Youth Vision Open Scout Crew jointly with Nodan Scout Crew, Nepal Scouts ,Kathmandu Metropolitan City have launched a one year ,Bishnumati cleaning and plantation project. The project official opening took place on 12th April from Bishnumati river bank at Dallu.  Rabidra Raj Joshi a renowned political personal was invited as the chief guest on the opening ceremony along with some scout commissioners.

Gathering of scouts for cleaning and plantation

Scouts planting saplings

''Using the equipments provided by KMC, more than 100 scouts along with few committee members participated in this programme planting more than 30 saplings'', said one of the programme supervisor Senior scout Prabin Nepal.Trees like Bakaina, Dhuppi, Sisau and many others were planted.the pragramme coordinator Scouter Shree Krishna Prajapati and sub coordinator Scouter Snjay Khadgi are determined to make this project a grand success along with all the project members.

Photo : Sujan Kunwar

Every month, we track the top 25 Facebook pages with the most likes , according to Page Data. In our first Page Data leader-board of 2014, we see that Coca-Cola has passed YouTube to move into the No. 5 spot.

While Facebook for Every Phone and Facebook always generate tons of likes, this month’s chart shows that Shakira, Vin Diesel and Candy Crush Saga also added hundreds of thousands of fans in the past month.

#	Name	Total Likes	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Facebook for Every Phone	362,101,546	+621,530	+4,379,284
2	Facebook	108,385,727	+81,321	+630,357
3	Rihanna	82,237,709	+43,479	+259,896
4	Eminem	79,657,079	+48,522	+327,383
5	Coca-Cola	78,286,825	+58,574	+470,855
6	YouTube	77,521,891	+19,615	+129,619
7	Shakira	76,526,243	+61,812	+442,337
8	Texas HoldEm Poker	69,832,118	+4,033	+26,999
9	The Simpsons	69,222,337	+11,716	+85,148
10	Cristiano Ronaldo	68,685,054	+56,146	+392,735
11	Michael Jackson	67,946,032	+43,687	+283,507
12	Harry Potter	67,484,601	+26,023	+168,168
13	Katy Perry	61,566,344	+51,249	+326,641
14	Lady Gaga	61,531,612	+25,927	+163,534
15	Justin Bieber	61,389,439	+77,175	+512,897
16	Vin Diesel	59,218,025	+141,745	+639,674
17	Linkin Park	58,734,330	+23,137	+148,995
18	Candy Crush Saga	57,632,748	+96,795	+627,620
19	Will Smith	56,425,503	+39,694	+315,630
20	Family Guy	54,772,864	+7,670	+49,966
21	Beyoncé	54,427,784	+32,609	+232,001
22	Bob Marley	53,351,310	+36,748	+239,330
23	Taylor Swift	52,096,021	+56,701	+331,219
24	Leo Messi	52,075,136	+23,632	+181,825
25	AKON	51,893,490	+21,760	+148,687

Other changes since December 2013:

• Michael Jackson and Cristiano Ronaldo switched places, with the late King of Pop sliding down to No. 11.
• Katy Perry moved from No. 14 to No. 13, bumping Lady Gaga down one spot.
• Justin Bieber advanced from No. 16 to No. 15, with Linkin Park falling from No. 15 to No. 17 and Vin Diesel rising all the way up from No. 20 to No. 16.
• Candy Crush Saga fell from No. 17 to No. 18.
• Will Smith went down one spot, to No. 19.
• Family Guy also fell one spot to No. 20.
• Taylor Swift rose from No. 25 to No. 23.
• AKON fell from No. 23 to No. 25.

KATHMANDU, April 2:

 At 19 years of age, Utsav Thapaliya is set 
to direct a feature film. A high school graduate, Utsav will be directing ‘Best Friend Forever’ (BFF), it was announced on Tuesday.

“To skeptics who ask what a 19-year-old can do, I’ll direct a good film and show them,” he said. “I may be young but I have good knowledge about my work.” 

He informed that his film will have plenty of love, romance and action. The cast of ‘BFF’ is completely new, and he stated that the actors match his vision.

“I wanted to give opportunities to new actors. But I’m thinking of working with established actors in my next film.”




Earlier, Utsav had directed a short film ‘Kathaa’ for UNICEF.

The film’s scriptwriter Lochan Acharya, too, is about Utsav’s age. He also assisted in the direction of ‘Jutta,’ a short film. He said that the friendship between young people is the core of the script.

Produced by Esan Ali, the film has ‘Mr Capital 2014’ Manish Neupane, Alia Khatiwada, Rima Shahi, Simran Luitel, Srijana Pokhrel, Nisha Budathoki, Aarush Gurung, Awon Upreti, Vikky Faiju, Rajan Puri, and Himal Khatri.

Producer Ali liked the story and agreed to invest in the film, he said. The film’s choreography will be done by ‘Nagbeli’ director Govind Rai.

