While Hong Kong filmmakers have a gift for action, they tend to overdo it in the melodrama department, at least when it comes to watching their films through Western eyes. Perhaps the worst Hong Kong film I've seen to date is Jackie Chan's Heart of Dragon (1985), which features Jackie caring for his developmentally disabled brother (played by goofball Sammo Hung, who co-directed). All the heartstring tugging made me want to claw my eyes out. Or take another look at a masterpiece like John Woo's The Killer and you'll see an operatic hugeness to the emotional scenes -- especially between men -- that an American would never even dream, much less dare. These folks have an extremely high tolerance level for sentimentality; it takes an enormous amount before their sap detectors begin going off.

The same goes for action director and one-man HK film industry Johnny To (also known as "Johnnie To Kei-Fung"). To was a fairly minor director during Hong Kong's exciting late 1980s/early 1990s heyday, when imported films began to tantalize American viewers bored with big explosions and Vietnam rescue flicks. His biggest credit was as co-director on the exceptional supernatural superhero movie The Heroic Trio (1992). But after the 1997 handover to China, when most other filmmakers withdrew or abandoned ship, To flourished and eventually became the country's most successful and exciting filmmaker. His action hits included: The Mission (1999), Running Out of Time (1999), Help!!! (2000), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running Out of Time 2 (2003), Running on Karma (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), Triad Election (2006) and Exiled (2007), along with some 40 other films.

In the spirit of the season and goodwill and whatnot, I thought I'd forgo griping about the sorry state of things this week and instead send out some love to the downtrodden, the small films of 2007 that were somehow overlooked, underrated or outright ignored in some way. Let's start with the Russian film The Italian, released in January, which caused critics to dredge up the word "Dickensian" for the first time in a while. But for all that it was a surprising, deeply-felt story of an orphan who escapes the orphanage to find his birth-parents.

Kino released the documentary Romantico in January as well, and they're apparently counting it as a 2007 release. I wrote a few weeks back about the documentary format; there's certainly a place for journalism and reporting, but the very best documentaries, the ones that stand the test of time, are the ones that capture the details of life, like Crumb, Hoop Dreams and To Be and to Have. Romantico is one of those. It tells the story of a mariachi illegally based in San Francisco who decides to go back to Mexico to see his family, even though he risks never being able to return (of course, his income in the States is much higher than in Mexico). Romantico will most certainly be overlooked in any discussion of 2007's documentaries, but it's worth seeking out on DVD.

Johnny To's Exiled grabbed me from its very first musical cue. The twang of a Spaghetti Western guitar reverberates, echoing through the empty streets outside a small home in Macau. Men with murder in mind have come to call on an old colleague. You just know that bullets will fly and blood will flow. As Scott Weinberg wrote, it's a "fast-paced and surprisingly amusing piece from a stunningly prolific Hong Kong moviemaker who really knows his genre stuff." The DVD hits shelves this week from Magnolia, with "making of" and "behind the scenes" features.

The great Bruce Lee made only a few films as an adult before his untimely and way too early death. His first celluloid outings came when he was just a sapling. The Kid features 10-year-old Lee as an orphan who is taken under the wings of a petty thief. A kindly factory owner, played by Lee's real-life father, tries to help him onto the path of the straight and narrow. Peter Nepstad of The Illuminated Lantern (a wonderful site) called it "a great example of early Cantonese cinema, a showcase of a little boy who grows up to become a huge star ... a movie not to be missed." The DVD comes courtesy of Cinema Epoch, though no feature details have surfaced.

Long before Samuel L. Jackson had his fateful encounter with hundreds of slithering reptiles, The Killer Snakes were crawling around cinemas. John Charles of Hong Kong Digital (another great site) described this 1974 Shaw Brothers production as an "incredibly sordid HK thriller [that] mixes gruesome horror, perverse sex, and animal cruelty into a most unsavory brew. ... Even almost 30 years after it was produced, this remains one potent and disturbing little picture." (He wrote his review of the Region 3 DVD several years ago.) Perhaps needless to say, no CGI was used. The newly-released Region 1 DVD from Image Entertainment contains a stills gallery and a collection of Shaw Brothers trailers.

