Movies: Tsao Chien

Ku Shen Chai, an artist in his early 30s, still lives with his mother, but he is suddenly shaken by the arrival of Yang Hui-ching, a mysterious princess on the run. Yang brings Ku into her circle of protectors, including a nameless monk whose spiritu...

Someone in a prison run by a corrupt warden fakes the deaths of convicts to later use them as expendable assassins. A police officer is sent into the prison to gather evidence of the corruption....

China, year 1457. The Minister of Defense is executed, and his children are sentenced to exile by order of the tyrannical Tsao. Fearful of future revenge from the young people, Tsao sends cruel soldiers to murder them, but a brave group of swordsmen ...

Brigitte Lin's debut film is a melodrama in which her character gets involved in a socially unacceptable relationship and then forced into marriage....

Leaving the poverty of his life in Shantung to seek fortune in Shanghai, The Boxer is instead drawn into a world of corruption, gang warfare and evil... Where his only protection is his famed fighting technique....

As China and Russia's governments are talking peace, traitorous agents on both sides seek war. Enter John Liu as a special agent sent to identify who the Russian traitor is, and who his contact is within the walls of the Forbidden City....

Despite the national resistance, the Manchurians have taken over China, but the Ching Emperor fears that the Shaolin Temple disciples would overthrow the dynasty. So he disguises himself as a disciple, in order to become a kung fu master and control ...

During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, a Chinese woman trains in the covert arts. When she arrives in Hong Kong, she learns that her brother works on behalf the Japanese cause. She then pulls together a team of women warriors to stop her brother...

Watch WANG YU as a one-armed savior battling the local goons in this martial arts classic. He has some rather amazing moves up his sleeve....

Directed by some of most well known Chinese-language directors of the time, the portmanteau film Four Moods was an attempt to alleviate Li Han-hsiang’s financial troubles during the late 1960s. Arguably one of his best works, King Hu’s short Anger is...

Hsi Shih: The Beauty of Beauties was one of the most ambitious films made in the Taiwan film industry in the 1960s. After leaving The Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong and moving to Taiwan, filmmaker Li Han-hsiang mounted this historical epic. Told t...

Kao Han (Kenny Bee) and Pan-yun (Xiu-ling Lu) meet for the first time as strangers in a pet shop. It is destiny that they meet a second time and Kao Han takes a chance in this second meeting to pursue Pan-yun. Pan-yun is reluctant to get involved wit...

The story follows a young man as he changes from an intelligently aware youth, to a teenager with much less confidence than he once had, and finally, to a stable adult....

A most touching and consistently heart-gripping war drama depicts the heroic deeds of General Chang Tsu-chung who was even held in high esteem and dubbed as “Mars of China” by his Japanese counterpart, General Itagaki during Sino-Japanese war....

Pirate Chang Pao-Chai springs a leak after an otherwise successful raid on a foreign ship. He goes ashore to get materials to patch his ship up, where he encounters corrupt Qing officials and poor, oppressed peasants. Being a good man at heart, he de...

A master swordsman is on a twenty year quest to revenge the death of his parents....

During the time of the Sung dynasty (roughly, around the 12th century), rebels in North China are fighting the Tartar invaders. A lady known as the Iron Mistress made a kind of Robin Hood career, from simply leading a bunch of thieves to become a loc...

Park Mei Ji receives a phone call from a woman who says she and Mei Ji's husband, Inn Min, are living together in Taipei and raising a son. Mei Ji immediately leaves Seoul and flies to Taipei with a friend at the woman's request, discovering that the...

Jointly and respectively directed by King Hu, Lee Hsing, and Pai Ching-Jui, three major Taiwan directors of the 1970s, this film consist of three shorts with the same cast of two actors and one actress, who through reincarnation meet in three differe...

Tsu Hong Wu is a highly fictionalized fantasy retelling of the early years of Zhu Yuanzhang’s life that was obviously geared toward younger audiences. The tale actually begins in Heaven, where the various gods are busy paving the way for a new empero...