Source : Myrepublica.com

10. The Tale of the Fox

A sneaky fox plays a series of underhand tricks on his neighbours in the animal kingdom, among them a timorous hare and a gullible wolf. The king of the beasts, a lion, summons him to face charges but the fox proceeds to outwit everyone, including the king himself. When Ladislas Starevich told this tale in the 1930s it was by no means new – versions of the Reynard story had been circulating around Europe for the best part of a millennium – but the means of telling it were utterly novel. Animated over 18 months from 1929 to 1930 (and premiering after a long delay in 1937, in Nazi Berlin), Starevich's beguiling film is often cited as the one of the earliest animated features ever made; it's certainly one of the first features composed of stop-motion animation.

What's striking, eight decades on, is just how sophisticated it is. By 1930, Starevich had been directing stop-motion films for 20 years – he started out making short films using dead insects in what is now Lithuania; after the October revolution, he emigrated to France and continued making films there until the 1960s. The Tale of the Fox is a testament to his great skill as an animator: the anthropomorphised cast (an unscrupulous badger barrister, a courtier cat with eyes for the queen) are remarkably expressive and the film-making brims with invention. In the process of tricking the poor old wolf for the umpteenth time, the fox conjures up a gourmand's vision of heaven that recalls the imaginative flights of Georges Méliès (whose neglected studio in Paris Starevich used after arriving in France). There are extended dream sequences and, at the climax, when the king has been exasperated into all-out military action, a comically protracted siege on the fox's lofty lair involving many pulleys and swinging logs. It's hard to imagine that Wes Anderson, in preparation for The Fantastic Mr Fox, didn't watch Starevich's film with an attentive eye, and pick up a trick or two in the process. Killian Fox

9. Grave of the Fireflies

Animation in Japan has a more adult and exalted status than in other parts of the world, in part because they've used it to grapple with darker issues than the likes of Disney-Pixar dare touch: politics, metaphysics and of course the defining event of 20th century Japanese history – nuclear annihilation. Whereas the supernatural, end-of-days millenarianism of Akira (1988) was a slightly insane response to the insanity of instantly losing 200,000 citizens from two bombs, Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies – released the same year as Akira – is something else entirely: a human response to how the war affected two perfectly average children.

The teenage Seita's mission to take care of his baby sister, Setsuko, in an old bomb shelter after their parents are killed is foolhardy and prideful – you can't help screaming "Go back to your wicked aunt!" as he ponders eating frogs to stay alive – but it is a kind of genuine heroism that is not reflected in the actions of the film's selfish grownups. Seita and Setusko watch as the rest of the country slows returns to normal; but their Robinson Crusoe adventure, though doomed, has a joyful purity that damns the hypocritical status quo.

Though Studio Ghibli's animation may be slightly dated now, it also shows how you can draw what you'd struggle to capture on camera: maggots dropping from burn victims, yes, but also the physical details of a little girl's life – rocking from side to side to cope with separation from her mother, bravely conserving her three remaining fruit drops by eating only the sticky shards. It's pathos a four-year-old actor could never convey. You wouldn't think a film about child starvation would be so uplifting, or so beautiful. Chris Michael

8. The Iron Giant

When the new Star Wars films were announced, there was a brief glimmer of excitement when Brad Bird's name was mooted. It's not hard to see why. While Mission: Impossible IV and The Incredibles showed that Bird could pull off style and kinetic set-pieces, 1999's The Iron Giantproved that he's also got the one thing that's been missing from Star Wars for over 30 years: colossal heart.

A loose remake of Ted Hughes's tremendously sad modern fairy tale The Iron Man, The Iron Giant flopped on release. This, plainly, is absurd. The film has been called one of the best non-Disney animations ever made, and the assessment is still hard to argue with.

Hogarth, a young boy, discovers a giant metal robot that has fallen from space, its memory wiped. Hogarth goes about teaching him a uniquely childlike, wide-eyed ideology of the world. The giant learns about good and bad, about death. He becomes a kind of local folk hero, but falls afoul of the military. By the film's end, after Bird has forced Hughes's broader themes of courage and pacifism through his own retro-futurist prism, heartstrings will have been tugged and tears will have been fruitlessly fought back.

A true hidden gem in all regards, The Iron Giant was perhaps a little ahead of its time. Five years after its release, Bird had corralled the might of Pixar into making The Incredibles; a flashier film that shares many of The Iron Giant's core messages. Had he held on for a few more years and given it the full CGI treatment, there's little doubt that The Iron Giant would have conquered all that stood in its way. Stuart Heritage

7. Yellow Submarine

Yellow Submarine was the fourth Beatles film in the space of four years and premiered in the summer of 1968, two years after the band quit touring in a hail of jelly babies (George Harrison's favourite candy, thrown by screaming fans). Seen in the light of the band's growing contempt for their publicity machine, this ambitious animation feature not only builds on the conceit of the the Fab Four's three previous films, in which they played versions of themselves as characters, it takes it to the logical extreme: not only are they not physically in it, they didn't even voice it.