Writers' strike got you down? Wondering how to fill those late-night hours now that all the talk shows are on hiatus? I've got just the answer for you: Asian films on DVD! All three of these newly-released films are sure to provoke, though I'm not sure they'll prepare you for sleep as well as Jon Stewart or Craig Ferguson.

Johnny To's Election brilliantly details a clash of triad titans in Hong Kong. Every two years an election is held to determine a crime gang's new boss; both Simon Yam, a suave yet savage family man, and Tony Leung Kar-Fai, a brutal and much feared lieutenant, want the job. Director To generates tension with great subtlety, and the story has several surprises up its sleeve. The DVD includes a "making of" feature and interviews with the director and stars.

Cinematical's Jeffrey M. Anderson wrote a beautiful review of Tsai Ming-liang's latest film, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, explaining how it fits into the director's ouevre and concluding: "The pleasure here belongs to Tsai's images, which can be both familiar and baffling, or beautiful and humorously deadpan, or realistic and supernatural. It's best to give up ideas of plot, story and characters and just explore these amazing images, one by one." The DVD includes the original theatrical trailer, which can be viewed at Moviefone.

Our friends at Moviefone also have the trailer for Kim Ki-Duk's Time, which in no way prepares you for how infuriating the film proves to be. I agree with Martha Fischer, who wrote: "The problem with Time is that every character in the film is so fundamentally repulsive it's impossible to care about any of them." Still, as I've written before, Kim's films are visually beautiful and told in an indelible narrative style, and that might be enough to justify a rental if you're curious. The DVD includes a "making of" feature and the trailer.

Programming a film series or festival inevitably requires a degree of compromise, depending as it does on the oft-indecipherable whims of distributors, producers and sales agents. In recognition of the challenges and frustrations involved, I prefer to give programmers the benefit of the doubt. Yet I can't help but wonder what the Film Society of Lincoln Center had in mind with "10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema," a retrospective series that begins tonight in New York City.

Ostensibly, the program is intended "to mark the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region" with a "series of cinematic highlights." That sounds good, but the program lacks any balance. If the aim was to provide the very best of Hong Kong cinema since 1997, then why include Initial D and Confession of Pain, two moderately enjoyable yet ultimately inconsequential films by the directing team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (their much better collaboration Infernal Affairs is also screening). If the goal was to provide historical perspective on the decade, why ignore completely the wave of proto-Hollywood thrillers (Downtown Torpedoes, 2000 A.D.) that flooded theaters in the late 1990's, or the plethora of romantic comedies that followed in the wake of Needing You in 2000, or recent attempts -- by directors other than Johnny To -- to reawaken the action film (Flash Point, Invisible Target)? If the goal was to highlight popular hits, where are the films of Stephen Chow (The King of Comedy, Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle)?

Instead, the showcase is limited to the tried and true: Lau and Mak (three films), Wong Kar Wai (two films) and Johnny To (three and 1/3, counting his contribution to Triangle) fill eight of the 13 slots. That's not to denigrate the quality of the selections nor to discourage anyone from attending, but it looks like a lost opportunity to showcase less-heralded gems of recent Hong Kong cinema. All that being said, if I lived in New York I'd park myself in the theater for the entire series, which runs through October 25; I've seen most of them, but not on the big screen.

I grew up and lived in Los Angeles for many years, but it was only after I moved away that I began to fully appreciate the tremendous variety of films presented by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Early this year the Archive launched its first season of programming at the brand new Billy Wilder Theater in the Hammer Museum in Westwood, near the UCLA campus. I haven't been there yet, but it certainly sounds like a fabulous screening facility, and this weekend sounds like a great time to go see a movie (or two or four).

