Ever since John Woo revolutionized the action film with his 1986 triumph "A Better Tomorrow," critics have described his "gun-fu" choreography as balletic. It turned out this is precisely how Woo wanted his bullet-whizzing sequences to be viewed. A huge fan of musicals, Woo stages these squib-popping set pieces as if he's directing Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, or Cyd Charisse. They're invigorating bursts of elegant brutality that'll leave you gasping in delight, so long as you can stomach the gratuitous bloodshed.

I've always had a very strong stomach (with a few extreme exceptions), so I've never been bothered by the unremitting violence in Woo's movies. They're so hyper-stylized that, even though the movies generally have a real-world aesthetic (this changed when he got to

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