A Touch of Zen

King Hu's three-hour epic, a film that won at Cannes and belongs more to art cinema than exploitation. A scholar becomes entangled with a fugitive noblewoman and the monks and agents pursuing her, and the film builds from village comedy to a bamboo-forest battle of astonishing beauty and finally to something close to transcendence.

The bamboo-grove fight alone influenced Crouching Tiger and a generation of imitators, and Hu's Buddhist finale reaches for the sublime. It demands patience and rewards it completely.

Barely exploitation, and one of the greatest films in any genre on this site.