The Archive's New Chinese Cinema series, presented in collaboration with the California Institute of the Arts, gets underway tonight (October 5) with a double bill of Still Life and Dong, two works by Jia Zhangke that tackle a similar subject from both a fictional and documentary perspective. Jia was invited by the artist Liu Xiaodong to document his working process as he created one of his "monumental, fractured paintings." The location was the Three Georges area in China, where a huge dam is being constructed. Jia was inspired by the location to make the feature Still Life and also slightly "fictionalized" the documentary Dong.

The series continues with the US Premiere of Eye in the Sky on Saturday night. Eye in the Sky is the debut film by Yau Nai-hoi, who has written several films for director Johnny To (PTU, Running on Karma, Election). Tony Leung Ka-Fai is a criminal in this one and Simon Yam is a cop in the Surveillance Unit assigned to catch him.

Sunday takes a decided turn toward the independent with Huang Weikai's street musician doc Floating and Yang Heng's debut feature Betelnut, a "gently observational portrait of youthful aimlessness," as described in the program notes. The series continues through October 26 with screenings also taking place at the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater (REDCAT).

Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours is back on the charts this week, playing on one lone screen, in Denver, according to my information. Among its other qualities and achievements, it marks the fourth collaboration of director Oliveira and actor Michel Piccoli (a fifth, a short segment in an anthology film, appeared earlier this year). At 81, Piccoli is practically a living legend, having worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle, Mario Bava, and many other greats. He also appears in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1962 Le Doulos, currently re-released on 2 screens. It's a delicate relationship between director and actor; Piccoli and Oliveira seem to be developing a comfortable working relationship in which each brings out the best in the other. This has happened relatively few times over the past century. When it happens, it can be very exciting, but when a director and an actor don't click, everything can fall to pieces.

Milos Forman has coaxed and guided some great performances over the years, notably Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus and Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon. But he has rarely been praised for directing women, as evidenced by his awkward handling of Natalie Portman in the awful Goya's Ghosts (37 screens). The movie earned advance attention for its nude/sex scene, but will probably be remembered for fitting Portman with a set of humorously bad fake teeth and for her self-consciously dazed walk, newly released from prison, through a chaotic town square. Forman may be to blame, but Portman is out there, on the screen, all alone and in front of everyone.

My pick of the week is the underseen Cautiva, a drama from Argentina. Cristina's biological parents were "disappeared" during the 1970s, but she knew nothing about it and is none too happy when she is torn away from her comfortable upper class existence to live with them. Cautiva (AKA Captive) does not dig very deeply into the political issues that it raises -- and I kept wishing that Cristina would react to her situation instead of simply slumping her shoulders -- but it is fascinating for its new twists on the old coming of age story.

More fully realized on every level, Away From Her marked the assured directorial debut of actress Sarah Polley. She paints a delicate portrait of a long-time marriage that reaches a breaking point from which it may never recover. In his Sundance review, our own James Rocchi wrote: "Away from Her is a truly romantic film, and it moves us because it knows the cruel, beautiful fact that how much love and life give us is often matched by how much they can cost." Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent star. The DVD includes an audio commentary with Christie, plus deleted scenes and commentary by Polley.

Triad Election is a riveting drama starring Simon Yam as a Hong Kong mob boss who desperately wants to stay in power. Johnny To masterfully directed. Cinematical's Jeffrey M. Anderson says that "the movie's real strength comes in the performances, the interplay, and the unknown levels of trust." Triad Election is actually the second part of a drama that begins with 2005's Election, which details Yam's rise to power. Unfortunately, Election won't be released on Region 1 DVD until November. Taken together, they are powerful, but even separated like this, Triad Election is well worth a look.

Other indie titles that may deserve a rental include Hungarian sports drama White Palms, character drama Snow Cake (featuring Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver), and nightlife comedy The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down.