Following their landmark Sgt Pepper album, and pre-empting the Monkees' equally surreal Head by several months, the Beatles somehow managed to smuggle the film's psychedelic aspects past the general public. Indeed, the film was quickly embraced by children, who responded to the simplicity of Lee Minoff's script, which seems remarkably rich considering he later claimed his only influences were repeated plays of the song Yellow Submarine itself and a meeting with Paul McCartney, in which the moptop expressed his hope that the film would contain "a monster".

Pitting the band against music-averse killjoys the Blue Meanies, who attack Pepperland and leave it in a state of frozen limbo, the film was directed by experimental Canadian animation producer George Dunning on a budget of just $1m. Dunning's masterstroke was to install Czech-German illustrator Heinz Edelmann as art director, and it is Edelmann's pop-art creations that stay in the mind, notably the Eleanor Rigby sequence with its bombed-out Liverpool streets and the abstract brainscapes of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. It says a lot about the band's careful curation of their own image that Yellow Submarine remains their favourite of their three feature films for United Artists. But it perhaps says more that the following year's Let It Be – the only film to capture the "real" Beatles, on the precipice of a break-up – is currently unavailable on DVD. Damon Wise

6. Persepolis

French-Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi co-wrote and co-directed the film adaptation of her own Persepolis, based on her memories of growing up during the 1979 revolution. Her young on-screen counterpart, Marji, is a spunky, rebellious sprite who worships Bruce Lee, shoots the breeze with God and believes herself to be a prophet. Her family embraces the overthrow of the shah's regime, but Marji realises that Iran is not changing for the better. Like John Boorman's Hope and Glory, which offered the definitive child's-eye view of life during wartime, Persepolis honours its protagonist's trifling concerns. Even with the Iran-Iraq war escalating and missiles destroying the neighbourhood, Marji's prime concern is winning a game of "My uncle has been in prison longer than your father", or scoring a copy of the new Iron Maiden album.

Persepolis brings a lightness of touch to weighty topics, while the drawings capture precisely Marji's bewilderment at her rapidly changing world. When she visits her dissident uncle in a Gothic prison cell rendered in charcoal smudges, the soft, clear lines of her own body make it seem as if she's strayed into a more sinister comic book. At school, headscarves and veils transform Marji and her classmates into rows of Russian dolls, peeking timidly from behind each other's sloping shoulders.

The picture's back-to-basics visual flair remains wonderfully refreshing. The simple black lines, or the blocks of inky darkness inflected with white detail (such as the silhouetted gas masks with two lunar circles for eyes), are both plain and poetic. Satrapi and her co-director, Vincent Paronnaud, make a little go a long way: the dots of snow falling on a sooty Tehran landscape show that you don't need to be David Lean to conjure an evocative sense of place. There's something satisfying, too, about the use of tidy, monochromatic, near-minimalist animation to describe a subject as messy as modern Iran. Ryan Gilbey

5. Chicken Run

Why did the British animators cross the road? To sign a multi-picture deal with Steven Spielberg. Having turned down a similar offer from Disney several years earlier, Aardman Animation, the stop-motion "claymation" studio from Bristol, teamed up with Spielberg's DreamWorks. "It used to be that the best we could hope for — the very summit of our ambitions — was to do something like The Wombles or Paddington Bear," said Peter Lord, who co-directed Aardman's debut feature, Chicken Run, with Nick Park. The Aardman/DreamWorks marriage was dissolved after disappointing returns from subsequent collaborations Flushed Away and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But Chicken Run, the first out of the coop, was a hit.

At the very moment that slick, spick-and-span computer animation was threatening to render old techniques obsolete, this movie went boldly against the grain by looking for all the world like it was all made in someone's back yard. It's essentially a PoW film with chickens rather than plucky British soldiers, rubbery beaks instead of stiff upper lips. It revolves around the efforts of Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha) and her fellow hens to escape Tweedy's Chicken Farm — a struggle that is given a boost by the arrival of Rocky the rooster (Mel Gibson), who has fled the circus and is recruited to teach the downtrodden hens to fly.

Even in its most ambitious sequences, such as those involving a terrifying pie-making machine, into which chickens are dropped only to emerge at the other end ready for the supermarket shelves, the picture has the earthy, handmade feel consistent with Aardman's earliest shorts. You can feel the care that has gone into it. More than that, you can practically see the thumbprints. RG

4. Spirited Away

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki took his lead from Lewis Carroll to rustle up this delirious rites of passage tale about a small girl's adventures in a bath-house for the gods. One moment 10-year-old Chihiro is bored on the back seat, en-route to a new home. The next, it seems, her parents are pigs, she's forgotten her name and is being asked to scrub down a "stink spirit" that has booked an appointment. Somewhere up ahead sits a dragon and a witch.

