A great action film for every year, 1924 to now

By the 1980s, everybody knew what an action movie was. They had their own section in the video shop. And on the video box or the poster, there were star names written in a font nearly as big as the title’s. What kind of movies did Arnold Schwarzenegger make? Action movies. How about Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan or Jean-Claude Van Damme? Also action movies.

Names like these promised the visceral, bicep-heavy, high-octane thrills we’ve come to expect from the genre: the breathless stunts, explosions, kinetic combat and wanton destruction. But exactly when we came to call these simply ‘action movies’ is more difficult to trace. Certainly, moving pictures craved action from the beginning. It’s there in the cue “Lights, camera… action” and seems to have been carved into the new medium’s constitution – its way of defining itself as different from books or theatre.

For its first half century or more, however, action in cinema wasn’t so much a distinct genre as something that was dispersed across various action-based genres, including westerns, war films, gangster pictures, swashbucklers, adventure serials like The Hazards of Helen (1914 to 1917), and what were more broadly labelled action-adventure movies. Some of the most spectacular chase sequences and daring stunts, meanwhile, were found in silent comedies – picture Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock tower in Safety Last! (1923) or Buster Keaton making his way through falling buildings in the cyclone-ravaged town in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928).

But just as rock’n’roll evolved into rock, dropping the ‘roll’ and getting many decibels louder, so the action-adventure film eventually morphed into the straight-up action movie – likewise upping the tempo, intensity and speaker-shaking loudness. The transformation was well underway by the 1960s, when lone action heroes, including James Bond, Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name and the wandering Japanese swordsman Zatoichi featured in cult action franchises. The same decade, a burst of activity in Hong Kong brought first the wuxia swordplay film and, later, the kung fu movie to international prominence. By the early 70s, everybody was kung fu fighting. Bruce Lee became a global action superstar.

Following our previous year-by-year lists of musicals, Japanese cinema and horror, our blow-by-blow account of action cinema keeps pace with this ongoing evolution over the last 100 years. Compared with most action lists online, it digs much deeper into the roots of the modern action movie in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s, reclaiming names like Raoul Walsh, William A. Wellman and Howard Hawks as key action auteurs, no less than Kathryn Bigelow or John Woo. Think of this as the nascent genre’s epic training montage.

Via the revolution of CGI and the digital action spectacles of the Wachowskis, George Miller and S.S. Rajamouli, the list brings us bang up to date and into our own volatile period, when action at the movies continues to be not just intrinsic to the medium but also seen as somehow crucial for its survival. With cinema facing an existential threat thanks to waning attendance, it is tentpole action films – including Tenet (2020), Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) – that have repeatedly shouldered (and often made good on) the industry’s outsized hopes for getting people into cinemas in huge numbers again.

But enough scene-setting, let’s skip to the action…

– Sam Wigley

Director: Raoul Walsh

All but launching the movie swashbuckler as a major genre with 1920’s The Mark of Zorro, Douglas Fairbanks was the defining action star of Hollywood’s silent era. He brought a dash, verve and acrobatic exuberance to the screen in a series of ever more extravagant storybook adventures, including blockbuster versions of The Three Musketeers (1921) and Robin Hood (1922), that have been templates ever since. In Raoul Walsh’s gigantic production of The Thief of Bagdad, vast sets, enchanting effects and thousands of extras recreate the perfumed world of the Arabian Nights – all as an opulent playground for Fairbanks’ gymnastic derring-do.

– Sam Wigley

Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton)

Director: Sergei Eisenstein

Is Battleship Potemkin an action film? It’s unquestionably a landmark in the use of editing to orchestrate carnage – and therefore the granddaddy of everything from Seven Samurai (1954) to The Wild Bunch (1969) to the subliminal ‘glimpse’ cuts of King Hu. The first two thirds of Eisenstein’s classic are all buildup, depicting the maggot-ridden conditions that lead the sailors of the Potemkin to mutiny. But after onlookers gather on the Odessa Steps to cheer on the rebels, Cossacks arrive to suppress the insurrection in one of the most famous sequences in cinema history: a lightning-charged succession of short, sharp, splintered images depicting the crowd’s attempts to flee a massacre. As film scholar David Bordwell put it: “extreme action meets extreme technique”.

– Sam Wigley

Orochi (Buntaro Futagawa)

Directors: Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman

A film is like a train, or should be – every second building up to the next, keeping things moving. This is true at least of Buster Keaton’s films, and none more so than The General. The magnitude of the operation, involving actual locomotives and realised on a huge budget, fails to weigh down the action. Playing train engineer Johnnie Gray, Keaton the actor is as fleet-footed as ever in this based-on-real-events story set at the outset of the American civil war, and Keaton the director and jokester is perhaps at his all-time funniest. Rather than insist upon the sizeable scale of the action, his visual jokes recall those in animated cartoons or children playing with train sets – the contrast between the lighthearted tone and the danger posed by these real machines remains as captivating and hilarious now as it was nearly a century ago. It’s safe to say that without Johnnie Gray, there would be no Ethan Hunt.

– Elena Lazic

The Black Pirate (Albert Parker)

Director: Ted Wilde

Silent cinema’s third most famous comic star, Harold Lloyd deserves the awe of action fans for so much more than the rightly celebrated clock-tower sequence of Safety Last! The following year’s Girl Shy (1924) ends with one of the greatest chase sequences ever conceived: a mind-blowing multiple vehicle pursuit through the streets of Los Angeles. Hingeing on a nebbish younger brother (Lloyd, naturally) taking on the gang of thieves who’ve stolen money from the coffers of a pioneer town, 1927’s The Kid Brother has a slower pulse rate at first. But action fans are rewarded for their patience with an extended climactic bout on a deserted ship, a frantic cross-country dash via horse and cart, and some closing fisticuffs that kick up so much dust that we lose sight of the brawlers.

– Sam Wigley

Wings (William A. Wellman)

Director: Zhang Shichuan

The wuxia – or heroic swordplay – genre is a Chinese literary staple that dates back some 2,000 years. In the 1920s, these tales of chivalrous vigilantes saw a surge in popularity, largely thanks to writer Xiang Kairan, whose serialised novels would be adapted into one of the first works of martial arts cinema. Released in 19 parts over three years, and running a staggering 27 hours, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple is an epic tale of love and kung fu. Reportedly a marvel of silent-era special effects, the film was Exhibit A in the government’s campaign against tales of superstition and fantasy, its “morally corrupting” success leading to the banning of all wuxia movies in 1931. Sadly, no copies of this watershed work of action cinema survive.

– Matthew Thrift

Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner)

Director: Castleton Knight

An action movie set on a train that runs a whisker under an hour – what’s not to love? There’s some disagreement over whether Castleton Knight’s locomotive adventure pre-dates Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) as Britain’s first talking picture. If the film suffers the same problems as many a part-talkie – its camera and cast locked in place to meet the requirements of the sound-recording equipment – none of this matters when we board the London to Edinburgh sleeper for the final 20 minutes. An act of vengeful sabotage leads to a chase and various punch-ups on practically every surface of the speeding train, the 95-year-old stunt work still inducing gasps. “For the purposes of the film,” reads an opening title card, “dramatic licence has been taken in regard to the safety equipment used on the Flying Scotsman.” Indeed.

– Matthew Thrift

Bulldog Drummond (F. Richard Jones)

Director: Howard Hawks

Howard Hawks’ first film in sound, The Dawn Patrol follows a group of airmen living, working, drinking and fighting together on a French base during the First World War. After each perilous mission, the group lose their friends, and those who remain must stare down their own fragile mortality. Though mostly set back at the base, as the men deal with the existential traumas of their situation, Hawks’ movie also contains several breathtaking, bravura aerial sequences that accompany our heroes across enemy lines – Hawks himself, a former airman, flew one of the planes. These sequences were so impressive, they were reused in the Errol Flynn-starring remake eight years later.

– Chloe Walker

Hell’s Angels (Howard Hughes)

Director: William A. Wellman

William A. Wellman’s pre-Code classic is violent from the start, mercilessly showing the seeds of crime taking root in a child’s mind. Tom Powers, played in adulthood by James Cagney, is such an obviously damaged soul that it is hard to see a need for the on-screen text that bookends the film, urging the audience never to glamourise the lifestyle of the Chicago mafia. Yet it is true that The Public Enemy is a perversely pleasurable picture, its impulsive antihero shattering the screen a little more with every new outburst. The template for all gangster films to follow, it has lost none of its terrifying, thrilling power. 

– Elena Lazic

Dirigible (Frank Capra)

Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel

In The Most Dangerous Game, a big game hunter (Joel McCrea) must evade being hunted for sport on a count’s (Leslie Banks) private island, a battle that’s framed as one of wits rather than outright warfare. This means that several scenes avoid, not embrace, opportunities for action. Traps are nimbly sidestepped, the sudden onset of fog thwarts the firing of a rifle, a character painstakingly lines up a shot with his bow… only to collapse. Towards the end, however, the film segues into a tense chase sequence full of immersive, impressive camerawork. One stretch cuts between Banks’s eyes and his point-of-view in tight close-up as he doggedly stalks McCrea through the jungle, vision obscured by dense foliage. In another, the camera keeps pace alongside a pack of ferocious hunting dogs. When the action moves to the count’s fortress, the sensation of the walls closing in only intensifies.

