Sword-crossed lovers: Leung, Cheung photo: Miramax Films Hero Directed by Zhang Yimou Miramax, opens August 27 more film most popular most commented Kabluey Tracking Shots by Jim Ridley Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic by McCann, Ruth Diminished Capacity Tracking Shots by Nick Pinkerton Holding Trevor Tracking Shots by Julia Wallace We Are Together Tracking Shots by Ella Taylor Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (14) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

The filmmaker's follow-up, House of Flying Daggers, due to open later this year, may have more humor and greater narrative intricacy, but Hero is a virtuoso performance. The action is wittily aestheticized, with swordplay variously compared to music, calligraphy, and theater. The heavens rain arrows, and in one choreographed number Maggie Cheung takes them for partners in a whirling-dervish dance. The most spectacular duel is an aerial ballet in which the combatants skip like stones over a sylvan lake. Many scenes are color-coded: The autumn leaves turn red as one character dies. Hero was shot by Chris Doyle, and although it's not nearly as expressionist as his work for Wong Kar-wai, its look is loud.

Hero's backstory is also action-packed. Having acquired the most costly movie ever made in China back in 2002, Miramax sat on its U.S. release, diddling with the running time, until other forces came into play. Quentin Tarantino persuaded his padrone Harvey Weinstein to restore the movie to its original length. Then, Weinstein's estranged padrone Michael Eisner released some extra bucks to facilitate the movie's release, acting to placate the Chinese officials whose help he needs for his Sino Disney World.

Such power politics are not inappropriate given the film's cartoon ideology. There's more than a bit of Leni Riefenstahl to Hero—and not just because of the implied "worship" in the title or Zhang's homage to Star Wars' famous Triumph of the Will swipe. Hero's vast imperial sets and symmetrical tumult, its decorative dialectical montage and sanctimonious traditionalism, its glorification of ruthless leadership and self-sacrifice on the altar of national greatness, not to mention the sense that this might somehow stoke the engine of political regeneration, are all redolent of fascinatin' fascism.