With many taking full advantage of the long holiday weekend, myself included, the box office numbers tumbled in a bit later than usual, but it appears that Spanish-language thriller Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón won on a per-screen basis with an average of $6,090 at 340 locations, based on estimates by Leonard Klady of Movie City News. That put it #2 overall in per-screen averages behind Rob Zombie's Halloween. In Ladrón, two thieves resolve to steal the fortune of an man who's built his empire by selling useless health aids to poor people via infomercials. The official site has the fake infomercials plus Spanish and English language versions of the trailer.

Death at a Funeral is holding up nicely, averaging $5,260 on 264 screens for distributor MGM. Directed by Frank Oz, the dark ensemble comedy declined just 2% while adding three screens in its third week of release. Also in its third week out, the superb doc The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters increased its take by 27.3%, according to Box Office Mojo, adding seven screens and averaging $4,571. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg gave each film a positive review, and word of mouth must be good.

Other debuting specialty titles included John August's The Nines, which drew an extremely healthy $14,650 each at the two screens where it was booked. (Our own Ryan Stewart really liked it too.) On its sole screen, Indian drama Vanaja made $10,500, which should be considered a triumph in view of it subject matter and lack of stars. (Read Christopher Campbell's positive review to see why: I've seen it and I agree completely.) Johnny To's Exiled finally made its theatrical premiere. I loved this terrific, tangy, self-aware, modern Hong Kong Western -- Scott Weinberg liked it, though not as much as me -- so I wish it made more than $9,550 in two engagements so far.

Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs dropped an astounding 81.4% in its second week, taking in just $1,100 for a total of $14,200 so far. Good thing the budget was low. You'd have to think that all the press on so-called "mumblecore" films in general would help, but perhaps the audience is more limited than expected or hoped.

For what could either be his next Falling Down or his next Bad Company, director Joel Schumacher is in negotiations to helm a remake of Johnny To's Breaking News. The project has been set up at Paramount Vantage with Alex de Rakoff (The Calcium Kid) penning the adaptation and Paul Brooks (White Noise) producing. Brooks is currently working with Schumacher on the Nazi vampire movie Town Creek, which Lions Gate will release next year. The original Breaking News is a Hong Kong cat-and-mouse actioner about a police inspector on the trail of a bank robber. The game begins with an embarrassing surrender by the police force, which is broadcast through the media. So, in order to boost the public image of the police, the inspector now needs a publicly aired victory, and he hopes this will happen with his capture of one of the robbers, who is hiding out with an innocent father and son.

Following his recent joke of a movie, The Number 23, and after Town Creek, which I can only imagine will be another bad occult-based pic, Schumacher will be in need of a decent police thriller. The thing about Schumacher is he's fully capable of doing a few awful films and then an occasional good one. I'd much prefer Breaking News to be on the level of Falling Down, and not Bad Company, but I'd settle for it to be another Phone Booth, which was somewhere in between those two. Earlier this year Paramount attached Schumacher to another supernatural movie called Inland Saints, but hopefully Breaking News comes first so the director can have a little rest from the spooky films -- he's not going to deliver another Lost Boys or even another Flatliners anyway, and working in another genre may keep him off the crazy idea that he'd be good to direct a Sandman movie.

The celebrations are over but the movies remain. July 1 marked the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover from British to Chinese rule. In the weeks leading up to the anniversary, several movies were released to capitalize on or commemorate this momentous event. Mr. Cinema was first out of the gate. The trailer, with the sometimes great, sometimes slumming Anthony Wong as an apparently mild-mannered projectionist, is not inspiring. Two commenters at IMDb had hilariously polar opposite reactions, with one calling it "the best movie I have seen so far in 2007" and the other claiming it was "another idealogically foolish movie." Local resident Kozo, who started his great site a few years ago and has written hundreds of reviews, described it as "an affectionate look at 40 years of Hong Kong history, but there are glaring historial and political omissions."

Wonder Women focuses on just the past 10 years and "tackles the toughest of topics head on," according to Kozo. Yet the film ends up a "noble train wreck," derailed by "manufactured cinema twists" and "canned melodrama." Director Barbara Wong made the daringly serious documentary Women's Private Parts and her subsequent films have been generally well-regarded, so it's disappointing to hear that her latest may not be so wonderful after all.

