So after the disappointment that was "The Grandmaster", I needed a good Donnie Yen flick to cleanse the palette. And I settled on "Wǔ xiá" (Dragon), a 2011 movie that is equal parts film noir as it is actually a martial arts film.
The gist of the plot is its 1917 in China and two bandits rock into town and try to rob the general store only for a local paper miller to try to stop them and accidentally kills them in the struggle. The man is praised as a local hero by the police and townspeople and everything goes well, until upcoming detective Xu Baijiu arrives an pulls a BBC Sherlock and realises that there's more to this situation than meets the eye and it all ties back to a dark conspiracy ten years ago...
So yeah, a really good film - very few fights compared to your standard Donnie Yen flick but they really up the stakes in each one so they hold much more weight individually. Very gory and surprisingly dark with a lot of emotional scenes, I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a more non-standard Chinese MA film of recent years.