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Veteran action movie ace Sammo Hung, Japanese actor Kurata Yasuaki and action choreographer-turned director Tanigaki Kenji had a ball on Thursday in Tokyo as they took a light-hearted trip down memory lane to discuss the state of martial art action movies from Hong Kong.

In a panel discussion held in the confines of Tiffcom, the rights market aligned with the Tokyo International Film Festival, the three were seemingly selected to represent the past, present and future of the genre.

“Hong Kong’s place in the film world is well deserved. We worked so hard for it,” said Hung. “Nobody paid attention to us for ages, so we could do what we liked. Then, finally, our time came.”

Hung (real name Hung Kam-bo) has over 250 film credits according to the Internet Movie Database in roles ranging from actor and stuntman to producer and director. These include “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,...

Bruce Lee's influence on martial arts films made them a global phenomenon and led to the rise of other big-screen martial artists. There are numerous other martial arts stars from the '70s and '80s whose work would be highly cherished by Bruce Lee fans. From David Chiang to Angela Mao, these martial arts stars have had extensive careers and continue to be recognized as legends in the industry.

Bruce Lee might be the most well-known martial arts star, but there are also many other kung fu stars that his fans would love. Instrumental in popularizing martial arts films around the globe, Bruce Lee's greatest movies like Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon are staples in the kung fu genre that remain influential to actors, directors, and filmmakers in the action genre. Despite only making five kung fu movies before unexpectedly and heartbreakingly passing away in 1973, Bruce...

Jackie Chan has fought numerous fellow action heroes over the course of his career. In the action movie world, Jackie Chan needs no introduction, having dedicated his life to a blend of action, comedy, and martial arts that is uniquely his own. Additionally, Jackie Chan has also performed innumerable death-defying stunts throughout his career, with his movies frequently featuring outtakes of stunts gone wrong and the many injuries he has incurred.

With martial arts being such an integral element of all Jackie Chan movies, he has also been at the center of some of the most impressive fight scenes ever put to film. While many fellow stuntpeople and martial artists have had fight scenes opposite Chan and gone on to great careers themselves, Jackie Chan has also fought quite a few big martial arts movie stars. Even the average Jackie Chan fight scene is usually guaranteed to be entertaining, but...

Michelle Yeoh has just won the Academy Award for best actress with her hysterically good performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, making Oscar history as first Asian woman winning that category. It has been a long way since the year 1937, when white actress Luise Rainer won the same category for sporting a “yellowface” and play a Chinese villager in “The Good Earth.” But the Malaysian-born actress had already built up a reputation in the 1980s and '90s as Hong Kong's kick-ass action star.

Check out the interview of Michelle Yeoh An Interview with Michelle Yeoh : One of Asia's Biggest Film Stars

A ballet dancer since 4, she moved to London to study at the Royal Academy as a teen, but her dancer career didn't last long. After winning the Miss Malaysia beauty pageant title and the Miss Moomba beauty pageant title in Australia in the early 1980s, she...

Building up on the success of the two previous installments, Sammo Hung and producer Eric Tsang really went overboard with this one, which this time, takes place mostly in Pattaya, Thailand and features even more explosive (literally and metaphorically) action scenes. The most impressive fact, however, about the film, is its uncanny cast, which seems to feature the majority of the creme de la creme of Hk action cinema, to say the least. Apart from the two aforementioned and the foreigners Richard Norton and Yasuaki Kurata, who form the main villain trio with Fat Chung, the movie also includes Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, Richard Ng, Kiu Wai Mai, Stanley Fung, Sibelle Hu, John Sham, Rosamund Kwan, Andy Lau, Kara Hui, Michelle Yeoh and Charlie Chin, while in non-named credits as thugs, we stumble upon Dick Wei, Philip Ko and Lau Kar-win, to name the ones with the most significant roles.

Hong Kong is always on the edge of destruction. Almost as long as it has been a city, it has been in crisis. World War II and the subsequent Chinese Civil War saw a massive contraction and then expansion of its population, flooding the then-colony with an nigh unsustainable number of refugees. They were packed into hellishly inadequate housing and given jobs (when they could find them) at the lowest rungs of laissez-faire industry. As one generation transitioned to another and the colony’s economy boomed, massive scandals came to light of corruption and interconnection between the police force and the criminal gangs that dominated the still-nightmarish warrens where the city’s poor still lived. Then, in 1984, the British and Chinese governments agreed that Hong Kong would be returned to Mainland control before the end of the century. This set the clock ticking on the potential end of all that Hong Kongers had built,...