In a perfect world, more children's films would be like Spirited Away, which boasts a kind of dream logic, rustling up an outlandish universe which nonetheless runs to its own set of rules. Most film-makers install their supporting players as fixed representations of good and evil. Miyazaki, however, sends them bouncing like pinballs, troublesome and scary, so that the diffident "No Face" blooms into an all-consuming carnivore. Spirited Away has the same skittish, volatile rhythm. It's a magic spell, a booby trap, a helter-skelter to a happy ending. Xan Brooks

3. Up

The economy, grace and restraint of Up's four-minute "Married Life" montage, at the very start of the film, may alone be one of animation's finest achievements. At the peak of their flawless streak in the mid-00s, Pixar dared to follow that up with the tender, energetic and boundlessly adventurous story of Carl Fredricksen and Russell, the unlikeliest pair of South American explorers. Up is sillier and more committed to spectacle than some other great animated films, but it's told with Pixar's famously rigorous storytelling, along with precise animation that brings it all – from perfectly cartoonish humans to dramatic vistas – to roaring life.

Up is a story that couldn't exist outside of animation, with a flying house and talking dogs, but even the most realistic moments prove the value of the medium; Carl's weary movements through his creaky house, the vibrant colors the balloons cast on the ground, the cliffs of South America made that much more crooked and wild by being drawn. The film walks a taut line between fantasy and reality, so that the canine fighter pilots feel as important and authentic as Carl's grief. The emotional climax comes as the house is perched at the top of Paradise Falls – the sacrifices and joys of marriage and age made powerfully literal.

Animation is still made in Hollywood almost exclusively for children, which means most big screen cartoons have similar numbing themes of self-acceptance and triumph. Up has that too, but slips in richer, deeper themes from its very start, as much an exploration of the life's disappointments and regrets as of the majestic Paradise Falls. Katey Rich

2. Fantasia

The popular view of Walt Disney is that he was a pragmatist; even the recent quasi-biopic Saving Mr Banks, released by his own company, shows the animation legend handing out pre-printed autographs at his theme park. Yet at the height of his popularity, Disney set out to make a high art concert movie – inspired by the abstract films of New Zealand artist Len Lye – that would take the Silly Symphonies series of the 1930s to a place where "sheer fantasy unfolds". He knew the risks he was taking, telling the New York Times that "if someone didn't break loose with new things, the movies wouldn't be where they are today… Somebody's got to be a damn fool."

Even with today's resources the 1940 Fantasia is a remarkable undertaking, mixing the music of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Beethoven with hand-drawn animation from his 700-strong team, using an innovative sound system – Fantasound – that would give the illusion of a full orchestra in the cinema. But Disney's plan was not for the music to accompany the images but the other way round, in perhaps the film's most extraordinary sequence we are invited to Meet The Soundtrack – literally, the film's white magnetic strip gets its own surreal solo as it responds to various instruments.

This movement by movement approach made the studio's distributor, RKO, nervous, so Disney released the film in the roadshow fashion of the silent days, moving from city to city, which proved to be a costly mistake. Regular Disney fans didn't get the non-narrative aspect, andclassical music experts hated its literal-mindedness. Over time, though, Disney's intent sank in; once known as his flop, it is now his high watermark. Indeed, its most famous section – Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice – isn't simply a great piece of 20th century populist art, it is also the apotheosis of its creator's thinking: whoever would have expected Uncle Walt to bring Goethe to the masses? DW

1. Waltz With Bashir

This extraordinary, hallucinatory animation by Israeli film-maker Ari Folman is the story of what he sees as his nation's willed amnesia at the Sabra and Chatila massacres during the Lebanese civil war. The "Bashir" of the title is Lebanon's internationally admired Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel who was engaged in a tricky diplomatic and strategic dance with Israel, appearing to connive at the Israelis' invasion of his country in 1982 to help drive out the Syrians and the PLO.

Gemayel was assassinated by pro-Syrian forces three months after Israel's invasion, but the killing was wrongly blamed on Palestinians. In the sinister atmosphere of fear, anger and revenge, Israeli troops helped close off the camps in Beirut's Sabra and Chatila districts to facilitate a horrendous retaliatory massacre by Lebanon's Christian militia: up to 3500 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered. Israel was not held directly culpable for this proxy bloodbath; its Kahan Commission accepted a partial or indirect guilt; and this, Folman suggests, is why the historical fact has never been entirely resolved or absorbed in the nation's collective consciousness, and is always threatening to break the surface of memory. It is evidently why he has chosen the medium of animation for the movie, digitally derived from live-action video — like the Rotoscoping techniques of Bob Sabiston.

