For Fans of Lau Kar-leung

Most people arrive at Lau Kar-leung through Jackie Chan, because Lau choreographed Drunken Master and the film is funny, loose, and immediately loveable. But The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is the real statement of intent. Gordon Liu as San Te trains for what feels like the entire runtime, and that patience is the point: Lau is showing you that skill is accumulated, not performed. The film earns its final act. Watch this first and everything else in Lau's filmography falls into the correct order.

Sloclap built Sifu around a specific Pak Mei lineage, consulted real practitioners, and made mastery the actual mechanic: you age when you fail, and the only way to win is to stop failing. It is the most Lau Kar-leung game ever made. The genre difference between film and game dissolves when both are asking the same question: can you carry the form correctly under pressure? The answer the game gives you is honest. Most people cannot, at first.

Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais working in pencak silat rather than kung fu, in a collapsing tower block rather than a temple compound, but the principle is identical to what Lau spent his career arguing: style is a real thing, and real style is interesting. The sustained stairwell sequences in The Raid have the same taxonomic clarity as Lau at his best. When a technique appears, you understand what it is and why it is being used. That kind of choreographic legibility is rarer than it sounds.

AMC's Into the Badlands is not subtle: it is soaked in Shaw Brothers iconography, from the colour palette to the way each character is defined by their style. What separates it from mere homage is that it hired real practitioners, choreographed fights with genuine craft, and gave the action meaning within a world built around martial hierarchy. It was cancelled before it resolved its central story, which is the correct tragedy for a show about systems of power that cannot sustain themselves.