Martial Arts Movies Bucket List

Rama goes undercover for two years inside a Jakarta syndicate; the prison mud riot, the car chase and the kitchen.

Ip Man opens a school in 1949 Hong Kong and ends up in a ring against a British boxer.

Donnie Yen as the Wing Chun master during the Japanese occupation; ten black belts at once.

A SWAT team fights floor by floor up a Jakarta tower block; the best action film of its decade.

Wire-work swordplay across the bamboo forests of Qing dynasty China.

The revenge saga turns talky, cruel and unexpectedly tender.

The Bride wakes from a coma and starts down her list, katana first.

Ip Man travels to San Francisco with a throat cancer diagnosis to find his son a school; the last of the Donnie Yen run.

A developer moves on the school and Mike Tyson turns up as his boss; the fight in the lift is the set piece.

Lord Shen builds a cannon and Po learns where he came from; the prologue is done in shadow puppets.

A noodle-shop panda becomes the Dragon Warrior; the fight on the steps.

Po has to name a successor and hunt the Chameleon, a sorceress who steals the skills of everyone he has already beaten.

Po finds his birth father and a hidden panda village while Kai collects the chi of dead masters.

Ip Man between the wars, in the rain; Wong's martial-arts epic.

A wuxia of exiled swordsmen in a desert, cut and recut for years; Christopher Doyle's desert light.

Jet Li tells the King of Qin three versions of a story, each in a different colour.

A bamboo forest fight and an echo game of drums; wuxia at its most beautiful.

Jackie Chan learns the drunken boxing style from a beggar; kung fu comedy at its purest.

Jackie Chan slides down a pole of lights through a shopping mall; his own best film.

Bruce Lee at a martial-arts tournament on an island fortress; the mirror room.

Stephen Chow's cartoon martial-arts comedy in a 1940s Shanghai slum.

Two estranged brothers meet in the final of an MMA tournament; Nick Nolte as their father.