A ★★★½ review of Buddha's Palm (1982)

The Phantasmagoria of the Jianghu The year 1982 marks a definitive rupture in the historiography of Hong Kong cinema, a moment captured with hallucinatory clarity in Taylor Wong’s "Buddha’s Palm". Situated at the twilight of the Shaw Brothers’ hegemony, the film functions less as a continuation of the Wuxia tradition and more as its psychedelic tombstone. Through a rigorous examination of its visual language and choreographic structure, it becomes evident that "Buddha’s Palm" represents the moment the genre abandoned the dialectics of physical labor in favor of the technological sublime. It is a work where the human body—previously the central