Eastern exposure: Amy Taubin on recent Asian cinema.

THE NEW WAVES of Asian cinema--from the three Chinas, Japan, and, more recently, Korea and Thailand--that have thrilled so-called specialized audiences over the past twenty years have gathered into a tsunami of sufficient force to propel the occasional Asian film to the top of the box-office charts. Moviegoers have gradually become acclimated to the hyperbolic pace and emotions (either glacial or boiling) and the fractured narratives of Asian film through the Hollywoodized hybrids of John Woo and Ang Lee, not to mention Quentin Tarantino. And although the eroticized longueurs of Wong Kar-wai's recent films (Happy Together and In the Mood for Love) have captivated such Hollywood hipsters as Sofia Coppola, it's the martial arts movies and gangster shoot-'em-ups that are more likely to cross into the mass market--even when their stars are less well known (albeit infinitely more glamorous) than Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan.

Witness Zhang Yimou's Hero, the highest grossing film ever in China and number one at the US box office for two weeks at the end of last summer. But this was just a warm-up for the director's ragingly romantic House of Flying Daggers (which made its American debut at the New York Film Festival last month and opens in theaters on December 3). The most internationally celebrated of China's "fifth-generation filmmakers," Zhang has always moved back and forth between small personal movies, Not One Less and The Road Home (both 1999) among them, and sweeping dramas with glossy production values such as To Live (1994). Hero and House of Flying Daggers are his first forays into the martial arts genre, and the combination of gorgeous visuals and dazzling, high-flying, sword-fighting ballets in both films bring to mind Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Hero's plot is just as convoluted as that of Lee's audience-pleaser, but Zhang, at least, spares us the Spielbergian character psychology that, in part, accounts for Crouching Tiger's crossover success. A paean to national unity, with more than one shot of assembled military might stolen from the Triumph of the Will playbook, Hero justified the state-controlled Chinese film industry's investment in its unprecedented $30 million production while creating a certain unease among Zhang's supporters outside the Chinese establishment. (One can only imagine how disconcerted Tibetans must have been.)

Compared to the Rashomon-like narrative structure of Hero, the triangular love story of House of Flying Daggers seems positively primal. The film is set in the ninth century during the last days of the Tang dynasty. Operating near the Imperial City, the House of Flying Daggers, a gang of freedom fighters (Zhang seems to have reversed the politics of Hero 180 degrees), is the nemesis of the local police. Two cops, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Leo (Andy Lau) suspect that Mei (Zhang Ziyi), the new blind dancer at the Peony Pavilion (the local whorehouse) may actually be a member of the Flying Daggers. They concoct a scheme to rescue her in the hopes that she will lead them to the gang's hideout. None of these three characters is who he or she claims to be--and the less said here about that the better. In the course of their dangerous journey through forests of bamboo and pine, both men reveal their passion for Mei and their jealousy of each other. And Mei finds herself torn between the loyalty she feels toward Leo and her mad love for Jin.

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House of Flying Daggers is a showcase for the staggeringly beautiful Zhang, who, as an actress and a dancer, performs with a combination of precision, abandon, and emotional conviction reminiscent of Balanchine's great ballerinas. Indeed, there's a bit of Balanchine in the film's fusion of tradition and modernism, its balancing of expression and abstraction in the use of color and music, and its magical, gravity-defying choreography. At the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, the director described Flying Daggers as "a love story wrapped inside an action film." But, paradoxically, the love story gives the film its momentum while the action is confined to martial arts set pieces that are geared more toward aesthetic contemplation than kinesthetic thrills. And it's the frozen moments that stick in the mind's eye after Flying Daggers is over: Mei standing perfectly still, listening for the sound that will cue her first movement in the "Echo game," the multicolored pattern of her robe and the slightly different pattern of the screens behind her conspiring in an image of exquisite chinoiserie. Or Mei poised aloft in the ghostly green of the bamboo forest, her legs stretched between the trunks of two trees in a perfect split.

If the film has a flaw, it's that the bamboo forest fights are no match for the memory of the one in King Hu's A Touch of Zen (1969). On the other hand, I could have watched the final scene forever: After Leo stabs Mei in a fit of jealousy, Jin and Leo draw swords on each other. As they fight, autumn turns to winter and Mei's face, slowly draining of blood, becomes as white as the snow that swirls around them. House of Flying Daggers begins as a fairy tale and ends as a melodrama, every bit as elemental as Duel in the Sun.

