10 Best Hong Kong Martial Arts Movies of All Time

2 days ago 12

Published Jun 22, 2026, 8:20 AM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2600 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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It wouldn’t be fair to say that all the great martial arts movies ever made were produced in Hong Kong, but a good many of them were. That does mean any ranking of all-time great martial arts movies will feature a fair few Hong Kong productions, though going beyond, you’ve also got American martial arts movies, Japanese martial arts films (mainly samurai movies), and then more recently, a bunch of Indonesian martial arts movies (like The Raid, its sequel, and The Night Comes for Us).

For now, though, the focus is on the ones from Hong Kong. These are just all-time great martial arts movies that were either produced in Hong Kong, or are co-productions between more than one country/region/territory, included here so long as one of those regions was Hong Kong. Together, they make a compelling argument for this being the best film industry in the world, when it comes to making great martial arts cinema.

10 'Hero' (2002)

There’s a little more by way of narrative in Hero, compared to some other martial arts films, mainly thanks to its structure and the fact that the drama here is genuinely quite engaging. If Hero didn’t have any big action scenes, and instead just focused on the other stuff, it’d probably work pretty well as a historical drama of sorts, especially because there is a movie that’s kind of like Hero, but without a lot of action: 1962’s Harakiri.

In Harakiri and Hero, there’s an individual who retells a series of violent/tragic events, and then there’s a building of tension to some kind of climax that itself will get violent and possibly tragic. But it’s not like Hero is a remake or anything; more that it’s got a similar structure and usage of flashbacks. Hero unfolds confidently and really impresses with its one-on-one fight scenes, making it an easy film to revisit and appreciate multiple times.

9 'The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter' (1984)

Shaw Brothers was the studio behind many of the greatest Hong Kong martial arts movies of the 1970s and 1980s, with The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter being the first title produced by said studio worthy of mention, for present purposes. This one’s about training and revenge, with some philosophical weight added to the whole film because of the former (training one’s mind along with one’s body and all that), and then the latter being the reason so much fighting ultimately happens.

The action near the end of The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter is especially spectacular, and the movie might well hold the record for the most teeth knocked out on screen. It’s easy to get swept up in this film and believe that the fighting is happening for real, owing to how painful much of it looks, which is often a sign that a movie’s doing something right, as a martial arts flick.

8 'The Super Inframan' (1975)

On the other end of things tonally, compared to The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, is The Super Inframan, though both films were produced by Shaw Brothers, and they work together to demonstrate the range of movies the studio produced. Granted, The Super Inframan is a bit of an outlier within the Shaw Brothers catalog, and seemed like an attempt to appeal to the sorts of audiences who might've been into the (generally) goofy Godzilla (and other kaiju) movies of the era.

The Super Inframan is also a superhero movie, with the titular character having superpowers that he uses to fight back against various monsters an alien is using in an attempt to take over the world. The Godzilla vibes are there because of all the monster suits, and even if they get in the way of the film’s fight scenes having objectively amazing choreography, the novelty of seeing people in such costumes generally pulling off high-energy fight scenes does make The Super Inframan a blast to watch. It’s goofy, but also good-hearted, and weirdly endearing, too.

7 'Drunken Master II' (1994)

Thankfully, this isn't the kind of sequel where you need to see the first movie. Though, to be fair, the first Drunken Master is still more than solid, and an essential film to watch if you want to see an early Jackie Chan starring role, since it was an important movie of his early on, that led to further greatness and more exciting movies overall. Like Drunken Master II, which is a good deal more energetic, action-packed, and wince-inducing (the last of those things in a good way).

The plot is a feature-length excuse to have a bunch of elaborate fight sequences, and that’s okay, seeing as the fights in Drunken Master II are so spectacular.

The narrative here mostly concerns people trying to steal Chinese artifacts, with Jackie Chan playing a man who fights with a Drunken Boxing style, and is against the whole stealing artifacts thing. It’s a feature-length excuse to have a bunch of elaborate fight sequences, and that’s okay, seeing as the fights in Drunken Master II are so spectacular, especially those featured near to – and during – the film’s climax.

6 'Last Hurrah for Chivalry' (1979)

Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979) characters

Last Hurrah for Chivalry is an underrated action movie overall, and tends to get overshadowed a bit by later action films John Woo would go on to direct, with those generally not being martial arts-focused. He came to specialize in making action movies that focused on firefights, rather than hand-to-hand battles, but proved he could indeed thrive doing the latter, as Last Hurrah for Chivalry demonstrates.

