Hong Kong's Asian Film Awards is honouring mainland Chinese director Zhang Yimou with a prize for his "outstanding contribution to Asian cinema", the organisers said Thursday. Zhang, 58, counts Raise the Red Lantern and the recently-released A Simple Noodle Story -- loosely based on 1980s thriller Blood Simple by Oscar-winning American brothers Joel and Ethan Coen -- among his work. The ...

Organizers for the Venice Film Festival have honored John Woo with its lifetime achievement award, saying the veteran director transformed action movies both in his native Hong Kong and his current professional home of Hollywood. Calling the 61-year-old filmmaker "an innovator of the contemporary language of cinema," festival organizers said in ...

The action movie director John Woo will receive a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at next year's Venice Film Festival, the organisers said Monday. Announcing the award, the Venice committee said Woo's "revolutionary conception of staging and editing (had) renewed action movies to the core." Woo, 53, was born in southern China and raised in Hong Kong, where ...