Director Kirk Wong set the style for the lean, edgy Hong Kong cop thriller. In this drama, special forces officer Danny Lee bends the law and suspends civil rights to track down ruthless criminal Anthony Wong (Hard Boiled), the leader of a notorious robbery ring, on the run with his loyal girlfriend Cecilia Yip. Lee, who performed similar duties in John Woo's The Killer, is driven and demanding as the passionate authority figure, a man whose selfless sense of duty teeters over into vigilantism, while Anthony Wong tones down his usual flamboyant style to play a charismatic, sensitive criminal who earns the director's sympathies. There's no John Woo bravura shootouts or stylistic frenzies in Kirk Wong's sober, sometimes too restrained approach, lacking the dramatic edge of Rock and Roll Cop and the punch of Supercop, two of his later productions. But the violence packs a wallop in its street-realist directness, and Wong knows how to stage a high-tension action set piece, as evidenced in the opening chase scene and the dynamic police-dragnet finale. What more attracts the director, however, is the inner workings of crime and punishment: the maze of the underworld hierarchy and the mechanics of crime, the contradictions that pull at the police and the bureaucratic tangle they navigate. Though there's none of the romantic gloss that Woo invests his cowboy criminals with, Kirk Wong loves to explore the dynamic that separates-and binds-cop and criminal. -Sean Axmaker.

An all-but-incoherent sequel to (and completion of) trendsetting martial arts director Chang Cheh's Water Margin adaptation of Seven Blows of the Dragon. The plot was so familiar to Eastern audiences that it's barely sketched in. Most of the picture is just fighting, Robin Hood-style daring-do staged and shot in the standard slapdash style of 1970s kung fu. China's emperor enlists the Liang Shan Po outlaws in a struggle against the traitorous lord Fang Lau. Seven heroes, complete with cool nicknames (David Chaing is Yen Ching, "The Graceful One") are assigned to infiltrate Lau's impregnable, water-guarded fortress, and several of these paragons get to die staunchly in rivers of blood. Ti Lung, who costarred in John Woo's The Killer almost 15 years later, fights minus an arm, before gallantly expiring. (The broadcast TV version, while nominally uncut, switches to black-and-white during the exsanguinate scenes. ) -David Chute.

Amateur movies shot with small handheld cameras by six German infantrymen on the Eastern Front during World War II form the core of this documentary. The men who took the movies appear on camera as old men to provide narration (in German, with subtitles), and they provide a perspective not often heard. As might be expected, they distance themselves from atrocities, and as they were foot soldiers in the Wehrmacht, their denials of involvement are probably true. One of the men still owns the camera he carried in the war, and he demonstrates how its small size made it perfect for impromptu filming in the field. Clips of smiling troops on the move is accompanied by an old man talking about how happy they were to be going to an unknown destination, likening it to "the joy one feels when on a journey. " It turns out the gleeful trip he recalls was actually the beginning of the invasion of Poland and thus the beginning of the war in Europe. Later footage shows combat conditions in Russia, and the grisly aftermath of vicious combat. The rarity of the film footage, some of which was shot in color, makes this documentary worth watching. But the recollections of the amateur cameramen also provide an unusual insight into the German war machine, such as when one of the old veterans mentions how he eventually realized, "This was no defensive war forced upon us, it was an idiotic war of aggression. " -Robert J. [+]