It is hyperreal and at the same time unreal: a bizarre dreamscape in which reality is morphed into something between two and three dimensions. Planes and surfaces stir and throb with colours harder, sharper, brighter than reality. It looks like one long hallucination, and therefore perfect for the trauma of Folman's recovered memories. This is his acid-trip down memory lane, and he might just have created Israel's very own Apocalypse Now.

It starts with the director's appearance as himself: in middle age, having a beer with a guy who did military service in the Israel Defence Force with him. His friend tells him that he is plagued by a recurring dream about being pursued by savage dogs and says that he believes it has something do with the 1982 Lebanon war. The director himself realises that he has suppressed much of his memory of his own participation of these events. It is all a blur.

So he sets out to track down his old comrades, to ask them what they remember, and so the animation surreally assumes something of oral history and psychoanalysis as well as personal drama. They tell him bizarre and horrifying episodes which pulse out onto the screen: sometimes it is not entirely clear if these episodes were real, or if they are the traumatised dreams which are, however, nonetheless telling the dreamer something important.

And still the director does not know what he remembers about Sabra and Chatila or even if he himself was actually present. As his investigations proceed, he gets nearer and nearer to the truth, and the experience becomes more and more painful, and disorientating.

Waltz With Bashir appeared in 2008, seven years after Richard Linklater's Waking Life, which employed a similar animation technique; it did not become widespread or popular, like the style of Pixar and Dreamworks in their golden decade of digital animation, and it did not become a personal signature, like the "hand-drawn" work of the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. But it is distinctive and compelling — and uniquely suited to a unique film. Peter Bradshaw

10. Once Upon a Time in China

The film that kick-started Hong Kong cinema's kung-fu renaissance and launched Jet Li towards a future of substandard western action movies. Its subject was already well known to local audiences: Wong Fei-hung was a real person: a turn-of-the-century martial arts master and healer who's become something of a folk hero. Like Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood, he'd been portrayed many times before. Jackie Chan played him in Drunken Master, and a long-running Wong Fei-hung film series during the 1950s and 60s gave roles to the fathers of Bruce Lee and Yuen Wo-ping, among many others.

Transposed to 1990s Hong Kong, with the handover from British to Chinese sovereignty on the horizon, this story of a Chinese rebel fighting oppressive colonialist powers had extra resonance. Its British and American baddies are cartoonishly demonised, and the plot is often convoluted to the point of impenetrability, admittedly, but what this film chiefly provides is dazzling, colourful, kinetic, epic, pre-CGI spectacle. Director Tsui Hark, schooled in both the US and Hong Kong, fills the screen with movement and energy. The wire-assisted fight scenes – choreographed by Yuen Wo-ping, inevitably – are ingeniously staged. Earthbound reality is left far behind.

And Li is simply incredible. He's got gravitas as an actor, but when he's in action, he really takes some beating. He does it all: fighting with hands, feet, sticks, poles, umbrellas. He kills one baddie with a bullet – without using a gun. But Li is a gymnast, too, pirouetting and somersaulting across the screen with the agility of a cat. He's surely the most graceful martial artist out there. Those skills come to bear in a jubilantly athletic final duel, which takes place in a warehouse conveniently full of bamboo ladders. It's one of the most celebrated sequences in martial arts movies, and it leaves you wanting more, of which there is plenty: they made four sequels in the next two years. Steve Rose

9. Yojimibo

Akira Kurosawa drew upon American pulp sources for Yojimbo's plot, principally the Hollywood western but also Dashiell Hammett's broken-city melodrama The Dain Curse. Here a lone, probably disgraced, certainly hungry samurai (Toshiro Mifune, the Wolf to Kurosawa's Emperor) wanders into a town where two factions are in eternal conflict, glaring at one another from their matching headquarters on opposite sides of the town's wide, western-like main street. Since each faction lacks a distinguished warrior with whose aid they might tip the balance of power in their favour, they each badly want the newcomer on their side, something the samurai figures out within moments, and exploits throughout the movie.

As the power games play out to their nihilistic, corpse-choked conclusion, Kurosawa demonstrates a mastery of his medium in almost every frame. His sense of spatial relations is beyond compare: panels in interior walls slide away to reveal whole exterior street-scapes and crowd scenes perfectly framed within the smaller new frame. Intimate conversations take place as a turbulent skirmish rages in the deep background center-screen, between the talkers' faces in the foreground. And what faces! From the moronic warrior with the M-shaped unibrow and the giant wielding a huge mallet to Mifune's increasingly battered countenance, sardonic, cynical and ever defiant, every single face is at once a landscape and an epic poem unto itself.