– Gayle Sequeira

The Crowd Roars (Howard Hawks)

Director: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

A ship full of unwitting humans, led by a dangerously determined director (Robert Armstrong), find themselves on the remote Skull Island, intending to shoot a movie. There, alongside a host of other enormous creatures, they encounter the mammoth gorilla King Kong, who starts picking them off like flies. Few are left standing, besides Kong’s beloved Ann (Fay Wray), with whom he takes a notorious trip up the Empire State Building. Even after endless sequels, remakes, homages (including one of ABBA’s worst songs), and almost a century’s worth of technical innovation, the practical-effect action sequences in the original King Kong remain awe-inspiring and utterly thrilling to behold.

– Chloe Walker

The Eagle and the Hawk (Stuart Walker)

Director: Cedric Gibbons

Ripped Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller is Tarzan, Maureen O’Sullivan is Jane in this standout entry in the exotic 1930s action-adventure series based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels. As the title suggests, it’s as much erotic romance as humid actioner, testing the censor with its depiction of the scantily clad couple’s blissful life of tree-swinging and nude swimming. But trouble brews when two huntsmen arrive in search of ivory from a local elephant burial ground, and bestial peril is never far away – cue an underwater wrestling match with a crocodile and a brutal finale pitching elephants against lions. Made six years before Hollywood signed up to its animal welfare pledge, these scenes admittedly make tough viewing today.

– Sam Wigley

The Count of Monte Cristo (Rowland V. Lee)

Director: Michael Curtiz

One of the great actor-director partnerships in the annals of action cinema, Michael Curtiz directed Errol Flynn in 12 features – an astonishing number given the pair could barely stand the sight of each other. Flynn had been tapped by Warner Brothers as the heir apparent to Douglas Fairbanks, and this swashbuckling adventure gave him his first leading role. The star plays Peter Blood, doctor turned pirate and “terror of the Caribbean”, while Curtiz lends his peerless blocking and spatial orientation to a plethora of dazzlingly nimble fights. Beyond the action, Casey Robinson’s screenplay delineates the democratic spoils of the piratical life, in which the wounded are recompensed for their missing limbs. The loss of a right arm is worth 600 pieces of eight; a left leg 400. “A fella can get rich if he’s lucky,” one rummy notes.

– Matthew Thrift

‘G’ Men (William Keighley)

Director: Howard Hawks

Named after the aeronautical term describing when cloud cover is so thick that flight navigation is next to impossible, Ceiling Zero was the last aviation picture Howard Hawks made before his seminal Only Angels Have Wings (1939); both follow a group of men who risk their lives delivering mail by air. While its successor would be far more acclaimed, one thing the 1936 movie had over it was a barnstorming whirlwind of a central performance from James Cagney. Our first glimpse of Ceiling Zero’s star sees him flying a plane upside down with an enormous grin on his face – and that absolutely establishes the tone for the rest of his wildly charismatic turn.

– Chloe Walker

The Charge of the Light Brigade (Michael Curtiz)

Director: John Cromwell

Anthony Hope’s novel had already been adapted for the big screen on three occasions by the time John Cromwell’s 1937 film was released, and there’d be further attempts to come. Nevertheless, Cromwell’s version, the first in sound, remains the ultimate take on the tale of a regular man (Ronald Colman) determined to save his royal doppelganger (Ronald Colman) from a nefarious usurper (Douglas Fairbanks Jr). Colman and Fairbanks Jr were two of classic Hollywood’s most charming swashbucklers. More than anything else, it was pitting these two against each other, as deft and dazzling with their swords as they are with their words, that elevated theirs above all the other adaptations.

– Chloe Walker

The Hurricane (John Ford)

Director: Michael Curtiz and William Keighley

Bullishly moving in on territory that Douglas Fairbanks and director Allan Dwan had made their own with the 1922 silent version of Robin Hood, this Errol Flynn-starring upgrade makes a glorious showcase for the benefits of sound and early full colour. Amid the rich greens of a Sherwood Forest that was conjured out of California, arrows thwunk satisfyingly into trees while Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s rousing score keeps the Merrie Men’s outlaw exploits at a gallop. Robin’s climactic duel with the villainous Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone) isn’t just about the swordsmanship, it’s also about the pair’s rapier-witted jibes – the taunts and insults that cut like steel. This is the Robin Hood movie that others are measured against.

– Sam Wigley

Spawn of the North (Henry Hathaway)

Director: John Ford

The template for many a group-in-peril movie, John Ford’s thrilling western adventure throws together a banker, a gambler, a saloon girl, an escaped outlaw and other strangers on a stagecoach journey through perilous Apache country. Although its director was already synonymous with westerns, Stagecoach was Ford’s first since 1926’s 3 Bad Men and his first in sound. The results drew a line in the sand for the western genre, its technical and thematic sophistication helping to usher in the more mature cowboy pictures that typified the 1940s and 50s golden age. Its place in action cinema history is also assured: a tour de force of dynamic cross-cutting, the astonishing Apache attack sequence set a new, galloping pace for on-screen excitement.

– Sam Wigley

Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks)

Director: Rouben Mamoulian

Tyrone Power is a delightfully smooth criminal in Rouben Mamoulian’s sound remake of the Douglas Fairbanks-starring silent classic from 1920. Hiding his secret identity as the masked, hyper-masculine vigilante behind a vain and effeminate persona, this Zorro is sly, charming and entertaining – but also deadly when he needs to be. The film features a lot less acrobatic, swashbuckling action than Fairbanks’ version, making the moments when the hero must strike all the more thrilling and shocking. Mamoulian’s method of cutting on movement, creating an effect of uninterrupted flow, also ups the adrenaline: the rapier duel between Don Diego Vega and Basil Rathbone’s Captain Esteban Pasquale is as technically impressive as it is fierce.

– Elena Lazic

The Sea Hawk (Michael Curtiz)

Director: Raoul Walsh

Custer’s last stand makes for one of golden age Hollywood’s most thrilling action sequences in this epic historical western from Raoul Walsh. As Custer’s soldiers are overwhelmed on the battlefield at Little Bighorn, Walsh’s film becomes a melée of gunfire, horseback charges, fatal tumbles and awe-inspiring bird’s-eye views of the violent chaos. The road to get here takes us from Custer’s first days as a young upstart at West Point Military Academy, Errol Flynn slowly growing out his mullet as Custer rises through the ranks, romances Olivia de Havilland’s Elizabeth Bacon and brokers a fateful treaty with Anthony Quinn’s Crazy Horse out in the Black Hills of Dakota. Fictionalised and romanticised it may be, but – made with the grit and polish of the Warner Bros machine at its peak – They Died with Their Boots On is one of the great print-the-legend biopics.

– Sam Wigley

The 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi)

Director: Raoul Walsh

Here’s a barnstormer of an adventure movie that deserves to be better known. Errol Flynn is the leader of a Second World War bombing crew – which includes Ronald Reagan – sent to blow up a Nazi munitions line on the Polish border. Their plane goes down and they have to hoof it through enemy territory, escaping capture with secret plans for a German airplane factory. Any let-up between the set pieces – which include plane crashes, car chases, locomotive fisticuffs, disguises and sabotage – is filled with banter, with director Raoul Walsh keeping things moving at a lick. Fans of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) will have a great time with this one. Superfan François Truffaut certainly did.

– Matthew Thrift

The Black Swan (Henry King)

Director: Akira Kurosawa

In general, Japanese action cinema leans towards swordplay and the conflict between duty and personal feeling much more than it does towards unarmed combat and the themes of personal enlightenment that are often central to martial arts films. Though he made several samurai movies, Akira Kurosawa never addressed spirituality so directly as in his judo-themed debut feature. The windswept ‘fight to the death’ climax takes on an almost mythic quality as the hero experiences a spiritual epiphany under stormy skies that allows him to secure victory by transcending himself and shaming his rival into defeat.

– Hayley Scanlon

We Dive at Dawn (Anthony Asquith)

Director: William Hanna and Joseph Barbera

Cat and mouse double act Tom and Jerry were well into their stride by the time this outing – the 17th of the 114 shorts William Hanna and Joseph Barbera would produce for MGM – came around, earning the duo the second of their seven Oscars for best animated short, a record only matched by Walt Disney and his Silly Symphonies. Our resident tomcat has resorted to a mail-order manual (published, suspiciously, by Random Mouse) to ensnare his foe, but traps and clockwork dames just aren’t doing the trick. A rapid series of escalating gags see Tom take his own scalp off with a shotgun before a pile of dynamite sends him heavenwards to meet his maker. Dark, quintessential stuff.

