Foreign language (Mandarin) story of loyalty, love, honor, warriors and wicked people with pointy chins.

Master Li Mu Bai (Yun-Fat Chow) leaves his training to return to the love of his life Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) but they haven't told each other of their feelings yet, although whenever they look in each other's eyes they dribble visibly.

Li Mu Bai returns his ("Green Destiny") sword but it is stolen by Jen Yu (Mandarin version)/Xiou Long (English dubbed version) (played by Ziyi Zhang) - she is an accomplished fighter whom Li Mu Bai offers training at Wudan.

"Oh! for those times passed, when women wore red lipstick and screamed at the smallest of things! Times change, I suppose. Or was it just all a load of old 1950's Hollywood bollocks back then?"

"The wire fighters in this movie have all of the elegance of a very drunk Superman with weights on his ankles."

"Wire fighting just looks like they're being pulled up on wires to me, now, for the elegance of Peter Pan, arms bestrode and legs tight behind - on to the left and straight on till morn..."

"This movie wafted me back in time to whence I was a child. I played with the marionettes my great grandfather left me in his bucket. I never quite got the knack (couldn't be assed, to be honest) of making them walk to the left and then to the right, so made them fly across the stage, mostly to the annoyance of my elderly audience. How wrong my critics were! If only I had kept that performance going I might have won an Oscar for staging the wirefighting in this movie!"

"Some of the fighting scenes really do need to be slowed down a little."

"I find it most hypnotic, watching the English version and then seeing the subtitles. A master class in how to dub a movie. Although, on the downside, I now get dizzy at the slightest attempt to do a spinning round house. Take this! Sucka! Argh!"

Li Mu Bai is poisoned by a stray dart from Jade Fox. The antidote is not found in time so there's lots of time for our heroes to look, yearningly, into each other's eyes. Jen Yu comes back on side and goes to find an antidote after Jade Fox is killed.

But, the lovers, who shoulda told of their love before now in any case, are parted in the most unfortunate of tear jerky ways.

A small masterpiece. A beautifully shot picture filled with love's unspokenness. Not really as visually stunning as the Last Emperor, but it is beautiful none the less, and highly emotional.

A timeless tale of love amongst warriors (a man and a woman). But, then, one of the should be lovers dies in the most tragic of slow motion ways. For a lover to die like that is one thing, for a proud warrior to go all so floppy is nothing short of a disaster. From superbly competent, vigorous, fighter, our hero is incapacitated to nothing short of Sunday-morning in-bed-lie-in levels of activity, but without the coffee, croissants and newspapers strewn all over the place. And then he croaks it. Not a dry eye in the house!

A triumphant movie which at the time was much acclaimed. In truth the movie is good, although not great. The wirefighting is very artificial, almost to parodic standards, offering little feeling of flight, but at least you can't see the strings!

Anything with self-destruct-in-10-minutes chop sticks.

Unlikely to work unless you have the full wirefighting set up. Remember: any martial arts can break bones - we refer readers to Fat Bastard's problems in Austin Power's Goldmember as your warning.

To get the authentic experience you have to watch it with the subtitles, even if it means missing most of the action because you are a slow reader.

Dogs will not like the wirefighting scenes: it is one of their worst fears to be pulled up into the air by an unseen force all of a sudden. Cats won't be that fussed, thinking it would be quite fun to be sitting on the dog's back when it is pulled into the air by an unseen force all of a sudden.

Tree dwelling mammals may watch this movie in the same way that people watch a car crash, or those police video shows on TV.

This blew the skirts up a whole new generation of Kung Fu watchers when it came out, but, to be honest, it is not really that different from many other similar movies from that part of the world. Even so it won four Oscars and was in a lot of movie top tens in 2000 when it was released.

A fine movie, the story is touchingly old fashioned and the acting is superb, however the wirefighting really annoyed us, it is supposed to be magical but it looks too artificial.