It would be easy to categorize Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as one of the best martial-arts movies ever made and leave it at that. But that's really not fair, because it's so much more.

This is a drama to savor, a spectacle to revel in, a romance to inhale, between gasps.

Jackie Chan movies are great fun, but you're not likely to find in them an ongoing discussion of who has more freedom, the woman in an unhappily arranged marriage or the woman warrior who gave all that up.

It's at once pulpy and profound, a movie that never forgets to have fun even as it's tackling such straight-faced issues as honor, devotion and compassion.