– Matthew Thrift

To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks)

Director: Raoul Walsh

The last of this list’s five Errol Flynn pictures, Raoul Walsh’s tense paratrooper movie Objective, Burma! sees Flynn and his squadron parachuting into Burma in order to blow up a Japanese radar station. The Burma campaign was still underway when Walsh’s gruelling epic went into production, and Walsh recreates the action with documentary-like realism, making use of real army planes and uniforms. The results drew criticism for implying that US forces won victory in Burma single-handedly, when in fact it was a joint Allied effort. But if the film is dubious history, it survives as a thrillingly sweaty ‘men on a mission’ movie, becoming a battle for survival as the group are forced to trek their way to safety through miles and miles of enemy-occupied jungle.

– Sam Wigley

Sanshiro Sugata Part II (Akira Kurosawa)

Director: John Ford

In truth, 1946 was not a notable vintage for action cinema – perhaps the world needed a break from action that year. After wartime service documenting the conflict on film for the US Navy and intelligence services, John Ford returned to cowboy movies with a notably reflective, myth-making account of the Wyatt Earp story, with Henry Fonda playing the famous Old West sheriff who faces off against the outlaw Clanton brothers. It earns its place on our action list by virtue of its pristine, archetypal treatment of an action movie staple: the climactic shootout. Here the gunfight at the OK Corral is written into immortality: the dawning of light over the desert, the glowering clouds over Tombstone, and the long, slow walk down Main Street as Earp and his men go to keep their appointment with fate and legend. 

– Sam Wigley

Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur)

Director: Senkichi Taniguchi

As well as directing some of cinema’s greatest action movies himself, Akira Kurosawa wrote the screenplay for this mountain adventure – a kind of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) set atop Japan’s frosted peaks. Adding to the Kurosawa connection are two of his stars: Takashi Shimura and, in his first screen role, the legendary Toshiro Mifune. The duo make up two thirds of a criminal gang, hiding out in a hot springs hotel way up in the mountains. The cops are in pursuit, and the slightest noise can trigger an avalanche – a worry with Godzilla (1954) composer Akira Ifukube on scoring duties. “The mighty mountain will punish the bad,” says an old man at the inn, and Mifune is first in line for his comeuppance as the double-crossing ruffian who turns on his crew in this icy survival movie’s thrilling final act.

– Matthew Thrift

Brute Force (Jules Dassin)

Director: Howard Hawks

The mammoth, deadly quest to move 9,000 head of cattle the 1,000 miles from Texas to Missouri is the narrative at the heart of Red River. With the herd liable to scatter at any unexpected noise, and the rivalry between the increasingly unhinged cowboy in charge (John Wayne) and his level-headed surrogate son (Montgomery Clift) also at perpetual risk of combustion, the action plays out like a thrilling mix of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and The Wages of Fear (1953). Ending in a fistfight, Red River was the first great western of Howard Hawks’ storied career, and one of his most epic adventure stories.

– Chloe Walker

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston)

Director: Chuck Jones

Few action directors can compete with the list of credits sported by Chuck Jones. From Bugs Bunny to Tom and Jerry, the animation maestro knew a thing or two about the thrill of the chase. With Fast and Furry-ous, Jones introduced a pair of characters whose 49 shorts would be described by director Joe Dante as chase films of “cosmic significance”. Road Runner (Accelleratii Incredibus) speeds against a cycling Monument Valley backdrop, the famished Wile E. Coyote in pursuit, knife and fork aloft. Cue the anarchic games of oneupmanship, as the ACME Company’s most loyal customer is perennially outsmarted by his feathered foe. Ever wondered what would happen if Coyote caught his prey? 1980’s Soup or Sonic has the answer.

– Matthew Thrift

White Heat (Raoul Walsh)

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Teamed for the first of several times with his old circus partner Nick Cravat, Burt Lancaster got to flex his acrobatic skills in this rousing Technicolor swashbuckler set in medieval Lombardy. It’s essentially an Italianate spin on the Robin Hood story, with Lancaster playing a vengeful outlaw, Dardo Bartoli, hiding out in a Roman ruin and plotting rebellion against the dastardly Hessian count who’s captured Bartoli’s son. This being a Jacques Tourneur film, the action comes saturated in shadow and night, although this is far from a mood piece. The finale sees Bartoli’s crew posing as travelling circus performers to get into the count’s castle: cue an acrobatics display that turns into an ambush, including some fun business with a long wooden pole. Lancaster performed many of these stunts himself, leading the New York Times to note: “not since Mr Fairbanks was leaping from castle walls and vaulting over the rooftops of ancient story-book towns has the screen had such a reckless and acrobatic young man”.

– Sam Wigley

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa)

Director: Samuel Fuller

Known for his bruisingly forthright genre movies, Sam Fuller would go on to make several grander, higher budget war movies in his career. But none would ever quite match his first, The Steel Helmet, for its stark, relentless tension and bare-bones brutality. Lost from several different units in the middle of nowhere during the Korean war, Sergeant Zack (Gene Evans) and a group of his fellow American soldiers try to pull together and survive. Finding shelter for the night in an apparently abandoned lookout post, they face incessant attacks from the North Korean army.

– Chloe Walker

Fixed Bayonets (Samuel Fuller)

Director: Robert Siodmark

Two years after The Flame and the Arrow, Robert Siodmak’s The Crimson Pirate was another chance for Burt Lancaster and his acrobatic partner Nick Cravat to fly, leap and tumble across the screen and into the hearts of delighted audiences. Lancaster plays the titular bandit, who ends up fighting against British colonialists after falling in love with the daughter of the leader of a rebel group. The plot is of minimal importance here though; the movie’s narrative is just an excuse to exhibit its hero’s ebullient, graceful athleticism at every possible opportunity.

– Chloe Walker

Way of a Gaucho (Jacques Tourneur)

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Remade stylishly by William Friedkin as Sorcerer (1977), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s original masterpiece remains among the finest cinematic depictions of desperate men under pressure. French hustler Mario (Yves Montand) and three other wastrels drive trucks filled with nitroglycerin from a dead-end South American town to a burning oil derrick across dangerous terrain. The suspense is pocked with earthy set-pieces. One standout sees Mario drive over a pal stuck in a lake of oil, while another involves a 20-ton boulder being blown apart with the truck’s syphoned bounty. Ultimately a pitiless portrayal of life and death, The Wages of Fear remains the only film to have won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival and the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

– Lou Thomas

The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin)

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Few films have had a greater influence on international cinema than Seven Samurai, which drew inspiration from Hollywood westerns and was in turn remade as one in The Magnificent Seven (1960). The most expensive film to be made in Japan at that time, its budget gave Kurosawa the freedom to experiment with an innovative multi-camera technique. It lends the climactic battle in the rain its immersive quality, reminding us that the reality of warfare for samurai and peasant alike is not so much glamorous duels as a bloody struggle for survival in the mud.

– Hayley Scanlon

Godzilla (Ishiro Honda)

Director: Michael Anderson

One of the chief pleasures of the Tom Cruise action sequel Top Gun: Maverick (2022) lies in its dedication to audience orientation. By the time the big mission came around, the viewer – much like the film’s pilots – had been drilled in the lay of the land: this is the almost-impossible thing we have to do, and this is the non-existent margin of error. It was a lesson in stakes-building cribbed from The Dam Busters, which similarly spends most of its running time establishing the exactitude needed to fly low and bounce a bomb across the water that leads to a German dam. The upper lips may be stiff, but the final act is a marvel of sustained tension which only works so well because of everything that came before. The immortal theme tune is a model of triumphalism. Just don’t mention the dog.

– Matthew Thrift

The Last Frontier (Anthony Mann)

Director: Edward Dmytryk

If you can get past the casting of Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner, who were born 30 years apart, as siblings (many contemporaneous critics could not), this Cliffhanger of its day offers plenty of vertiginous thrills. After learning of a fatal plane crash in the mountains above the alpine village where they live, Chris (Wagner) persuades his reluctant older brother Zachary (Spencer Tracy) – a retired climber – to help him journey up and loot the bodies. Their trek proves even more perilous than either expected. Edward Dmytryk’s film offers resplendent VistaVision scenery, exciting climbing sequences, and a genuinely moving tale to underpin the action.

– Chloe Walker

Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (Hiroshi Inagaki)

Director: Cy Endfield

Stanley Baker’s first leading man performance for regular collaborator Cy Endfield doesn’t have the epic scope of the American exile director’s Zulu (1964), but it contains just as much knuckle-whitening tension and – like the truck Baker’s ex-convict Tom has to haul at top velocity – plenty of grit. Away from speeding trucks, there are some cracking punch-ups. A dancehall melee that Tom shies away from is mostly played for laughs, but Tom’s straight-up fist fight with bully Red (Patrick McGoohan) is necessarily vicious. A young Sean Connery watches on as a fellow trucker, doubtless making notes for his imminent supernova career shift into becoming James Bond.