Along with all that comes Kurosawa's furious visual energy, his virtuoso choreography of moving camera and bodies of warring men; and his talent for adding enriching layers of kinetic, elemental motion – rain falling, leaves or smoke blowing in the unceasing winds – to the violence already in play. Yojimbo led to the Italian A Fistful of Dollars, which in time completely remade the American western, completing a circle of international cultural exchange that foreshadows a give-and-take among international filmmakers that we take for granted today. John Patterson

8. A Touch of Zen

We have A Touch of Zen to thank for Harvey Weinstein's interest in Asian cinema; it was after Quentin Tarantino screened King Hu's 1971wuxia that the mogul began a controversial spending spree in the east that led to his current controversial involvement with Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer. It's not hard to see why: Hu's film is unusually epic for the genre, clocking in at over three hours, and made cinema history by being the first Chinese film to win an award at Cannes, missing out on the Palme d'Or but taking home the Technical prize.

A Touch of Zen is most notable nowadays as the template for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, being the 14th century story of an artist, Ku, who encounters a beautiful woman living in a rundown house with her elderly mother. In true wuxia fashion, however, she is not all she seems, and so the story grows, until Ku realises that he is in the middle of a major dynastic war between rival factions. And as the story develops – effortlessly absorbing elements of comedy and romance – so does the spectacle, increasing in scale and scope in ways that would be unimaginable today.

It is these fight sequences that have endured, and although wuxia briefly fell out of favour soon after, it is easy to see Hu's influence on the hit martial arts films of recent years. More so than Crouching Tiger, A Touch of Zen casts a long shadow over the films of Chinese director Zhang Yimou, whose House Of Flying Daggers directly references Hu's film in its bravura bamboo forest sequence. But it is Hu's deadpan sense of the grand that keeps this astonishing film fresh, with its themes of justice and nobility, shot through with a strange spirituality that earns the film its title in a sequence involving a pack of bouncing, kick-ass Buddhist monks.Damon Wise

7. The Raid

As a breathless and brutal martial arts thriller shot in Jakarta and directed by a Welshman, The Raid would already have been worthy of note. That it is a film of precision and inventiveness, taking fight sequences into the realm of horror, slapstick comedy, even the musical, guarantees its place in action-movie history. The plot is as simple as its choreography is complicated. A police unit sets out one morning to seize control of a tower block in Jakarta that has fallen into the hands of a gang. But not just any gang: this mob has kitted out the high rise with sophisticated CCTV and public address systems monitored from a top-floor control room. The gang-lord, presiding over the CCTV screens, broadcasts a call to his tenants: "We have company. You know what to do." He doesn't mean put the kettle on and crack open the custard creams.

In the absence of much dialogue, the weapons do the talking: guns, knives, swords, hammers. A man receives an axe to the shoulder, which is then used to yank him across the room. A refrigerator doubles as a bomb. The gang's most vicious member, Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian, who also served as one of the film's fight choreographers), acts as mouthpiece for the film's philosophy. Casting aside his firearms, he explains: "Using a gun is like ordering takeout." If that's the case, Mad Dog would merit a fistful of Michelin stars.

Some of the fight sequences are enclosed claustrophobically in hallways where the only option is to use walls as springboards, Donald O'Connor-style. Others, such as a dust-up in a drugs lab, expand like dance numbers. Evans's prime achievement has been to make a berserk adventure characterised by clarity. In contrast to most action cinema, the frenzy arises from the performers rather than the editing; no matter how frenzied things get, we never lose sight of who is karate-chopping the windpipe of whom. Ryan Gilbey

6. Ong-Bak

Hands and feet are one thing in martial arts; elbows and knees are quite another. And after seeing this Muay Thai showreel, you'd put money on Tony Jaa against any other screen fighter. Even in the scenes where Jaa isn't fighting anyone at all, simply going through some moves, he's awesomely formidable.

Ong Bak as a movie is fairly straightforward: city baddies steal a village's Buddha head; a humble peasant goes to get it back, individually crushing each adversary with his bare hands in the process. That's all it needs. Ong Bak's prime objective is to say, "Can you believe this guy?" and with the added note that no special effects or stunt doubles were used, it more than accomplishes it. In fight after fight, Jaa unleashes moves that leave you thinking, "That's gotta hurt", if not "That's gonna require major cranial reconstruction". No holds are barred and few punches are pulled, but rather than brute violence, you're left marvelling at Jaa's speed, technique and pain threshold. The fights are skilfully staged, particularly an exhilarating, three-round barroom brawl that leaves no opponent or piece of furniture standing.

Jaa shows off his physical prowess in other ways, too, from an opening tree-climbing race to a Bangkok street chase that sends him along a hilarious assault course of cafe tables, market stalls, children, cars, trucks, sheets of glass and hoops of barbed wire. He's almost too much to believe, and Ong Bak acknowledges our incredulity by frequently rewinding the action to show us Jaa's moves in slow motion, as if to say, "Do you want to see that again?". We do. SR

5. The Matrix

Cocteau imagined the mirror as a gateway to another world in his 1930 film The Blood of a Poet, and it's a testament to the durability of this image that when it turned up again in The Matrix, it had lost none of its allure. The film clocks up a further debt in its plot, which proposes that what we perceive as reality is actually a cosmetic facade constructed to conceal a terrible truth about our existence. Neo, a computer boffin played by Keanu Reeves, is selected to bear the burden of enlightenment. Reeves's blankness in the part is perfect, mainly because Neo is required to display only those skills and qualities that are downloaded into his brain. Required to master jujitsu, he is simply installed with the relevant computer programme. In no time at all, he is pulling off those tricks from 1970s martial arts movies, where a man can launch himself in a flying kick and somehow manage to prepare a cocktail, read a short novel and fill out his tax return, all before his feet touch the ground.

