Chocolate

Martial arts experts come with myriad afflictions. They can be blind, alcoholic, one-armed, American or, as we learned earlier this year, pandas. But ‘Chocolate’ presents us with an all-new breed of kung-fu star: Zen is a skinny 15-year-old from a single-parent family with a sweet tooth and a fierce temper. Oh, and she’s autistic.

Prachya Pinkaew’s breakthrough movie, ‘Ong-Bak’, prided itself on bone-crunching realism, and here he presents a more thoughtful, socially conscious riff on the same techniques. Twenty-two-year-old Jeeja Yanin is simply astonishing as Zen, a whirlwind of fists and feet: the film’s closing outtakes sequence details the real damage she did to her co-stars.

The heart of the film may be its action sequences but, even outside the battle arena, ‘Chocolate’ is a nicely characterised and consistently likeable piece of work. Audiences eager to see a disabled teenager wreak bloody revenge on a gang of transvestite supercriminals need look no further.