The 25 best martial-arts movies of all time

Yes, its broader legacy is tied to the title of one of the greatest rap albums of all-time, but it’s not just name recognition that earns this milestone the top spot. It’s truly masterful, with a philosophical soulfulness and sense of visual poetry that sets it apart from so many other films to roll off the Shaw Brothers assembly line. It established director Lau Kar-leung as one of the genre’s masters, and made an icon of star Gordon Liu, portraying San Te, a young student (loosely based on an actual historical figure) on a quest to avenge the slaughter of his people by the oppressive Manchu government. The nearly hour-long training montage, showing Liu advancing through the various stages of Shaolin mastery – filmed at the actual Shaolin Temple in Henan Province’s Songshan mountains – is simply remarkable.

A nihilistic grindhouse trip, Jimmy Wang Yu’s one-armed boxer is so badass that a blind, psychotic monk (equipped with the titular weapon) comes gunning for his head. Cue a kung fu competition featuring arm-stretching yogis, spring-loaded, gut-seeking axes and a final battle inside a coffin shop.

Decadent, delirious and dripping with sin, it’s more of a swordplay thriller than a kung fu killer, but it’ll still claw your eyes out. Lily Ho is kidnapped and sold to a brothel, where the lesbian madam teaches her the martial arts of revenge…and love!

How much damage can one man do with a wooden stick? If he’s Gordon Liu, plenty. In this epic tale – one of the last films produced by Hong Kong’s mighty Shaw Brothers studio – a soldier-turned-monk is pulled back into the vengeance game after the same jerkoffs who betrayed his father on the battlefield kidnap his sister. Filming was nearly derailed when star Alexander Fu Sheng died in a car accident halfway through production. Instead, director Lau Kar-leung honoured him with a masterpiece.

Hey, this one sounds familiar. Yes, it inspired the Wu-Tang Clan song of the same name, as well as the moniker of Ghostface Killah, who took his nom de hip-hop from the film’s memorable villain. But even if no one ever rapped about it, the balletic fight scenes – a blend of graceful five-element technique with chess-influenced strategem – would still have guaranteed the movie a spot in the pantheon.

A true genre classic, Cheng Cheh’s Five Deadly Venoms established the ‘Venom Mob’, the crew of actors who’d turn up in many subsequent productions from Shaw Brothers Studio. A dying master, suspecting that his teachings are being used for evil, sends his last remaining student to investigate five of his former pupils, each one skilled in a different animal-based technique. (Snake, Scorpion, Centipede, etc.) It’s an irresistible premise that allows each fight scene to take on its own unique identity. A lot of kung-fu fandoms start here.

Even by the over-the-top standards of cult-classic kung fu, director Chang Cheh always went a little higher, and this face-off between elite Chinese fighters and well-trained Japanese ninjas might be the bloodiest, most bonkers entry in his oeuvre. How bloody and bonkers? At one point, a disemboweled combatant gets tangled up in his own guts. ’Nuff said.

If a movie has the phrase ‘once upon a time’ in its title, you know you’re in for something epic, and director Tsui Hark’s masterpiece is no exception. Jet Li plays Wong Fei-hung, a 19th century Cantonese folk hero training an army to protect his province from encroaching Westerners. Full of spellbinding imagery, it’s perhaps the best martial arts movie of the ‘90s. Li would star in two sequels before making his English-language breakthrough toward the end of the decade in Lethal Weapon 4.

One of the earliest Shaw brothers productions, Come Drink with Me established the look and tone of the wuxia sword fighting genre. After the son of a Chinese general is kidnapped and held for ransom, the general’s daughter Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-Pei) goes to rescue him, eventually teaming up with another formidable fighter known as Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua). A remake directed by superfan Quentin Tarantino has been rumoured for years, and while it appears that will never materialise, the movie’s influence on Kill Bill is strong enough to nearly count as one. 

Six years before Master of the Flying Guillotine, writer, director and star Jimmy Wang Yu presented the origin story of his titular impaired ass-kicker, Tien Lung. (Yu really had a niche: he’d previously starred in two unrelated One Armed Swordsman movies for Shaw Brothers.) It’s tame compared to the sequel but not to practically anything else in cinema. Wang avenges his missing limb by iron-fisting his way through a coterie of international villains, including a fanged Japanese kung fu master, twin Thai boxers and a gray-faced Indian yogi with impenetrable skin. Well, almost impenetrable.

