Name: Swordsman II
Start: 2026-04-25T19:30:00-05:00
End: 2026-04-25T21:30:00-05:00
Location: Webster University Winifred Moore Auditorium

(Ching Siu-tung, 1992, Hong Kong, 109 minutes)
No need to mince words: All three Swordsman films are fun, but if you’re only going to see one of them, it should be Swordsman II. No shame in not seeing the first one first—you won’t really be in these for narrative continuity anyway. Swordsman II is perhaps star Brigitte Lin’s finest hour. Lin, known to Wong Kar Wai fans as the woman in the blonde wig in the first section of Chungking Express (which wound up being her final film role), was associated with over-the-top wuxias in Hong Kong in the 80s and 90s, wherein she often played androgynous or outright male characters, starting with 1977’s Shaw Brothers production The Dream of the Red Chamber and continuing through classics such as 1983’s Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain and 1993’s The Bride with White Hair (not to mention non-wuxia roles in stuff like Jackie Chan’s Police Story and Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues). Still after that scroll from the first film, now we have martial arts legend Jet Li in the lead role of Linghu Chong, trying to retrieve the scroll in question from Lin’s auto-castrator Dongfang Bubai, nearly undefeatable. Also with Michelle Reis (Fallen Angels, Flowers of Shanghai) and Rosamund Kwan (Once Upon a Time in China).
In Cantonese with English subtitles.