FOR A LONG TIME, action films, like convenience stores and software, were one of the things America did better than anybody else. But during the late eighties, serious action film fetishists starting talking about a place that was actually producing better movies than the U.S.: Hong Kong. By now, everyone has heard that as Hollywood became increasingly mired in predictable plots and sequel-mania, Hong Kong action films were establishing a cult following in the U.S. Their films were faster, gorier, more stylish; their stars were cooler. They featured delirious flights of fantasy, where heroes flew and villains were male and female simultaneously. You could watch them and see echoes of French New Wave films, kung fu films, film noir, and a potpourri of other influences instead of just the last Hollywood buddy film to make it big. And of all the dazzling Hong Kong directors, none were as virtuosic as Tsui Hark.

By 1997, however, with the Asian economic collapse, waves of film piracy, and an impending takeover by the communist mainland, the city that had once boasted the third largest film industry in the world, producing up to two hundred and thirty films a year, suddenly became a ghost town. It looked like a mass exodus. Actors like Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan, and Michelle Yeoh left for Hollywood; so did directors like John Woo, Ringo Lam, Stanley Tong, and Hark himself. In what seems like a cruel twist of fate, most of them wound up spending their time making films with Jean Claude Van Damme, a notorious (and notoriously unreasonable) control freak. Even the most die-hard Hong Kong action fans felt like all they could do was sift through the rubble, looking for something like the glory days of old.

But the Hong Kong movie industry is springing to life again, bullet-riddled maybe, but stronger than ever. For aficionados, this boils down to one thing: Director/producer Tsui Hark is back where he belongs, behind the camera making blood-drenched, hyper-kinetic films. His latest, Time and Tide won this year's Best Picture award in Hong Kong. It follows the converging and colliding paths of a former mercenary (played by Taiwanese pop star Wu Bai), his pregnant wife (another pop star, Candy Lo), a would-be bodyguard armed only with a plastic gun, and an army of guys with more serious firepower. But in a moment when both speed and slow-mo are everywhere, and the prospect of watching one more shootout or another fireball rolling down yet another corridor with yet another hero running in front of it causes something like physical pain, Time and Tide feels startlingly fresh. One reason for this may be the sheer speed of the film; it's breathtakingly fast, a stylish mix of whip-pans, blurred scenery, and jump cuts. Another may be that, in many ways, it looks more like one of Wong Kar-wai's films than an actioner: Even the big set pieces are a mix of intimate handheld camera work, alternately washed-out and saturated colors -- and big explosions.

Hark's Film Workshop was at the forefront of Hong Kong's Golden Age. Started in 1984, the Film Workshop was originally a class at the Hong Kong film school. "I was looking," Hark says, "for a way to help people think in new ways about their films, about what kinds of films they were making, what kinds of stories they were telling. At the time, Hong Kong moviemaking was so -- there were so many of the same kinds of films, over and over again. I wanted to find new directors, and I wanted to help directors tell their stories in their own way, to bring their visions to life." He succeeded beyond anything he could have hoped for. From 1985 to 1995, he worked on film after film, spawning franchises and reinventing entire genres: from the hardboiled gunplay of A Better Tomorrow to high-flying costume dramas like A Chinese Ghost Story to martial arts epics like Once Upon A Time In China.

Ultimately, this success would prove to be a mixed blessing. Franchises turned into copycat films; the endless drive to top what had come before led to repetition. Hark eventually went to work in the U.S. and made a couple of mediocre films, one with Van Damme and one with Dennis Rodman and Mickey Rourke. (This latter movie was actually pretty memorable, but not for the reasons Hark was hoping.) Time and Tide has none of the manufactured slickness that plagued Double Team and Knock Off.

Time and Tide opens with the lead character retelling Genesis, starting with the creation of light as we see the flare of a cigarette being lit. Finally, he says, on the seventh day, God rested. But then He looked around and saw that what He had created was no good; He realized that He'd have to start all over again. In many ways, Hark could just as well be talking about the Hong Kong film industry, being rebuilt from the ground up. Only three years after what seemed like the end, directors and actors alike are returning home, bringing new ideas, new visions with them. These visions are more global than before. Following the model of pan-Asian films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which featured a Shanghainese director, Hong Kong crew, and mixed U.S. and Chinese financing), Hark and other directors are building a more international -- and more secure -- filmmaking infrastructure. They may yet reinvent the world of action films again and again, but with any luck they will not have to start from scratch.