– Lou Thomas

Eight Hours of Terror (Seijun Suzuki)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Bursting with colour and violence, Richard Fleischer’s historical epic brings out the elemental power of the Viking sagas it is based on. Shot by Jack Cardiff in the widescreen Technirama format, this pet project from Kirk Douglas is a tragedy of deadly rivalry, brutal customs and inescapable fate. The fight for the throne of Northumbria between Douglas’s would-be heir and Tony Curtis’s virtuous slave is set against a stunning backdrop of real locations in Norway, and culminates in a savage duel atop a high tower, the sworn enemies alone against a clear blue sky. This box-office smash led to other contemporary Viking films, such as Mario Bava’s Erik the Conqueror (1961) and Cardiff’s own The Long Ships (1964).

– Elena Lazic

The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock is so synonymous with the thriller that perhaps his influence on action cinema has been underrated. But here we are, in 1959, with a kind of template for one of the biggest action series of all: the James Bond franchise. Three years before the inaugural 007 movie, Dr. No (1962), here we have Cary Grant playing the urbane, suit-wearing, cocktail-drinking Roger O. Thornhill – not a spy but an advertising exec who is mistaken for one and chased all over America by a nefarious ring of secrets smugglers. It’s no surprise that, after North by Northwest, Grant was pursued to play Bond or that both the long train ride and cropduster attack from Hitchcock’s film would be liberally borrowed from for From Russia with Love (1963), the cropdusting plane just swapped for a helicopter. 

– Sam Wigley

Ben-Hur (William Wyler)

Director: John Sturges

John Sturges’ remake of Seven Samurai is an early attempt at adapting Japanese golden age cinema for the Old West – Sergio Leone’s unofficial reworking of Yojimbo would follow four years later. Helping set the trend for all-star-cast action flicks in which a gang of tough, semi-loveable rogues perform a mission with a moral (see The Great Escape, The Professionals, The Dirty Dozen, and so on), The Magnificent Seven sees hired gunslingers protect a Mexican village from ruthless bandits. The shootouts and sparse but witty dialogue impress, but Elmer Bernstein’s Academy Award-nominated score tremendously heightens both oater action and emotional heft, highlighting the importance of music in rousing excitement.

– David Morrison

Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick)

Director: Akira Kurosawa

In an interesting example of cross-pollination, Kurosawa’s Yojimbo draws inspiration from the American hardboiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and the films of John Ford but itself went on to help shape the spaghetti western through its unofficial remake, A Fistful of Dollars (1964). It’s certainly not your typical jidaigeki (period film), lending a note of cynical humour to the dog-eat-human-hand world its heroes inhabit. It all ends in a duel of fierce intensity amid the dusty streets between a man with a gun and a wandering samurai with no name and nothing to lose except his life.

– Hayley Scanlon

The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson)

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

“Oh no, not again,” says Saito Kageyu (Rentaro Mikuni) as “half-starved ronin” Tsugumo Hanshiro (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives seeking to commit ritual suicide in the Iyi clan’s courtyard. Saito tells Tsugumo the cautionary tale of another ronin (Akira Ishihama) who had come there earlier with similar intentions. Yet Tsugumo has his own tale to tell, and his own mixed motives – and so an exchange of stories will eventually lead to vengeful violence. In this sophisticated clash of words and swords, director Masaki Kobayashi’s postwar allegory cynically exposes and eviscerates Japan’s professed code of honour in both the 17th and 20th centuries.  

– Anton Bitel

The Tale of Zatoichi (Kenji Misumi)

Director: Seijun Suzuki

Youth of the Beast is often cited as a kind of breakthrough for Seijun Suzuki, the first film to fully inhabit his signature style of pop art aesthetics and irreverent absurdity. The pastel colours and playful sensibility lend a sense of cartoonish fun to what is otherwise quite a dark and noirish tale. It skews a little nastier than your average Nikkatsu borderless action movie, taking its cues from Yojimbo as the ice cool Jo Shishido pits one gang against another and executes a series of perfect setups with an almost childish glee.

– Hayley Scanlon

From Russia with Love (Terence Young)

Director: John Frankenheimer

John Frankenheimer’s black-and-white masterpiece stars Burt Lancaster as a French Resistance fighter doing all he can to stop a train from returning to Nazi Germany with stolen works of art. As impressive feats of sabotage meet increasingly violent and deadly opposition from the crazed Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield), a principled battle for humanity’s beauty and soul turns into a fight to the death. The unrelenting cruelty of the enemy is echoed by Lancaster’s intensely physical performance and his train’s ferocious efficiency.

– Elena Lazic

Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton)

Director: Terence Young

With over a quarter of the world’s population estimated to have seen at least one Bond movie, the series’ influence is immeasurable. But the 1960s films are still the pinnacle, with Ken Adam’s distinctive production design and ever more daring stunts and gadgets capturing the imagination. Thunderball, best known for its groundbreaking underwater scenes – roughly a quarter of the film’s action is submerged – is the epitome of the franchise’s ambitions and won an Academy Award for best visual effects. Most astonishing is the Bahamas-shot finale involving scores of divers shooting harpoons and wrestling undersea. But the shark pool scenes also make an impression, and put Sean Connery in genuine danger when one apex predator apparently got around a plexiglass partition.

– David Morrison

Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks)

Director: Sergio Leone

Oaters typically end in a duel, resolving polarised issues with a stylised confrontation. Yet despite its backdrop of that ultimate American duel, the civil war, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western breaks down simplistic binary divisions not just with characters whose motives on all sides are chiefly low and venal, but also with a focus on triangular structures. You can see it in the tripartite title, in the three corresponding characters (who in fact share, to differing degrees, all three of the title’s qualities), in the film’s status as a loose trilogy closer – and especially in the climax, a spectacular three-way Mexican stand-off.

– Anton Bitel

Come Drink with Me (King Hu)

Director: Chang Cheh

Making a star of Jimmy Wang Yu, The One Armed Swordsman is widely credited with opening up the wuxia genre to more brutal action, while leaning into how social status defines the martial world. It’s a looker too, director Chang Cheh (who would become one of the biggest names at Shaw Brothers) piecing his epic together with striking editing and lush, colourful production design. After the orphan Fang Kang (Wang Yu) loses his fighting arm (the daughter of his martial arts master throws a tantrum, but with a sword), he retreats to a farm in the countryside where he falls in love with his carer. But as another martial arts school threatens his old adoptive home, the film becomes a push and pull between the violence of a martial life and the peace that he might know outside of it.

– Kambole Campbell

Dragon Inn (King Hu)

Director: Brian G. Hutton

An impregnable Nazi fortress. A top-secret mission to rescue a downed American general. Spies and double agents everywhere. You’d be hard pressed to find a more quintessential ‘men on a mission’ film than Where Eagles Dare – based on Alistair MacLean’s best-selling novel… except maybe The Guns of Navarone (1961), a previous MacLean adaptation. This is Boy’s Own derring-do of the highest order, where Nazis are there to be booed, female agents are there to be wooed, and Clint Eastwood is able to single-handedly gun down the entire Third Reich without any help – in fact, Eastwood supposedly kills more people on screen in this film than all his other films combined.

– Timon Singh

Bullitt (Peter Yates)

Director: Sam Peckinpah

That a cinematographer as highly regarded as Roger Deakins considers The Wild Bunch his favourite film is indicative of the qualities of Sam Peckinpah’s influential western. A poignant study of violent men reaching the end of an era in the Wild West, Peckinpah’s slow-motion experiments and fast cutting inspired many. Highlights include William Holden’s gang of robbers blowing up a bridge and a train heist of unrivalled tension. The monumental bloodbath finale appalled as many critics as it impressed upon release but now seems a clear antecedent for the bullet operas of John Woo and claret-crazed stylings of Quentin Tarantino.

– Lou Thomas

Antonio das Mortes (Glauber Rocha)

Director: Ossie Davis

In 1970, actor, director and activist Ossie Davis made his directorial debut, kickstarting what would come to be known as blaxploitation a year before either Shaft or Sweet Sweetback had a chance to unholster their guns. The titular cotton isn’t a person but a bale thought to contain $87,000 in spoils from an armoured car robbery – the one that kicks off the film with a vehicular chase for the ages. Shot entirely on the streets of Harlem, and filling the screen with local residents, Davis’s eccentrically freewheeling caper flick puts race relations and community tensions centre stage, setting the template for the so-called blaxploitation subgenre.

– Matthew Thrift

Vengeance (Chang Cheh)

Director: King Hu

Having begun his career at Shaw Brothers as an actor, King Hu’s second directorial feature Come Drink with Me had helped to shape the new brand of wuxia swordplay films at the studio. With A Touch of Zen, produced after his move to Taiwan, he helped bring the genre to international prominence after the film’s screening at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. The staggering bamboo forest sequence, which inspired Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), is among the best in all of action cinema, representative of Hu’s characteristic invention and mastery of both the balletic and the brutal.

