love is a battlefield; This month's best foreign films feature gorgeous stars, fierce fighting, and unlikely romance.

When Bruce Lee first became a worldwide sensation back in the seventies, who could have guessed that kung-fu pictures would one day be ruled by women? Today our screens aren't merely overrun with kick-ass chicks, from Charlie's Angels to Kill Bill's Beatrice Kiddo, but ever since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, martial-arts tales have been "feminized"--they're as much about romance as gravity-defying leaps. You get both in the ravishing new romp House of Flying Daggers, an exuberant love story costumed in the flashing silks of a kung-fu movie. Set during the ninth-century, the story follows two police captains, hard-edged Leo (Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau) and sweet-faced Jin (the Keanu-ish heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro), as they pursue a rebel group, the Flying Daggers. Investigating a house of ill repute, they encounter a blind dancer, Mei (Crouching Tiger's Ziyi Zhang), who proves as duplicitous as she is graceful. Soon this trio is caught in enough double-crosses and amorous agonies to fuel The O.C. for a year.

As he showed in his recent hit Hero, director Zhang Yimou is a wondrous visual stylist. His set pieces explode with bright colors and balletic movement: the blind Mei playing the Echo Game, in which her robe's flowing sleeves serve as her weapon; a battle among bamboo trees that becomes a symphony of greens; and a snowstorm finale so delirious it makes the average opera look austere. The movie's radiant center is Ziyi Zhang, who was raised during her country's headlong embrace of capitalism. You can feel that dynamism in her screen persona. Although she's utterly convincing as a Tang Dynasty warrior-she moves with a dancer's practiced elegance-you can easily picture her clutching a cell phone while picking through the racks at Barneys. A contemporary avatar of the classic Chinese beauty, Zhang has what it takes to become a superstar in America. And Hollywood knows it. DreamWorks just cast her as the lead of its adaptation of Arthur Golden's best-seller Memoirs of a Geisha.

Three years ago, Audrey Tautou became famous as the beaming (some would say mugging) heroine of Amelie. Inspiring a fizzy francophilia in the unlikeliest places-I myself heard fans ooh-la-lahing over the film in Des Moines-Jean-Pierre Jeunet's valentine to Paris became the most successful French movie of all time, even spawning "Amelie Tours" of the City of Lights. Now Jeunet and Tautou have ...