NEARLY four decades after his death, Bruce Lee remains one of the most potent symbols of Hong Kong cinema's golden age. The original crossover martial artist, a local child star turned celebrated creator of Jeet Kune Do, the art of the intercepting fist, Lee made only a handful of films after his international breakthrough. (He died in 1973 at the...
Two well-known names in the world of independent and international film releasing have joined forces, forming a single company that its principals said would make them ''the biggest of the little guys.'' On Wednesday, Kino International, which has helped introduce American audiences to foreign filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai and Michael Haneke, and...

TEN years ago the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai went to retrieve original negatives of one of his early films from a lab going bust. He was startled to find reels of that martial-arts film, ''Ashes of Time,'' made only four years earlier, already disintegrating. It was a rueful coincidence for an auteur whose work (''In the Mood for Love,''...