– Hayley Scanlon

Dirty Harry (Don Siegel)

Director: Chung Chang-Wha

Also known as Five Fingers of Death, King Boxer was one of the first Hong Kong martial arts films to be dubbed into English and screened internationally in mainstream cinemas. It became a huge hit in the United States, giving rise to the kung fu craze of the 1970s. Korean director Chung Chang-Wha makes fantastic use of the trampolining technique pioneered by King Hu, along with wire work and fast cuts. Its series of quite literally eye-popping action sequences helped to cement a new genre at Shaw Brothers, which had previously specialised in wuxia swordplay movies and musicals.

– Hayley Scanlon

Fist of Fury (Lo Wei)

Director: Toshiya Fujita

Lady Snowblood may have come to international prominence through the influence the film had on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003), but she’d been a cult icon long before. Who can really forget the sight of her twirling umbrella and the carnage it conceals? As played by Meiko Kaji, the intensity of Yuki’s glare proves more powerful than any sword, even as she takes on quasi-supernatural qualities. She becomes the demonic embodiment of vengeance, hellbent on cutting down the forces of corruption in a rapidly changing Japan still in the process of shaking off the feudal past.

– Hayley Scanlon

The Fate of Lee Kahn (King Hu)

Director: H.B. Halicki

So committed was director H.B. Halicki to the idea of the perfect car chase that it ended up costing him his life. Fifteen years after directing one of the greatest rubber-burners in cinema history, the stunt-driver-turned-director was killed by a dislodged telephone pole on the set of its sequel. But what a legacy he left behind. Gone in 60 Seconds stars Halicki as a car thief tasked with half-inching 48 cars. The last – a 1973 Mustang named Eleanor – sets the peerless 40-minute chase sequence in motion. It’s a film of myriad pleasures, not least Warner E. Leighton’s rhythmic editing. A film about space and speed, it’s also one of the great LA pictures, and a key text in Thom Andersen’s city symphony Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).

– Matthew Thrift

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent)

Director: Ramesh Sippy

Its proximity to the actors, swift movements and off-kilter angles all make the camera itself seem like a brawler in Sholay – one that gets knocked sideways and gets right back up again. This Hindi classic’s most celebrated action sequence is as propulsive as the train it’s set on, as one outlaw (Dharmendra) shovels coal into the locomotive furnace to speed it up, while another (Amitabh Bachchan) picks off converging bandits. But its most indelible scenes draw out time instead. In one Once upon a Time in the West-inspired stretch, a policeman’s (Sanjeev Kumar’s) family is gunned down. As the villain (Amjad Khan) approaches the sole survivor with agonising slowness and takes aim, the film cuts to a train pulling into the station, the expected sound of a shot replaced by the screech of wheels. What’s emphasised is the tragedy of the policeman, coming home to only death. For all its physical violence, Sholay’s deepest cuts were psychological. 

– Gayle Sequeira

Deewaar (Yash Chopra)

Director: John Carpenter

John Carpenter could never get the budget together to make a western, so compromised with this lean, mean $100,000 urban oater, loosely based on the plot of his idol Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), and set in contemporary Los Angeles. As a decommissioned police station comes under vicious attack from street gangs, the skeleton crew inside must join forces with two death-row convicts if they are to see the night through. This tense siege drama shows old war drums still reverberating in America’s modern civilisation, and finds morality not in institutions but in individuals doing what they have to do.  

– Anton Bitel

Man on the Roof (Bo Widerberg)

Director: John Flynn

More than a little reactionary, this Paul Schrader-penned revenge tale is all the more brutal and viciously cathartic for its trappings as a sensitive exploration of post-Nam PTSD and alienation. Its poignant portrait of a returning vet who feels out of place at home moves firmly into exploitation film territory following a vicious gang attack (by outlaws with names such as ‘Automatic Slim’ and ‘T-Bird’) that memorably involves a garbage disposal unit. Quentin Tarantino selected Rolling Thunder as one of his favourite films of all time in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll; in his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, he called it “the greatest savage, fascist, Revengeamatic flick ever made”.

– Elena Lazic

Star Wars (George Lucas)

Director: Lau Kar-leung

Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973) aside, martial arts movies don’t get more iconic than this Shaw Brothers studio classic from director Lau Kar-leung. Lau’s favourite leading man Gordon Liu plays a student determined to learn the secret techniques of the Shaolin temple, passing through a series of increasingly difficult training chambers in a bid to perfect his skills and avenge his father’s death. Beginning his career as a stuntman and choreographer before moving into directing, Lau’s fight sequences are among the most innovative in the Shaw canon. 36th Chamber is first and foremost a training movie, and the dazzlingly inventive montages which make up the first half of the film simply have to be seen to be believed.

– Matthew Thrift

The Driver (Walter Hill)

Director: Lau Kar-leung

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin director Lau Kar-leung had been one of Shaw Brothers’ key action choreographers throughout the 1960s, often working with Chang Cheh on films such as The One-Armed Swordsman. As a director in his own right, it’s with Dirty Ho that he leaves Chang’s style firmly behind. Fully embracing the comedic sensibility Lau had pioneered, the film’s intricately choreographed routines balance physical balleticism with perfectly pitched slapstick, culminating in a final showdown in which co-stars Wong Yue and Gordon Liu are so precisely in sync they seem to move almost as one.

– Hayley Scanlon

Mad Max (George Miller)

Director: Kenji Misumi and Robert Houston

As if the manga-adapted six-feature Lone Wolf and Cub series was not hyperkinetic enough, Robert Houston inventively remixed and redubbed the first two, Kenji Misumi’s Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx (both 1972), into a flab-free cavalcade of massacres and maximalism for American viewers. As the Shogun’s outlawed executioner Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama, extraordinarily intense) roams the land with his young son – and the film’s narrator – Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa), he hires out his swordman’s skills while facing assassins from all sides. The results are a bloodbath of values pitched paradoxically between conservative nostalgia and countercultural rebellion.

– Anton Bitel

Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa)

Director: Steven Spielberg

The spirit of Zorro and Buck Rogers sparked the original idea for the adventuring archaeologist. You can see the joy of those characters in what Steven Spielberg eventually ushered on to the screen. Indiana Jones is an old-fashioned action hero: gallant and brave and – thanks to Harrison Ford’s endlessly winning performance – tongue-in-cheek about his chances when facing mortal danger. This is Spielberg’s Bond, yet Indie’s not slick. The nerdy archaeology nut keeps poking through. Despite the whip and the boulder and Nazis with their faces melting off, this is action cinema for the bookish.    

– Henry Barnes

Mad Max 2 (George Miller)

Director: Walter Hill

Eddie Murphy’s wisecracking turn as convict Reggie Hammond is one of the great screen debuts – he’s equal to the verbal and physical abuse dished out by racist cop Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) and then some. Director Walter Hill fills the running time with lairy set-pieces, from the frantic opening jailbreak to Hammond’s sizzling one-man takeover of a redneck bar. Though not the very first buddy cop film (that’s arguably 1974’s Freebie and the Bean), 48 Hrs’ winning blend of high-stakes action, hard-edged comedy and the breakout performance of an important Black star set a precedent for future hits, including Lethal Weapon (1987) and Bad Boys (1995).

– Lou Thomas

First Blood (Ted Kotcheff)

Director: Ching Siu-tung

The first directorial feature from longtime action choreographer Tony Ching Siu-Tung, Duel to the Death arrived just as the classic wuxia genre was in decline – and so is unafraid to reinvent it. Breathtaking cinematography coupled with rapid cuts and crazy wire work lend the film a dazzling quality, yet it’s remembered chiefly for its nihilistic absurdity, including its strange, sand-lurking, kite-flying and occasionally explosive ninjas. But its best fight may be that fought in the town square by the coolheaded heroine, with a pitch-perfect setup of two obnoxious Japanese samurai who soon fall victim to her sword.

– Hayley Scanlon

Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (Tsui Hark)

Director: Lau Kar-leung

Lau Kar-Leung’s The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter – a Shaw Brothers spin on the folklore of The Generals of the Yang Family – balances dynamic, large-scale battles and political intrigue. Yang Wu-lang (the legendary Gordon Liu) is one of a general’s six sons, who retreats to a Buddhist monastery after his brothers are betrayed and slaughtered in the film’s opening carnage. But the titular pole fighter is a volatile man, who struggles between the requirements of his new life and the memories he carries with him from what the head of the monastery calls the “material world”. The depth of his grief suits a bloody response, which is ultimately unleashed in brutal, teeth-shattering action. 

– Kambole Campbell

The Terminator (James Cameron)

Director: Jackie Chan

For too long the Hong Kong film industry had been inundated by period dramas or wuxia fantasies. After a miserable experience in America making The Protector (1985), Jackie Chan aimed to change all that with a hard-hitting, groundbreaking contemporary action film that he would not only star in but also direct – Police Story. From its shanty town-destroying opening car-chase to its limb-shattering finale in a shopping centre – which saw the film get dubbed ‘Glass Story’ by the stunt team due to the amount of panes they were all kicked through – the film has inspired countless imitators over the decades, but Police Story is in a class all its own.

