Quotes of the Day

For eight years now, the New York Asian Film Festival has earned "Wow"s and "Huh?"s from Manhattan audiences with its savory mix of action and art-house works from the continent that produces more movies than any other. In its scope and vigor, this is the New York film festival, and it's run not by a heavily subsidized arts institution but by a few knowledgeable guys from Brooklyn who want to share their enthusiasms with the fanboys of the tristate area. The playlist has grown from 11 features in 2002 to more than 50 this time, and includes movies not just from Japan and China but also Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Tamil state of India. Few of these titles are likely to get a U.S. release, which is a shame, but there's always the Internet. Be a cinema sleuth and track down some of these titles; you'll say Wow, too.

20th Century Boys and 20th Century Boys: The Last Hope (Yukihiko Tsutsumi, Japan)

This, not Transformers 2, is the action movie series about giant robots that tens of millions of people should have been paying to see this summer. The NYAFF showed the first two parts in a trilogy; the final installment opens in Japan next month. Taking its title from a T. Rex song and based on a manga by Naoki Urasawa that has sold some 20 million copies, this fantasy of an alternative Japanese history imagines that the lines and pictures scrawled by a club of kids in the '70s has become the Book of Prophesies by a cult whose leader, known only as Friend, takes power many years later. The special effects are rudimentary, but the churning of plot, and the richness of character and detail, keep you glued. One prophesy — that "The satanic salesmen will destroy the world" — might have referred to the Wall Street sharpies who crippled the world economy last fall, after the first two movies were made.

K-20: Legend of the Mask (Shimako Sato, Japan)

Another vision of an alternate Japan, based on a manga (by So Kitamura), this movie proposes that the country's rulers averted a multicontinental World War II by forging a truce with the U.S. the day after Pearl Harbor — as we say, it's a fantasy — thus allowing the nobility to stay in power amid widespread poverty. Enter K-20, the Fiend (kaijin) with 20 Faces, who can assume almost any identity, and who steals from the rich but also oppresses the poor. Only one man (pan-Asian star Takeshi Kaneshiro) can stop K-20 — if he can just figure out what evil genius is behind that ever-changing mask. A buoyant pace, meticulous design and a robust parkour fight on a skyscraper roof mark this superior effort from Sato, one of Japan's rare female directors of big-budget action films.

Warlords (Peter Chan, China)

Ever since Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon broke records for a foreign-language film at the Stateside box office, Asian directors have plundered Chinese history for tales of airborne warriors and another chance at the U.S. market. Chan, better known for romantic dramas like the superb Comrades: Almost a Love Story, could have a shot with this remake of Chang Cheh's 1973 kung-fu bromance Blood Brothers. He's certainly got star quality: Jet Li, Kaneshiro and Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau (who had the Matt Damon role in the film that was remade as The Departed). It's a little long and a lot of fun, even if it doesn't quite live up to the NYAFF blurb: "As big, meaty and satisfying as a flame-roasted leg of wild boar, Warlords is the kind of movie you tear into with relish, wiping its bloody juices off your chin with the back of your hand as you sit on a throne made of the bones of your enemies."

Dachimawa Lee (South Korea)

While North Korea celebrated our July 4th by firing short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan, South Korea made balky protests and stood on edgy alert. Yet to judge from some of the movies in this now world-class national cinema, you'd think the South's biggest political problem was the repression of its own postwar decades. In the 1970s its film industry produced a number of anti-Communist films; Dachimawa Lee is a parody of these gung-ho, better-dead-than-Red melodramas. That might register only as more grousing from the artistic Left, if the movie weren't so wildly and encyclopedically entertaining — a sendup and evocation of spy movies, with some great martial-arts moves. Start to finish, it packs plenty more punch than one of Kim Jong-il's sputtering Scuds.

The Forbidden Door (Joko Anwar, Indonesia)

From the world's most populous Muslim country comes a mordant, confounding thriller about an unsuccessful artist who becomes an art-world sensation after his wife convinces him to build a sculpture around her aborted fetus. Suddenly he's besieged with commissions — but where to find more dead babies? As slick as it is sick, the movie could be Anwar's calling card for international employment, if only Hollywood moguls wanted something out of their own narrow range. The Forbidden Door is one more NYAFF example of what movies could be but rarely dare to try.

