Peking Opera Blues

You need a fairly thorough-going grasp of the political and factional fall out from China's 1911 revolution to make sense of the plot (in which two undercover revolutionaries set out to foil warlord Yuan Shikai's plan to expand his territory), not to mention a working knowledge of traditional Peking Opera. Happily, the plot doesn't matter. The film is a speed-crazed riff on what happens when a spy melodrama meets a backstage comedy: Feydeau with blood at 150 beats per minute. Everyone in it is sparky (especially Brigitte Lin, in male drag for the first time), and most of the gags are pretty funny. But Tsui's kinetic dazzle is the main thing.