– Timon Singh

Ran (Akira Kurosawa)

Director: James Cameron

Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) was an extremely effective merger of sci-fi and horror, relocating a slasher cum haunted house movie to outer space. The genius of James Cameron’s sequel was to take all the elements now familiar from the original but to reconfigure them as action. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) agrees to join a search-and-destroy mission, this time surrounded not by unarmed workers but by macho, posturing Marines. Now taking out the aliens with a big gun and industrial mecha suit, she proves herself one tough mother, while facing off against another in the form of a giant, egg-laying xenomorph queen.

– Anton Bitel

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo)

Director: Paul Verhoeven

A Paul Verheoven social satire stuffed into the confines of an 80s action romp. Peter Weller plays hero cop Alex Murphy, killed in the opening minutes so that the Detroit Police Department (a subsidiary of nefarious mega-corp Omni Consumer Products) can pack his corpse into a metal suit and reanimate him as the RoboCop. The film’s portrayal of capitalism – people as products, ethic-less use of AI – was prescient and picked up later by directors including Alex Garland. RoboCop’s political intensity was matched by its hyper-violent action scenes. The pursuit of justice rarely looked so grim.

– Henry Barnes

Eastern Condors (Sammo Hung)

Director: John McTiernan

What more is there to say about the film that catapulted then sitcom guy Bruce Willis into big-screen action stardom, made Alan Rickman the greatest movie villain of the decade, and spawned cinema’s most profane, most beloved catchphrase? Die Hard has become very much the platonic ideal of an action movie, so it’s almost a surprise to go back and watch it again and realise it’s at heart simply the story of a wise-cracking, grouchy man with sore feet having a really, really bad night. There’s a reason it’s struck a chord with so many, for so long.

– Chloe Walker

Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo)

Director: John Woo

John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) may have ignited the Heroic Bloodshed genre, but Woo brings it to its apotheosis in the superlative hitman melodrama The Killer, in which an earnest assassin and hotheaded cop realise they are each bound by their adherence to a code now incompatible with the realities of the contemporary city. The blistering final shootout at a disused church features Woo’s first use of his signature doves amid the hail of bullets, but it’s the melancholy strains of Sally Yeh’s aching theme song that linger long after the final shot has been fired.

– Hayley Scanlon

Violent Cop (Takeshi Kitano)

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Arnold Schwarzenegger would have a bomb on his hands in the summer of 1993 with Last Action Hero, a film that took broad swipes at the blockbuster culture with which the Austrian Oak was synonymous. It went largely unnoticed at the time that, three summers earlier, Paul Verhoeven had got there first, putting the lunk through all manner of image-undermining humiliations with Total Recall. And what is Rekall Inc – the film’s dream-weaving corporation that purports to send Schwarzenegger on holiday to Mars in memory only – but a proxy of the cinemagoing experience? Verhoeven’s film, the most expensive blockbuster of its day, is a satirical thrill-ride like no other: a sly backhand against passive consumption made all the more hilarious if we read Arnie’s construction worker as brain-fried and comatose from about 20 minutes in.

– Matthew Thrift

Bullet in the Head (John Woo)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Surfing broke all over the cool kids in the 1990s. Weezer wrote a song about its anti-capitalist stance, while even inland indie kids spent hundreds on beach-based clothing brands. Kathryn Bigelow’s action-thriller never really caught the wave on release, but has become a cult classic. Keanu Reeves is Johnny Utah, an LA cop who swaps badge for board in order to infiltrate a gang of – get this! – surfing-obsessed bank robbers. Patrick Swayze is on the opposite side of the dime as Bodhi, the spiritual bro with a ruthless streak. Swayze performed much of the film’s heart-in-mouth sky-diving sequences himself. An insurer’s nightmare. An action fan’s dream. 

– Henry Barnes

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron)

Director: John Woo

“Give the guy a gun and he’s Superman – give him two, and he’s God!” These words summarise the signature aesthetic all at once of Hong Kong’s Heroic Bloodshed films, of the director John Woo, and of the actor Chow Yun-fat who had, since Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, been the genre’s poster boy. Here, Chow’s Inspector ‘Tequila’ teams up with undercover cop Alan (Tony Leung) to bring down armies of gangsters, deploying the pistols in their hands in much the same stylised manner that heroes from earlier local films used swords. Later, surreally, Tequila will tote a baby alongside his shotgun.

– Anton Bitel

The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann)

Director: Corey Yuen

Jet Li is best known for playing the stoic folk hero Wong Fei-hung in the popular Once upon a Time in China (1991 to 1997) series, but The Legend allowed him to play up a more light-hearted side, playing the mischievous kung-fu-gifted scamp Fong Sai Yuk. Directed with skill and lightness by the late, great Corey Yuen – who came out of the same opera school as the likes of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao – and with a proto-feminist subplot involving Fong’s mother (who is an even more skilled fighter than he is), The Legend is a Hong Kong classic that has fallen under the radar of most.

– Timon Singh

Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano)

Director: Lau Kar-leung

The second Drunken Master expands from the funny, athletic self-improvement of the 1978 original, seeing the mischievous Wong Fei-hung (Jackie Chan) – now a master of the unpredictable, arrhythmic ‘drunken boxing’ martial arts – taking on the responsibility for both his house and a nation’s history as he hunts down men selling artefacts to British colonialists. The scale of the stunts has grown too, finding a halfway point between the traditional stylings of director Lau Kar-leung (taking over from the first film’s director, Yuen Woo-ping) and the big stunt-focused work Chan had become known for. The climactic set piece in a factory serves as a perfect example of that chemistry (despite stories about on-set friction) – combining one of Chan’s wildest stunts with one of the very best fights of his entire career.

– Kambole Campbell

Speed (Jan de Bont)

Director: Michael Mann

Michael Mann’s soulful cops ‘n’ robbers epic contains the debut on-screen pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, but that’s not even the best thing about it. Instead, it’s the extraordinary Downtown Los Angeles gunfight in which De Niro’s crew of hardened bank robbers trade bullets with Pacino’s team of stalwart detectives. Kicking off outside the Citigroup Center – now FourFortyFour South Flower – in Bunker Hill, the deafening action spills into adjacent streets with both sides suffering heart-breaking casualties. Cast members were trained for three months by former SAS sergeant Andy McNab to make their automatic weapon use look like the real thing. The results set a standard for cinematic gunfights which hasn’t been beaten since.

– Lou Thomas

The Blade (Tsui Hark)

Director: Brian De Palma

The beginning of a fascinating franchise, each film a style showcase for the director who chose to accept it. Brian De Palma’s opener has Tom Cruise playing IMF agent Ethan Hunt, framed for the murder of his team and on the run from his own agency. Packed with quotable lines and pinging between set pieces (The exploding fish tank! The vault heist! A helicopter in the Channel Tunnel!), Mission Impossible is still more pacy and compelling than a 90s film based on a 60s franchise has any right to be. 

– Henry Barnes

The Rock (Michael Bay)

Director: John Woo

In John Woo’s Face/Off – which fuses the balletic grace of bodies in motion with the violence of gunfights in his signature ‘gun fu’ style – the unhinged intensity of the actors’ performances and outlandish absurdity of its plot is matched only by the relentless excess of its action. Nicolas Cage leaps through the air no less than four times. His and John Travolta’s first, well, face off, pits a speeding jeep against a taxiing jet. The climactic speedboat chase includes the sight of Cage skiing. Woo heightens the brutality by contrasting it against innocence and peace. During a SWAT team raid, ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ plays over a child’s headphones, an attempt to mask the gunfire. By the end, a five-way Mexican standoff takes place, where else but inside a church, a house of prayer, with white doves, the symbol of peace, fluttering around. 

– Gayle Sequeira

Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven)

Director: Tsui Hark

Having passed his early-90s theatrical peak, Jean-Claude Van Damme was heading straight to video when he tapped Hong Kong genre polymath Tsui Hark and compatriot Ringo Lam for a handful of features in a bid to ride the Heroic Bloodshed wave and replicate the success of John Woo’s Hard Target (1993). Knock Off is the best of a berserk bunch, with JCVD starring as a fashion designer in Hong Kong on the eve of the ’97 takeover, embroiled in a plot by Paul Sorvino to embed tiny bombs in pairs of fake jeans, export them to the US and blow them all up. Tsui directs with delirious abandon, unperturbed by physical or gravitational restrictions when it comes to camera placement. The shoe-cam alone is an insane wonder, and while the sight of the Belgian bruiser being slapped on the bum with an eel in a rickshaw race with Rob Schneider brings easy laughs, the joke’s on the viewer who misses how tightly Tsui cuts it all together.

