Critic Robert Daniels spotlights five action films to stream this month

Robert Daniels highlights five action films to stream this month, ranging from classical swordplay to a World War II tank drama and a rough revenge western. Daniels recommends Pengfei Qin’s Blade of Fury, about Pei Xing, a.k.a. the Jackal (Ashton Chen), a drunken bounty hunter who, while tracking bandits he thinks stole imperial jewels, finds a courtesan’s hidden newborn heir and must protect the child from multiple pursuers including Lord Guo (Pema Jyad) and former comrades; Daniels calls it a classical swordplay film that shifts from steady compositions to wide framing and hand-held movement as the stakes grow.

He also discusses Josh C. Waller’s Lone Samurai, split into two parts, which follows Riku (Shogen), a 13th-century samurai who washes ashore on a remote island, moves from meditative resignation to brutal fighting after being taken prisoner, and stages a climactic battle that Daniels describes as spellbindingly poetic.

Dennis Gansel’s The Tank is presented as a hellish 1943 Eastern Front tale about a German panzer crew led by Lieutenant Philip Gerkens (David Schütter) sent to retrieve Officer Paul von Hardenburg (Tilman Strauss); Daniels notes the film mixes soldierly camaraderie and moral conflict as the five-person crew faces minefields, underwater tank dives and confrontations with Soviet forces, culminating in a nightmarish reveal.

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Culture, Robert Daniels, Lone Samurai, The Tank, Mexico City