Hong Kong Surprise

These days some of the most blissfully entertaining films on earth come from Hong Kong, and they're nothing like the stilted kung fu epics of your Late Show nightmares. Director Tsui Hark is the most dazzling practitioner of the high Crown Colony style: bloody-romantic gangster dramas and goopy ghost comedies put together by people who still seem to have fun making movies—in most cases, making them up as they go.

Born in Vietnam and educated in Texas, Tsui has set the pace in Hong Kong since 1979, when he graduated from television serials to the rapturous swordplay fantasy The Butterfly Murders, and the companies he's worked for, Cinema City and his own Film Workshop, have come to dominate the local industry. This month Tsui's first film and five others have a class-A showcase at New York's Asia Society, and our mental image of the world-cinema landscape will have to be adjusted to make room for another master.

And as 1997 looms on the Hong Kong horizon, Tsui has made his first film in the U.S., a martial-arts thriller called The Masters. Yankee moviemaking can always use a jolt of foreign energy, and a fully developed Tsui opus, like his 1987 masterpiece, Peking Opera Blues, has enough spare calories to heat a small midwestern city. This tum-of-thecentury action comedy about nationalist spies, stolen diamonds, and a troupe of sexy acrobats plays like a dozen Spielberg films condensed and projected at triple speed. Tsui's work is bracingly unembittered, and it could revive your now jaded infatuation with celluloid.

DAVID CHUTE