– Matthew Thrift

Enemy of the State (Tony Scott)

Director: Lana and Lilly Wachowski

Whoa. Philosophy, the internet, video games, gender, religion, capitalism and folklore. There weren’t many topics that the Wachowski siblings didn’t draw on to write The Matrix, or that were left untouched by its seismic impact. As an action film, it’s almost genre-defining: blending Hong Kong-inspired fight choreography with breathtaking CGI. And, in Keanu, they had the perfect avatar – vulnerable, relatable, blank. A beautiful canvas ready for our power fantasies to make their mark.

– Henry Barnes

The Mission (Johnnie To)

Director: Ang Lee

Ang Lee’s world-famous wuxia film tells of lovers kept apart by the societal roles they are expected to fulfill. The legendary swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) and warrior Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) repress feelings for each other out of duty, while the daughter of nobility Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) pines for the bandit Lo (Chang Chen). From the very first floating, wire-enhanced jump, the choreography – courtesy of Yuen Woo-ping, who at this point was also in demand in the west for films like The Matrix – is captivating. Each hard-hitting, emotionally fraught battle incorporates a variety of weapons, all players fighting with a sense of professional control slowly slipping as repressed emotion breaks free. Its beautiful action expresses how, for Crouching Tiger’s characters, propriety has become a prison for the desires of the heart.

– Kambole Campbell

Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku) 

Director: Stephen Chow

What makes Stephen Chow’s madcap action comedy so funny is its application of martial arts to decidedly non-martial activities. No longer able to find any pupils for his skills, indigent Shaolin kung fu master Sing (Chow) forms a soccer team with his Shaolin brothers in the hope of popularising their discipline, even as Sing’s love interest Mui (Zhao Wei) uses her tai chi powers to make Chinese steamed buns, and eventually to be a goalie, and even a champion bowler. Using copious wire-fu and CGI to create gravity-defying effects, this has little interest in real-world physics or indeed the offside rule.

– Anton Bitel

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson)

Director: Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou was already working on his own wuxia project at the time Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was released, but almost shelved it, fearing people would assume he was merely taking advantage of the success of Ang Lee’s film. Nevertheless, Hero became a cornerstone of the wuxia revival of the early 2000s, famed for its bold use of colour and breathtaking cinematography, not to mention a series of balletic action sequences such as the confrontation between martial arts stars Jet Li and Donnie Yen. The casting of In the Mood for Love’s Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as divided lovers, meanwhile, deepens the sense of romantic tragedy.

– Hayley Scanlon

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook)

Director: Michael Bay

With a budget over $100 million higher than its predecessor, this spectacularly nihilistic concoction is to date the most expensive in Michael Bay’s action-comedy franchise. It is also the most tasteless, pushing the boundaries of what Hollywood considered comic to more disturbing reaches, since explored and expanded by the likes of The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017). The skill and care put into the action set pieces, however, remains undeniable. The scene where Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s 4x4 rolls down a hill and bursts through the houses of a shantytown is lifted wholesale from Jackie Chan’s 1985 action classic Police Story, but the Haitian bullet symphony is pure Bayhem. 

– Elena Lazic

Oldboy (Park Chan-wook)

Director: Paul Greengrass

Extreme ways are here again in this sequel to Doug Liman’s franchise-starter The Bourne Identity (2002). Paul Greengrass’s shaky, multi-camera visual style expertly uses close-ups and quick-pans to rack up the tension and keep the viewer attentive. Running on adrenaline and stress alone, Matt Damon’s Bourne is the living manifestation not of destiny (that’s Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt) but of a world that was then just getting used to ever faster movements of people and information. “Although they’re mainstream commercial Saturday-night popcorn movies,” Greengrass said of the Bourne films, “there’s something about the story and character that enables you to get to the paranoia that drives the world today and express it in a mainstream way.” Twenty years later, we know he wasn’t wrong.

– Elena Lazic 

Throw Down (Johnnie To)

Director: George Lucas

We may not have reached the point of wholesale cultural reclamation, but time has certainly been kind to George Lucas’s much-maligned prequel trilogy. Some viewers might never be able to get over the adolescent humour and ripe dialogue which plagues the films, but to other eyes Lucas proves himself a directorial force to be reckoned with. The opening and closing set pieces of Episode III are all the evidence you need in any argument for Lucas’s place in the canon: the former constructed hand-in-hand with pal Steven Spielberg, the sturm und drang of the latter a potent expressionistic nightmare that’s all Lucas – Wagnerian in its staging, incisive in its political clarity, and devastating in its emotional force.

– Matthew Thrift

Domino (Tony Scott)

Director: Michael Mann

Mission: Impossible excepted, big-screen revamps of cult TV series generally disappoint, so it makes some sense why Michael Mann’s big-budget retooling of his archetypal 1980s crime show was coolly received on arrival in 2006. Mann showed little interest in reviving the formula as was, instead ditching pastels for pixels in an abstracted action thriller that revels in its gauzy, digitally shot nightscapes, its illicit atmospheres and in arcane dialogue that’s frequently inaudible above the ambient hum of urban Miami. In the opening seconds Mann throws us straight into the action of a nightclub sting operation and from then on dares us to keep up, as Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) investigate a Colombian drug smuggling operation using go-fast boats to import narcotics via the Caribbean. 

– Sam Wigley

Deja Vu (Tony Scott)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

The two halves of Death Proof each conclude with a superb car sequence: one a crash, the other a chase; one at night, the other at daytime; one sickening, the other supremely satisfying. When psychopathic stuntman (Kurt Russell) first rams into a car full of women, Quentin Tarantino draws out the moment, replaying the head-on collision from each victim’s point of view, tracking severed limbs and smashed faces. The second action sequence elicits the same dread by cutting between Russell’s foot on the accelerator, Tracie Thoms’ panicked eyes in the rearview mirror and Zoë Bell’s flailing body as the group is attacked. Gradually, however, the roles of cat and mouse are reversed, expressions of terror and triumph swapped. The titular car may be death proof, but its scarred driver isn’t impervious to a savage beatdown.

– Gayle Sequeira

The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass)

Director: Lana and Lilly Wachowski

Lilly and Lana Wachowski revolutionised western action filmmaking with The Matrix, and they did it again with Speed Racer, only with fewer imitators this time. Adapting the 1966 manga, it follows the titular driver as his underdog, family-run auto-repair shop goes up against an underhanded conglomerate. The Matrix was heavily inspired by contemporary cyberpunk anime such as Ghost in the Shell (1995), but Speed Racer sees the directors leaning more into the language of paintings and 2D animation in pursuit of an impressionistic, distinctly digital filmmaking aesthetic. The result is electrifying and even hypnotic, as cars spin and careen across racetracks of almost overstimulating colour.

– Kambole Campbell

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)

Director: James Cameron

If history has taught us one thing, it’s that it’s never a good idea to bet against James Cameron. The same pre-emptive schadenfreude that greeted Titanic (1997) was unleashed tenfold on Avatar, a film that still holds its record as the highest grossing of all time. Needless to say, JC knows what he’s doing, recalibrating archetypes for an old-fashioned epic that hits the bullseye of what studio nabobs refer to as ‘four-quadrant appeal’. Avatar may operate as a series of grand gestures, but Cameron knows the devil is in the detail. You only need look at the film’s final set piece – a virtuosic sky battle of staggering complexity and character-driven escalation – to see a master of world-building, rhythm and action-staging at work.

– Matthew Thrift

Crank: High Voltage (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor)

Director: Nabwana I.G.G.

In this brainchild of one-time brickmaker Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana, a nano-budget is offset by maximalist ambitions, combining the sensibilities of Hong Kong kung fu (the hero is a Shaolin martial artist named Bruce) and American 80s action flicks with home-made CGI, cheap props, explosively bloody squibs and hilarious live commentary. This – or more specifically its viral YouTube trailer – is what put on the international map Ramon Film Productions (‘Wakaliwood’), Uganda’s cottage action-movie industry born from the capital Kampala’s slum suburb Wakaliga. The titular mystery may never be resolved, but the body count is very high in this military-vs-mafia massacre.

– Anton Bitel

Unstoppable (Tony Scott)

Director: Gareth Evans

Pitting cops against criminals in a locked-down 15-storey tenement, this Indonesian action movie (showcasing local martial art pencak silat) was improbably written and directed by Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans, and is one of the very finest – and tautest – action films ever made. Perhaps it is the Aristotelian unity of time and place, perhaps it is the immense talents of actors/fight choreographers Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, or perhaps it is the bone-snapping intensity of the action, but this ascends fast to a genre peak that only Pete Travis’s Dredd (2012), uncannily in production at the same time, also reaches.

– Anton Bitel

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh)

Director: Johnnie To

Best known to international audiences as a Hong Kong crime auteur, Johnnie To’s gangster films often share the balletic camerawork and sense of cosmic irony that mark his romantic comedies. Drug War, To’s first action film to be fully shot on the mainland, is also deeply ironic, especially in its grim ending, but sees him exchange woozy romanticism for breakneck procedural. It culminates in a 20-minute shootout outside a primary school during which the embattled antihero shoots cop and gangster alike in a desperate, if ultimately futile, bid for escape from state control.

