Film
Ashes of Time
Wong Kar-wai took two beloved wuxia heroes and used them to make something almost unrecognisable as a martial arts film — swordplay reduced to blurred smears of colour, plot dissolved into memory and regret. Ouyang Feng, embittered by lost love, brokers assassinations from a desert outpost while former lovers and doomed swordsmen drift through his life. It's gorgeous, oblique, and more interested in heartbreak than combat.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you love wuxia stripped of its swordplay choreography, where the fights arrive in sudden bursts and the real business is loneliness, memory and the slow drift of regret across a sun-bleached desert.
Skip it if you want a plot you can follow scene to scene; this one folds back on itself and jumps without warning, so the narrative can slip away.
What it asks of you: Settle in for under two hours of unhurried, hazy images, where you piece the story together from fragments and let the mood do most of the work.
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Recommended by
Hero, House of Flying Daggers, The Grandmaster, Mulan, Pale Flower, Colombiana, A Touch of Zen, Fearless, The Bride with White Hair, The One-Armed Swordsman, The Valiant Ones, Samurai Fiction, Titus Andronicus, The Scent of Green Papaya, The Blade, Hand of Death, Crime Story, Infernal Street, Snake & Crane Arts of Shaolin