Chin Yung Shing

The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter may have arrived at the midpoint of Lau Kar-leung’s career, but it plays like a late-period reckoning with a genre he helped create. Possessing some of the action maestro’s finest set pieces, and steeped in spiritual exhaustion, this is kung fu’s answer to The Searchers.

As the golden age of kung fu movies drew to a close, the great filmmakers at Shaw Brothers began questioning the very tenets of the martial world. Punctuated with fierce stabs of color, this brutal late-period epic from director Chang Cheh calcifies the path of vengeance into nihilistic abstraction.