It’s essentially a heroic bloodshed movie, but with swords used instead of guns. People bleed, the heroes go through a lot, and the action is near-constant, with there potentially being more minutes spent on depicting fight scenes here than scenes that don’t have action. Maybe Last Hurrah for Chivalry runs the risk of getting a bit exhausting, at a point, but it delivers your money’s worth and then some, so long as what you're spending your (figurative or literal) money on is high-quality action.

5 'A Touch of Zen' (1970)

Ying Bai and Feng Hsu with wounded arms in a forest in A Touch of Zen (1971).

A co-production between Hong Kong and Taiwan, A Touch of Zen is a huge martial arts film, and maybe one of the most ambitious ever made, too. It runs for about three hours all up, and finds time to be both mysterious and kind of fantastical on top of having the action you might expect from a martial arts movie. Though, regarding the action, it’s not exactly non-stop here.

For about the first half or so of A Touch of Zen, there isn't a ton of fighting, because that’s saved for the final act. There’s surprisingly good writing and acting here, giving you a reason to care about the characters and their situation before any real showdowns start happening. All throughout, A Touch of Zen is absolutely beautiful to look at, with it walking this odd but rather intoxicating line between being atmospheric/peaceful and then sometimes also quite exciting, at least when it wants to be.

4 'The 36th Chamber of Shaolin' (1978)

Gordon Liu as Liu Yude/Monk San Te in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin produced by the Shaw Brothers

The last Shaw Brothers movie worth mentioning is The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, though there are more than just a handful of films from the studio worthy of all-time great status. Yet only the best of the best can be focused on here, and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin really is one of the best. Also, like The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, this movie stars Gordon Liu Chia-Hui, was directed by Lau Kar-leung, and has a story that involves a good deal of training done so a young man can enact vengeance on those who wronged his family.

This one stands out for just how much time is spent on the training, which makes the eventual action all the more cathartic. It’s a very simple but also highly satisfying martial arts film, and it kicked off the start of what ended up being an overall pretty good trilogy… though one where the quality of this first film was, admittedly, never quite exceeded.

3 'Enter the Dragon' (1973)

There were only a small handful of movies Bruce Lee starred in during his short but impactful (and influential) acting career, with Enter the Dragon being the final completed one, and also the best, overall. Its premise involves a martial arts tournament held on a strange island and hosted by a mysterious individual whom Bruce Lee’s character is told to spy on while posing as a fighter within the tournament.

You’ve also got a few other side characters who have their own motivations for being there, with it all adding up to something that has a ton of action, be it the fights that take place within the tournament, and then more deadly fighting that starts to take place outside the competition itself. Enter the Dragon is still a blast to watch more than half a century later, and also stands as a great gateway film into classic martial arts cinema as a whole. The approachability is helped by it being a rare English-language old-school martial arts movie, not to mention, technically, a co-production between Hong Kong and the U.S.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is often held up as the gold standard for martial arts cinema, and it’s not too hard to see why. It’s got a bit more by way of fantastical elements than some of the other movies mentioned here, owing to it being a wuxia film, yet the action is still immaculately choreographed and exciting, being visceral in its own way (at least once you get used to it being a bit floatier and technically less grounded than something like Enter the Dragon).

To make another comparison to a previously mentioned film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has a bit of an excuse plot, like Drunken Master II, since this film revolves around a prized sword that various people want for themselves. There’s a lot of melodrama and even some romance that gets included, so it’s got that kind of broad, crowd-pleasing appeal, though the inevitable star of the show is the high-quality action, which has seldom been equaled or topped in the years since the movie’s release.

1 'Police Story' (1985)

Overall, Police Story might not be a perfect movie, but it is a movie with some absolutely perfect action, and more than worth watching for the stuff that works alone. When it’s at its best, Police Story is pretty much the ideal showcase for what Jackie Chan was capable of doing, in his prime, and it’s also a movie that sees him in control both in front of and behind the camera, since he starred in and directed this one.

Things kick off with a high-profile criminal being arrested, and then some so-so comedy sequences and a few small action scenes play out, with the criminal eventually seeming to get away with things, until another big action sequence (this one ending the film) revolves around taking him down, again. It doesn’t really hold together or flow in a particularly interesting way, but the action in Police Story (especially at the beginning, and then during the climax) is so good that the movie is, nonetheless, still pretty much representative of the martial arts genre at its very best.