Most famous as the movie that inspired Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, King Hu’s wuxia milestone exudes an uncommon grace and depth of feeling for the time period, not to mention length: it’s nearly three hours long. But it’s worth the commitment, and not just because of the later films that borrowed from it. Its exploration of Buddhist philosophy is still rare in the martial arts world, and its experimental touches make it an experience as unique as it is influential. 

To save her cop brother from an underground drug ring, Etsuko Shihomi must defeat a Warriors-like assemblage of bad guys before confronting an iron-clawed final boss. If that sounds like a video game, well, it is called Street Fighter. Although to be honest, the title is a bit misleading: yes, this is a female-fronted spin-off of the movie that broke Sonny Chiba internationally, and Chiba is in it, but he plays an entirely different character. It does, however, have a similar ’70s exploitation vibe and enough ultraviolence to initially get it slapped with an X-rating in the US. More than anything, it’s got Shihomi, who is neither sexualised nor presented as a feminist symbol – just as someone you really shouldn’t mess with. 

Along with Drunken Master – released the same year, with the same director, newcomer and future icon Yuen Woo-ping – this action-comedy helped establish Jackie Chan as the Buster Keaton of Hong Kong action cinema. In one scene, Chan, initially playing a lowly janitor, manically slips towels under the feet of a guy walking across a floor he just mopped. After getting taken in by a vagrant proficient in the nearly extinct ‘Snake’ fighting style, he fends off a gang by having the beggar control his limbs, then achieves his final battle-ready form by imitating a cat. It’s all wonderfully goofy – but, in the grand Chan tradition, he still incurred legitimate injuries, including a missing tooth and a slashed arm from a supposedly dull sword.

A roly-poly ass-beater named Fatty (Sammo Hung, who also directs) gets embroiled in a vaguely Shakespearean family feud between a violent scumbag and his benevolent adopted brother. It’s a bit convoluted plot-wise, but the film mostly exists as a thrilling early example of the choreographic magic of Hung, who’d go on to become one of Jackie Chan’s frequent collaborators. 

Another film whose reputation has been enhanced from being a source of hip-hop samples, Shaolin vs Lama tells a basic story: an aspiring student of kung fu seeks mentorship from an old monk and ends up in the middle of a war between Chinese fighters and a violent Buddhist sect. But the acrobatic action sequences come non-stop and make compelling use of the scenery, particularly a Shaolin temple. Also, there are at least two fights involving a roast chicken. 

Most martial arts films peak with a third-act showdown, but the highlight of this Taiwanese production – a collaboration between Mystery of Chess Boxing director Joseph Kuo and ascendant fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping – is an opening montage educating audiences in the art of t’ai chi. According to the narrator, the top one percent of practitioners eventually become impervious to pain, a concept one advanced student helpfully demonstrates by smashing bricks with his head, dragging a knife across his body, getting gut-stomped off a balcony and taking a spiked bat to the junk. It sets a high bar, but the climactic final battle, in which the pupils of a kung fu academy attempt to defeat a villainous t’ai chi master by piercing his one weak spot, is worth sticking around for. 

Until the early 1970s, most martial arts films belonged to the wuxia subgenre – fantastical tales with action sequences centred around highly choreographed sword fights. With The Chinese Boxer, director and star Jimmy Wang Yu introduced a different kind of martial arts flick, placing the focus on unarmed combat and the mastery of various disciplines, and its box-office success ensured that it would set the template for just about every Hong Kong action movie to follow. As such, its story is as standard as it gets – a Chinese boxer seeks revenge for the destruction of his training facility – but Yu’s self-directed fight scenes remain spectacular even after decades of imitation.

Thai phenom Tony Jaa smashed through to international audiences with this bruising tale of a Muay Thai fighting phenom who ventures into Bangkok underworld after the head of a sacred Buddhist statue is stolen. Full of jaw-dropping, non-CG action backdropped by spectacular location photography, the movie sets up Jaa as the next great martial arts crossover star – although his next most memorable movie is probably Ong-Bak 2, aka ‘the one where he runs up and backflips off an elephant’.