– Hayley Scanlon

Resident Evil Retribution (Paul W.S. Anderson)

Director: Wong Kar Wai

Telling the life story of legendary martial arts master Ip Man (Tony Leung), whose most famous student was Bruce Lee, Wong Kar Wai’s beautiful biopic incorporates decades of Chinese history into its epic narrative. The fight scenes play like ballet, with the bout between Leung and frequent co-star Zhang Ziyi particularly ravishing. Released almost 10 years after the project was originally announced, and having had to survive a whole tranche of obstacles along the way – such as star Tony Leung breaking his arm twice during the production, and Harvey Weinstein’s brutal American cut – The Grandmaster is a paean to persistence that is committed to practicing what it preaches. 

– Chloe Walker

A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke)

Director: Chad Stahelski

Keanu again. This time he’s a hitman on the warpath after ‘They’ killed his dog. Directed by Reeves’ Matrix stunt double, Chad Stahelski, John Wick’s action sequences – often shot in long single takes – are brutal and graceful, a balletic blend of rolls, gougings, fractures and head shots, heavily inspired by John Woo’s ‘gun-fu’ style. When not killing people John enjoys a catch-up with his mentor/handler Winston, the manager of a hotel that acts as the New York branch for – what else? – an international society of hit people with their own money, politics and rules of engagement. And just as all of that gets a little hard to stomach, John decides it’s time to start shooting people again. Glorious.

– Henry Barnes

Non-Stop (Jaume Collet-Serra)

Director: George Miller

George Miller’s belated addition to his Mad Max trilogy (1979, 1981, 1985) not only recasts Tom Hardy in Mel Gibson’s role but slyly sidelines Max Rockatansky to passenger status. He’s now a mere ally to new character, the one-armed Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who is very much in the driving seat for a future that might just bring an end to the prevailing patriarchy. Essentially one extended chase sequence, Mad Max: Fury Road is endless barrelling spectacle and zany visual invention – a mad, maximalist ride down the road and back again against impossible odds, with its strong feminist theme evolving naturally from the preceding films.

– Anton Bitel

The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Director: Yeon Sang-ho

Fast zombies had been done to death in the new millennium, but Yeon Sang-ho upped the ante by placing them aboard a runaway passenger train. This barrelling live-action companion piece to his animated apocalypse Seoul Station (2016) has workaholic fund manager Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) quickly resetting his priorities as he struggles to keep his estranged young daughter (Kim Su-an) safe. Meanwhile, the beleaguered express locomotive becomes the vehicle for class allegory, as Korea’s entitled élites prove as dangerous as the infected undead to proletarian passengers. It barrels along at a furious pace, while finding unexpected pathos at its final destination.

– Anton Bitel

Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno)

Director: S.S. Rajamouli

S.S. Rajamouli’s thunderous two-part Baahubali saga ranks among the most eye-popping action spectacles of the CGI era. Set in the ancient Indian kingdom of Mahishmati, it’s conceived on a scale that might make Peter Jackson baulk, immersing us in a glittering world of palaces, princesses and warriors fighting tyrannical wrongs. Rajamouli embraces the hyperreal potential in his digital toolbox, amping up each moment of Herculean action in ways that seem to bend space and time. Fans of John Woo or George Miller really need to see this. Yet for all the overwhelming maximalism, it’s Rajamouli’s ability to keep sight of the storytelling that really impresses. Small wonder this second part is the highest grossing film in India ever.

– Sam Wigley

Only the Brave (Joseph Kosinski)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

By 2018, a franchise that began with Tom Cruise dangling from the ceiling of a Langley vault was dangling him off a 1,981-foot-high cliff, illustrating how Mission Impossible’s stunts have only gotten bigger, bolder and more bonkers. Christopher McQuarrie is adept at blending the highs of spectacle with the stakes to ground them – for every visceral thrill of Cruise weaving through the dizzying danger of Paris traffic, the film mines tension from his bike stalling, crucial seconds of his getaway attempt lost. Fallout’s most memorable action scene is just pure fun, beginning in the confines of a bathroom stall before spilling out. You know what comes next – Henry Cavill reloads his arms, and a million memes are fired off.

– Gayle Sequeira

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman)

Director: Ang Lee

Released the same year as Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which similarly used de-ageing technology to bring about a younger incarnation of its leading actor, Ang Lee’s Gemini Man channelled incessant online chatter about the impending death of the movie star into a magnificent action extravaganza about technological obsolescence. Will Smith plays a hit man squaring off against his own clone – a smarter, faster, younger version of himself – created using the very technology that countless opinion pieces argued was a warning sign for past-their-prime stars everywhere. The tech wasn’t up to snuff, most argued, but it was only a question of time. Nonetheless, Ang Lee delivers a jaw-dropping marriage of form and content, captured using the same high-frame rates he’d adopted for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk three years earlier. The motorcycle chase is a knockout, and if your telly can handle 60fps, the 4K disc is one of the best on the market.

– Matthew Thrift

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (Chad Stahelski)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Orson Welles’ assertion that a movie in production is the biggest train set a boy could have is routinely borne out by Christopher Nolan films, in which planes are wrecked with giddy glee. This continues in Tenet, with the characters ramming a 747 aircraft into an airport, the intentionally ungraceful manoeuvre offset by the elegance of what follows. The Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson) trade a frenetic flurry of kicks and punches with two masked assailants, the precise choreography rendered even more inventive when it’s revealed they’re fighting their future selves, who then perform the same sequence in reverse later in the film. As the combatants move in sync with each other, they’re also dancing through time: backwards and forwards at once. Being at war with yourself has never looked this slick. 

– Gayle Sequeira

Underwater (William Eubank)

Director: Hideaki Anno

The fourth entry in the Rebuild of Evangelion series continues Hideaki Anno’s fascinating approach to remaking his own material: it’s in direct conversation with the Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 to 1996) series that came before it, but veers off into a new story entirely. At first, the mech action takes a back seat to character-focused drama in a quiet, pastoral and post-apocalyptic community. But then it doesn’t, as fights between giant robots mix traditional 2D drawn animation with careening 3D computer work. Later, the fourth wall is broken, in a sense, by hosting a mech battle on a hand-drawn soundstage à la the traditional tokusatsu shows that Anno grew up adoring. In true Evangelion fashion, it spins its loving homages and sometimes convoluted science fiction into a meta dialogue with the rest of the series, including how it has changed in the eyes of its author, and his shifting identification with its characters.

– Kambole Campbell

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Zack Snyder)

Director: S.S. Rajamouli

After his record-breaking Baahubali films, the Indian film industry was S.S. Rajamouli’s for the taking. Little did he know that his pan-Indian action extravaganza would break not only more Indian box office records – including highest opening day gross – but also international ones, as RRR became a global phenomenon that won an Oscar for best song (‘Naatu Naatu’) and made people rethink their preconceptions of Indian cinema. While Western cinema these days might undercut their heroes with a certain level of snark and side-eye, Rajamouli had no such interest in doing so with his leads Ram Charan and N. T. Rama Rao Jr who – amid their earnest friendship and loyalty for each other – all but tear apart the British Empire with their bare hands.

– Timon Singh

Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski)

Director: Siddharth Anand

The ease with which secret agent Pathaan (Shah Rukh Khan) rolls with the punches in the first of this film’s many action scenes is rendered even more gratifying when contextualised by just how much the actor had been beaten down off screen. Pathaan was released five years after Khan’s last movie and after he’d become a target of the country’s right-wing government, making it not just the story of a spy returning from exile but that of an Indian superstar returning to our screens. The action-hero fantasy is burnished by its actor’s lived reality. Bloodied, bruised and bound, Pathaan sums up Khan’s triumphant comeback in just two words: “Zinda hai (Still alive).” No amount of CGI-enhanced spectacle can match the sheer delight of watching real star power in action.

– Gayle Sequeira

Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)

Director: George Miller

OK, so 2024 is not yet done, but it’s impossible to imagine another action movie coming along to overtake the road-hogging juggernaut of pure cinema that is Furiosa. Coming nine years after George Miller refitted his Mad Max franchise with hyperreal CGI and non-stop desert-chase momentum for Fury Road, this rampaging prequel moves Max to one side in order to sit young rebel Furiosa (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy) in the driving seat. Her origin story sees her being snatched as a girl by a biker gang and getting caught up in a deadly turf war between rival warlords, including Chris Hemsworth’s aptly named Dementus. Segmented into chapters and covering much more apocalyptic terrain, from Gastown to the Bullet Farm, Furiosa risked losing some of Fury Road’s fiery thrust. Instead, Miller handles the broader scope with aplomb: Furiosa leaves most competitors choking on its exhaust.

– Sam Wigley

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (Soi Cheang)

Art of Action plays in cinemas across the UK and online on BFI Player from October to December 2024.