Directed by the man who coordinated the fight sequences in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Yuen Wo Ping, Iron Monkey (1993) is centered around a kind doctor (Yu Ruang-Guang), his beautiful assistant (Jean Wang), and a corrupt libertarian (James Wong) who governs a provincial city on the outskirts of a great civilization. Like Bruce Wayne, the doctor has another identity: He is a kung fu master, who steals from the rich and gives to the poor.

Yes, it's "an Asian Robin Hood," as so many critics have eagerly pointed out. But it's also an "Asian Western" with a heady dose of the Russian provincial comedy, made world-famous by Nikolai Gogol's play The Inspector General. Iron Monkey is a Western in the sense that it's set in a small, mid-19th-century city that exists outside the control and order of a federal authority, and so only physically powerful individuals administer justice and protect the weak. It's a Russian provincial comedy in the sense that the local government is corrupt, crude, and fatuous.

Invariably described as an exercise in pure cinema because of its commitment to the visual music of human movement, what really makes Iron Monkey fascinating are the rooftop scenes that happen at night. As a Westerner and one who doesn't watch kung fu films religiously, it strikes me as strange that roofs can be the stage for so much drama and action. I first noticed this rooftop theme in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and then realized that it was also in The Matrix. Indeed, American cinema rarely notices roofs, or at least regular roofs. Spectacular roofs exist, such as the one at the end of Blade Runner, but not the ordinary roofs we find in the opening of the Asian-influenced The Matrix.

Nothing comes close to the beauty of eating/romancing/fighting/running from rooftop to rooftop above a sleeping city; it's as if the kung fu masters were specters of a collective dream rising up from a thousand bedrooms.