MARTIAL ARTS PURISTS scornful of the art-film mongrelization of the genre and the CGI and wire trickery of Hero and Flying Daggers can look forward to Thai director Prachya Pinkaew's Ong-Bak, starring Muay Thai champion Tony Jaa, who with proper handling could become the next Jackie Chan. (The film opens early in 2005.) With its overall look of polished bronze. Ong-Bak is more sophisticated as filmmaking than its stock characters and rudimentary plot--innocent country boy comes to dissolute Bangkok to rescue the head of a Buddha that was stolen from the temple in his village--might suggest. What's primarily on display are Jaa's acrobatic, kick-boxing skills. Special effects are strictly low-tech, limited to depicting a particularly mind-boggling move in slow motion or in a kind of instant replay--as if the film were responding to the audience's sense of having seen something "unbelievable" by showing it over and over again. The martial arts choreography by Phanna Rithikrai is inventive and hilarious, even at its most violent. Our cherub-faced hero fights an opponent in a Howard Stern wig and a tattooed thug with a penchant for using any object in the room (a full-size refrigerator, a fluorescent sign) as a weapon. In another deftly edited sequence, Jaa sets himself on fire to fell a bad guy with a burning drop kick, douses the flames just as they threaten to engulf him, and then delivers a spinning reverse kick to someone else. Earthbound rather than ethereal. Ong-Bak nevertheless issues a cinematic challenge to the laws of gravity, mass, and weight.

THE MOST COMPELLING of the recent crop of Asian action films doesn't involve martial arts at all. In Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs trilogy, a Hong Kong cops-and-gangsters saga that combines both the glamour and the moral conflicts of Jean-Pierre Melville's policiers with the tragic weight and political undertones of The Godfather films, action becomes a struggle between good and evil carried out within the depths of fragile, fragmented psyches. The shoot-outs that punctuate the Infernal Affairs series are quick and deadly, but oddly enough, they matter less than the wrestling of souls.

As a result of the phenomenal popularity in Asia of the first Infernal Affairs (2002), Lau and Mak rushed into production with two more in 2003. It's a rare case of the commercial imperative generating a major work of art. The trilogy (recently shown at the New York Film Festival and available as a DVD import) is greater than any one of the films alone. Infernal Affairs I is a dense, driving psychological thriller in which Hong Kong stars Tony Leung Chiuwai and Andy Lau play characters who lead double lives. Leung is Yan, a cop who has infiltrated the Triad hierarchy; Lau is Ming, a Triad operative who graduated from the police academy and has risen within the police ranks to a position in the Internal Affairs division. Yan secretly reports on Triad activities to his good father, Superintendent Wong (the marvelous Hong Kong character actor. Anthony Wong) but spends all his time with his bad father, the ruthless Triad boss Sam (roly-poly high-energy charmer Eric Tsang). Ming feeds information about police surveillance to Sam, but longs for the approval of Wong and his fellow officers. Even before they discover each other's identity at the climax of Part I, Ming and Yan, by mere fact of their mirror-opposite positions in the narrative, are locked in a symbiotic relationship that dominates their imaginations and the imagination of the viewer as well.

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The trilogy is set in a Hong Kong of steel and glass--hard-edged reflecting surfaces framing the vertiginous, dreamlike doubling of Ming/Yan and Sam/Wong. Infernal Affairs II takes a backward leap in time, focusing on the connection between the father figures and their recruiting of the teenage Ming and Yan to do the undercover work that, as we know from Part I, proves devastating to them both. Part II informs and transforms, in retrospect, the meaning of Part I. It's such a simple thing--to reverse time so that we know the end before we know the beginning. The effect is to make one want to go back and see Part I in the light of Part II and then Part II again ad infinitum--not so much to connect the fine points of the plot as to recapture and reanimate the characters. At the end of Part I, three of the four major characters in the series are dead. Part II becomes an act of mourning. It's like a funeral where we learn from the speakers all kinds of details that we might not have known about the dead person in life. Part III is a different kind of time-twister, retracing some of the events of Part I, but this time through Ming's eyes rather than Yan's. Ming's desire to become good--to incorporate Yan into himself--and the resulting schizophrenic splitting of his psyche carry the narrative forward to its open ending.

Given the vagaries of foreign film distribution, US audiences may never get to see the entire trilogy in theaters. However, Martin Scorsese is currently in preproduction with a remake starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon and set in Boston. I think it's sacrilege--but that doesn't mean I won't run out with everyone else to see it.

Amy Taubin is a contributing editor of Film Comment and Sight and Sound.