Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon Is Full of Surprises and Beautifully-Realized Fight Scenes

You know what's nifty about Ang Lee as a filmmaker? Just how many different genres he's explored in his directorial efforts! Much like fellow eclectic director Steven Soderbergh, Ang Lee has spent his twenty-plus years as a filmmaker transversing across several different genres from superhero fare (Hulk) to period piece romantic dramas (Sense & Sensibility) and even to a martial arts motion picture entitled Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that defies easy genre categorization. It's a mixture of an action movie, a romantic feature, a character-driven drama and so much more. Lee's flexibility as a filmmaker in terms of what genres he explores seeps into Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon and allows this particular singular story to inhabit all sorts of different genres much to the betterment of the movie as a whole!

The Inconsistent Miss Congeniality Has Glimmers Of Real Creativity And Laughs

To follow the trajectory of Sandra Bullock's career is to see a fascinating career path that, with the benefit of hindsight, really does just exemplify longevity. Bullock garnered large amounts of fame in the 90's, thanks to Speed and While You Were Sleeping kicking her career into overdrive and she maintained that star wattage through the next two decades of her career, with the only real bump in her career coming in the 2006-2007 era where she just had some mild box office underperformers. Right after that though, the 2009 double-whammy of The Proposal and The Blind Side took her to the next level of stardom that she's been riding ever since. Nine years prior to those two movies though, Bullock starred in one of her most famous motion pictures, the comedy Miss Congeniality.

Snatch Me If You Can

Before he was making big blockbusters like the Sherlock Holmes movies and that new King Arthur film that just opened this weekend (the latter feature is why I'm covering the subject of this review today), Guy Ritchie was a bloke from England looking to make crime movies with a distinct air to them. He's carried over his unique editing and directing sensibilities over to some of his blockbuster work, but if you want pure unfiltered Guy Ritchie, you can most certainly find it in his 2000 crime movie Snatch, which is packed to the gills with energy as well as characters in its gargantuan ensemble cast.