Lalapipo (Masayuki Miyano, Japan) and Blind Love (Daisuke Goto, Japan)

For nearly a half-century, Japan's most prolific genre has been Pink Eiga — soft-core, low-budget sex films. It's served as a training ground for young directors; the NYAFF showed an early effort by Yojiro Takita, who won the foreign-language Oscar this year for Departures. Goto, the current hot Pink auteur, was represented by the sweeter-than-it-is-sexy Blind Love, a twist on Cyrano de Bergerac, with a ventriloquist using a friend to woo (and have sex with) his inamorata. Lalapipo (Lot of People), set in the teeming, tumescent world of the porn industry, is an agreeably demented farrago whose hero has a talking penis that looks like a Muppet — say, the Nookie Monster — and urges him to have sex with someone other than himself. If you get to see the movie, stick around for the UFOs.

Love Exposure (Sion Sono, Japan)

Loving man, beautiful woman, dutiful son: this happy family of Catholics is so devout that the mother gives her boy, Yu, a statue of the Virgin Mary and tells him, "Find someone just like her to marry." When the mother dies young, her husband becomes a priest with a gift for applying God's word to his parishioners' lives. The father-son bond is tested when the priest is stalked and seduced by an unstable woman who soon deserts him, leaving this gracious man severe and doctrinaire. How can Yu reconnect with his father? By committing outrageous sins and confessing them to him. This is the first 15 minutes of a four-hour whirlwind epic of faith, family, cults, cross-dressing, upskirt photography and violent femmes, told with confidence and intensity, and based not on a manga but on the life of a friend of director Sono (The Suicide Club). Unmissable — except it has no U.S. distributor. The DVD will be released later this month by YesAsia.

Written By (Wai Ka-fai, Hong Kong)

Wai has written many movies for Hong Kong's last standing top director, Johnnie To, including Vengeance, the Johnny Hallyday gangland saga that played at Cannes this year. On his own, Wai offers Written By, a conceptually complex yarn beginning with a car crash that kills a man and blinds his young daughter. Years later, the daughter (Kelly Lin) writes a novel in which she dies and the father (Lau Ching-wan) survives but is blinded. Then, within that fantasy, the father writes a novel reviving his child. It's a little more appealing as a Charlie Kaufman-like structure than as a movie; but Lau, for two decades the prime mopey presence in Hong Kong films, brings gravity and grace to the conceit.

When the Full Moon Rises (Mamat Khalid, Malaysia)

Noir meets nutso in this black-and-white thriller from a vital national cinema whose films are virtually unknown in the U.S. After his car runs over something on a country road — turns out to be a skeleton — a tough-guy newspaperman stops in a small town that seems to be under the curse of a female ghost and is certainly teeming with oddballs. It's the old story of the city slicker out-crazied by the remote rubes. Unfamiliarity with Malaysian film conventions may leave you wondering whether the tone is comic or melodramatic or simply extraterrestrial. No matter: enjoy the gorgeous neo-primitive imagery and the inexplicable shenanigans. We'll bet that even Malaysians were pleasantly baffled.

Quick Gun Murugun (Shashanka Ghosh, India)

Quick Gun, the hero of this goofy, riotously colorful comedy, is a cowboy who's also an Indian (from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu): a pudgy chap with pomaded hair and a gigolo's thin mustache, outfitted in white hat and boots, green shirt, orange pants, pink scarf, leopard-skin vest. He's determined to stop his nemesis from turning the Tamil dish of vegetarian crepes into all-meat patties in a chain of McDosa fast-food restaurants, and to achieve his mission he'll need to be reincarnated, as himself. Originally a series of spots for MTV India, the feature version is lovingly, lavishly, almost libelously indebted to Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns. It also makes passing reference to The Terminator, Pulp Fiction and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — and, since every Indian film needs a production number, it filches a song from the 1968 Tamil musical Oli Vilakku. By the end, when Quick Gun comes out blazing with eight gun-totin' arms, the movie has fulfilled the agenda of the NYAFF: to render its audience happy and helpless with head-swiveling astonishment.

• Richard Corliss