The film's Cocteau-esque concept is harnessed to some X-Files-style paranoia, but it is the dazzling martial arts work that gives the film its special lift. The directors, the Wachowski brothers, were already having ideas above their station when they came up with The Matrix (their only previous film, after all, was the sweaty, claustrophobic thriller Bound). It was the martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping who helped them reach the next level.

The movie's fight sequences provide its purest source of pleasure for a number of reasons. First, the violence doesn't come with redemptive overtones; it is played out for the thrill of the choreography, not the anticipation of injury or righteousness. Death is flippant, but it provides no moral kick. Second, the movie introduced a strange new effect, much copied or parodied since in everything from Charlie's Angels to Shrek: a character freezes in midair while the camera circles the tableau like a computer imagining a 3D representation of a 2D image. When the camera has completed its movement, the physical motion of the scene resumes. Suddenly the humdrum vocabulary of the action movie has been extended before our disbelieving eyes. RG

4. House of Flying Daggers

Watch the opening 20 minutes of House of Flying Daggers and it's not hard to see why the Chinese picked its director, Zhang Yimou, to direct the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Even though the action unfolds within a reasonably sized brothel waiting room instead of a stadium, there's all the elements that Zhang would multiply by the thousands in 2008: traditional Chinese music, dancing, swathes of brightly coloured silk cloth, drummers and, of course, martial arts. It makes for a magnificent spectacle that's sets a high bar for the rest of the movie. Fortunately, there's more dazzle to come in this follow-up to Zhang's first wuxia film, Hero. Zhang's 2006 Curse of the Golden Flower concluded the trilogy, but for many the romantic, operatic yet satisfyingly compact Flying Daggers represents the best of the three.

Set during the Tang dynasty, two police captains, Leo (Andy Lau, best known for the thematically-not-dissimilar Infernal Affairs trilogy) and Jin (hunky Takeshi Kaneshiro) are searching for the leader of the Flying Daggers, a counterinsurgency group. They suspect blind courtesan Mei (Zhang Ziyi) may be a secret member of the Daggers, so Jin, posing as a citizen, busts her out of jail and goes on the run with her, pursued by Leo and numerous expendable officers. Love seems to flower between Jin and Mei, but no one and nothing are as they seem here.

Although the fights are terrifically choreographed by Tony Ching Siu-tung – especially a bamboo-forest chase that tops Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a final mano-a-mano in the snow – judged against other classic martial arts films, Daggers is actually a little light on combat scenes. Indeed, the fighting is so stringently stylized it's more like dancing with knives. No matter: the love story may be almost as schematic as the film's rigorous use of colour, yet the acting is so powerful from the core trio that deep emotional depth is created seemingly out of nothing. Leslie Felperin

3. Police Story

Although it was obvious at the time, it seems strange now that Jackie Chan was originally groomed by at least one Hong Kong producer as a successor to Bruce Lee, the lithe master of martial arts whose style was almost laughably serious in its grim-faced intensity. After a few tryouts in the genre, however, Chan took things in a much more comedic, but no less athletic route, which is why, after breaking out in the Yuen Woo-ping classic Drunken Master, the former stuntman found himself in Hollywood, adding light relief to The Cannonball Run in 1981.

Chan's Hollywood career, however, didn't pan out, and after a disappointment in 1985 with The Protector – a collaboration with neo-grindhouse director James Glickenhaus, perhaps not the most sympatico of all possible talents – Chan returned to Hong Kong to take matters into his own hands, directing and cowriting Police Story, in which he played a disgraced cop who is forced to go undercover and clear his name after being framed by drug barons.

