate the region's top resistance fighters, thereby breaking the spirit of Chinese patriotism. Two local kung-fu masters prove more than a match for the...
A mix of supernatural tone, comedic banter and nudity with musical numbers, it takes a while before this story of two scholars being courted and haunted by both, fox spirits and malicious ghosts, gets started. Do the scholars side with the fox spirits, trying to achieve immortality or are they...
After her six year old son is kidnapped, a successful fashion designer must work with a detective to clear up the terrifying mystery and get her son back.
When Master Leung tries to rob Wong I-Hsia of a precious cargo he must protect, Wong I-Hsia fights him off with the iron palm and makes his escape. Too old and weak to continue his mission, Wong I-Hsia entrusts the cargo to his eldest son Wan Fu, who wastes no time in proving his fighting skills as...
