Saw A Touch of Zen. It starts out as a fairly typical samurai movie (actually the genre is wuxia, according to imdb, but I don't know if I will remember this phrase) which makes a sudden and dramatic veer in the last half hour or so of its runtime.
The main character is a painter in a small town. He lives in an abandoned castle which is said to be haunted. He is quickly caught up in political machinations, defending the princess of a disgraced clan from the underlings of an evil eunuch (of course.) There's a recurrent image of a spider web which seems to be initially used to imply the web of deceit which our heroes are caught up in and which is later subverted when the heroes spin a crafty scheme of their own. I'm not a big action fan, so I'm hardly the target audience, but I found the story to be fairly humdrum. It's the usual thing: noble heroes, faceless soldiers, a conspiracy slowly crystalizing. You can probably see the broad outlines coming.
The film is also edited in a confusing way. Due to the technical limitations of the time, they often cut away just as someone is getting stabbed and then cut back to the bloody aftermath. But they also cut away for other reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. Characters will appear and disappear from a fight scene, or will suddenly be in the village or away from it. We know time is passing, but the film does not hold our hand through this. We're just suddenly one year later. I found this very confusing and it made the plot difficult for me to follow, however truth be told I was not trying all that hard. Anyway, the third act really took me by surprise.
The film is three hours long and, in about the last half hour or so, completely shifts focus, losing track of the princess in a sudden jump-cut. The painter hunts for her, but we lose track of him too, rediscovering the princess in a show-down with a general, a monk acting as her ally. This sequence is not directly to do with the main characters, but is a battle with strange, religious, philosophical overtones. It's all portrayed symbolically, which is to say indirectly, though fades and juxtaposition, downfall coming from mysterious avenues. I get the sense of a message being communicated. It's very evocative.
I don't know that the last half hour makes the rest of the film worth it for me, but that ending was very interesting
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