Making a direct rebuttal of the Hollywood way of doing things (in his mind, sloppily and half-heartedly), Chan prioritised the fights and stuntwork, using the genre elements mostly as filler. Refusing to use a body double for every scene (bar one that involved a motorcycle), Chan began to earn his reputation as a fearless and pioneering action star. On this film alone, he was hospitalised with concussion, suffered severe burns, dislocated his pelvis and was almost paralysed by a shattered vertebrae. The resulting film was a huge hit and spawned five strong sequels. Seen now, it seems remarkably straight given what was to follow – the cartoonish Rush Hour series – although Chan certainly must have enjoyed the irony of being embraced by Hollywood for a film that is, essentially, a critique of everything it was doing wrong. DW

2. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Why is Ang Lee's film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon such a sublime experience? Perhaps because every bone in your body tells you it shouldn't work. It's a tranquil action movie. Whoever heard of one of those? And it's a love story with a kick: a kung-fu kick. It begins with the theft of a fabled sword, the Green Destiny. As the sword is stolen, the camera takes flight along with the thief, for whom gravity is a restricting garment to be cast off at a moment's notice. The warrior Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) gives chase, skipping blithely across rooftops that glow silver in the moonlight. When the pursuit gives way to combat, the rule book of action cinema is not only discarded but sliced to ribbons. For viewers too young to remember, the shock of seeing a Sam Peckinpah shoot-out back when slow motion was an innovation rather than a nasty virus, then the sight of these warriors levitating calmly to nosebleed-inducing heights will provide something of that same liberating jolt.

The midair skirmishes of martial arts movies were brought to mainstream audiences by The Matrix, and Lee enlisted that film's choreographer, Yuen Woo-ping (who later worked on Kill Bill and Kung Fu Hustle), to take that style even further. The resulting fight routines evoke Olympic gymnastics, break dancing and those cartoon punch-ups where one of the Tasmanian Devil's limbs would emerge briefly from within a frantic cyclone. And if Yu occasionally steps on her opponent's foot, she's not fighting dirty – it's just the only way of ensuring that the battle remains at ground level.

For all the finesse of the choreography, the action sequences would be superficial without the emotional weight Lee brings to the picture, notably in the largely unspoken tenderness between Yu and her fellow warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat). As a director he doesn't differentiate between the way he shoots tenderness and violence. In his hands, a love scene can come to be brutal, with a man's blood forming a fork across his lover's breast as they embrace, while a struggle between opponents in the forest treetops, with the supple branches doubling as nests, catapults, rungs and bungee ropes, achieves a sensuous serenity. RG

1. Enter the Dragon

Bruce Lee purists may or may not agree that Enter the Dragon is his greatest film. But this is the one that has passed into legend: it was the colossal box office smash of 1973 and the most famous film of that unrivalled martial arts superstar who had died the summer before its release of a cerebral reaction to painkillers. He shared with James Dean the grim distinction of appearing posthumously in his most famous picture. After a career as a child star in Hong Kong cinema – almost the Macaulay Culkin of his day – and a spell on TV's The Green Hornet, Lee exploded into action pictures that were simply so popular and profitable that Warner Brothers agreed to make Enter the Dragon, with Lee as star and coproducer: Hollywood's first martial arts movie. Robert Clouse directed, and the script was by Michael Allin, who wrote the Isaac Hayes film Truck Turner. Lalo Schifrin composed the music.

Bruce Lee was possessed of extraordinary physical grace, balletic poise, lethal speed and explosive power. He was a master of kung fu, judo and karate, and is considered the spiritual godfather to today's mixed martial arts scene. He was not a big man, and so his presence was better captured by the camera lens. Moreover, he had a delicately handsome, almost boyish face and had a charm and verbal fluency as he expounded his Zen theories of combat in interviews, something more like dynamic motivational philosophy than any fortune-cookie cliché. Lee had a presence and charisma comparable to Muhammad Ali, and that was perhaps never better captured than in Enter the Dragon. Perhaps only Jackie Chan now rivals him as an Asian star in Hollywood – and Hollywood has not shown much interest in promoting an Asian-American A-lister since Enter the Dragon.

Lee plays a Shaolin master who is recuited by British intelligence to enter a martial arts tournament undercover. This event is being run by a sinister megalomaniac called Han who is suspected of involvement in drugs and prostitution. Lee has a personal beef with Han, whose goons terrorised and attempted to rape Lee's kid sister – she committed suicide rather than submit. He shows up at the island with a couple of American fighters: Williams, played by Jim Kelly, provides some Shaft-style street cred while Roper, played by John Saxon, is a playboy type who is close to the James Bond template. In truth, of course, it is Lee himself who is the James Bond, but he is no womaniser. Bruce Lee has a monkish purity and spirituality, with a laser-like focus on exposing Han – and of course kicking ass.

The look of the movie is exotic and extravagant, especially its inspired hall-of-mirrors showdown, with Lee sporting the weird, almost tribal slashes across his midriff. His strange, animal quavering cry and piercing gaze are entirely unique. But what makes Enter the Dragon outshine the rest is the serene, almost innocent idealism of Lee himself. In the opening scenes, Lee speaks humbly to the aged Abbot at his temple, coolly takes tea with the British intelligence chief Braithwaite, and interrupts their conversation to instruct a teenage boy in martial arts. When this young hothead is easily bested in combat, Lee says to him with inimitable seriousness: "We need emotional content – not anger." It is the philosophy of this martial arts classic, and its unique star. Peter Bradshaw