The best of the bunch may be Hooked on You, produced by Johnny To. It looks at the past decade through the eyes of an enterprising fishmonger played by Miriam Yeung (pictured); our friend Kozo thought it was entertaining and touching, with interesting characters. Writing from Singapore, Stefan S appreciated the "good ensemble cast with great chemistry between the leads ... and best of all, being able to identify with them, and the relationship issues they face." You can watch the trailer at the official site or at The Great Swifty Speaketh!

In the early 1990s, the leaders of the Hong Kong action pack included John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung with Johnny To running somewhere in the distance. His only major credit was co-directing the awesome The Heroic Trio (1993) with Ching. But as the 1997 handover approached, during which control of Hong Kong would revert from the British back to the Communist Chinese, most filmmakers panicked. Some came to the U.S. to make Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and others simply laid low, waiting for the worst to happen. However, To suddenly found himself at the forefront of things, and slowly worked his way into becoming Hong Kong's top new action director, consistently churning out reliable, if old-fashioned hits: Running Out of Time (1999), Help!!! (2000), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running on Karma (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), Exiled (2006) and now Triad Election.

Tartan Films is giving Triad Election an American theatrical release, even though its forerunner, Election, did not get the same treatment. No matter. I didn't see Election, and it was easy enough for me to parcel out what was what. This superb, graceful new film actually has quite a bit in common with Francis Coppola's Godfather trilogy, and so anyone even remotely familiar with that should be able to follow it pretty clearly. Here it is: Lok (Simon Yam) is the current Chairman of Wo Shing Triad Society in Hong Kong. Each Chairman is elected and serves for two years. Lok's time is running out and he wishes to serve another term.

Exiled is a movie that demands you pay very close attention for the first fifteen minutes, because the flick doesn't stop to deliver big blocks of exposition or early character development. We open with a half-dozen gun-wielding men. We don't know the good guys from the bad guys or why they're all wielding those guns. An elaborately hectic gun battle breaks out ... and then the surviving combatants drop their weapons and begin renovating an apartment. Yes, seriously. Don't mistake Johnny To's Exiled for a convoluted or indecipherable affair, though; it's actually quite a simple little story -- but the veteran filmmaker seems to be having some fun by dropping us into the mix without a map and commanding us to keep up.

It's a pretty engrossing first act, I can tell you that much, and if the rest of Exiled doesn't quite live up to its early promise, there's still more than enough mayhem to keep the gangster fans entertained. Plus it kind of turns into a western in Act III, which I found bizarre but also quite entertaining. The meat of the story is fairly basic: A bunch of childhood friends, now on opposite sides of warring families, must band together to avoid a common enemy. Picture The Dirty (Half) Dozen of Asian mafioso types, and that's pretty much Exiled to a tee. It's a fast-paced and surprisingly amusing piece from a stunningly prolific Hong Kong moviemaker who really knows his genre stuff.

Hot off its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Magnolia Pictures has nabbed the English-language rights to Johnny To's action thriller, Exiled. As part of a three-way pact (with Optimum Releasing for UK rights and Madman Entertainment for rights in Australia and New Zealand), pic marks the second acquisition for the three companies, after teaming up to snag The Host this past May at Cannes, where Magnolia also picked up the genre title Severance.

Set in Hong Kong's underworld and modeled after To's 1999 hit The Mission, Exiled packed its cast with folks like Roy Cheung, Francis Ng, Anthony Wong and Simon Yam. Says Magnolia's President Eamonn Bowles, "A lot of people thinking that the Hong Kong gangster film ran its course in the nineties are going to be pleasantly surprised by the freshness and innovation of Exiled. Now comes the more (or less) important question: How long before an American filmmaker decides to orchestrate a remake?

• Breaking News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
• Free Enterprise: Special Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and Mindfire Entertainment's website features a rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at 157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also available.