FOUR STAR THEATRE owner Frank Lee's Asian Film Festival returns for a seventh year, boasting its largest (and longest-running) program to date, with 43 films spread through the month of August. Pleasing the crowd seems to be the overriding theme this year, with a lineup that forgoes documentaries, shorts, and experimental works in favor of more commercial features (read: heavy on action, horror, gangsters, and historical drama).

Unlike years past, the 2003 fest doesn't include visits from any filmmakers or stars. Still, there's enough here to titillate Asian film aficionados of all stripes. Anyone lamenting the conclusion of the Four Star's "Hong Kong Movie Madness" series can get a fix with the 1971 Bruce Lee favorite Fists of Fury (a.k.a. The Chinese Connection), a savvy selection to mark the 30th anniversary of the star's mysterious death. Sure, everyone loves Enter the Dragon, and Bruce's yellow Game of Death track suit is soon to be everywhere thanks to Kill Bill, but from the Leone-esque title sequence to the freeze-frame ending, the oft-imitated Fury is revenge cinema at its finest. Other vintage martial arts selections include Frank Lee favorite Jimmy Wang Yu in Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman, which shares Fists of Fury's themes of vengeance and Chinese-Japanese discordance, and King Hu's 1969 female-warrior masterpiece Touch of Zen.

Swordplay figures prominently in some more recent – but, of course, set in ye olden days – choices, including Flying Dragon, Leaping Tiger. The suspiciously Ang Lee-ish title and some unexciting fight scenes aside, Allen Lan's film is worth seeing for Samo Hung's performance as an elder statesman in a seriously dysfunctional family of horse thieves. If you missed the Korean epic Musa: The Warrior at last year's San Francisco International Film Festival, it's certainly deserving of two-and-a-half-plus hours of your time: sweeping cinematography, top-notch battle scenes, a slow-burning love affair, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon brat Zhang Zi-yi (playing, possibly coincidentally, another brat, but more sympathetic this time around).

Though the fest does factor in a number of San Francisco premieres – including two Bollywood musicals, Devdas and The Legend of Bhagat Singh – several of the more buzz-worthy entries, like Musa, have already played locally in some shape or form (Devdas has also played in Sunnyvale and Fremont). Still, that's good news for anyone who has some catching up to do: see Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer for the first time and wonder why nobody in America has the guts to create anything so marvelously creepy, outrageous, nauseating, and hilarious. Other repeat performers worth noting: Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera; spooky duo Inner Senses (featuring the late Leslie Cheung) and Japanese zombie flick Versus; and popular Korean Ring rip-off The Phone.

While movies from Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan grab the most marquee space, the festival also includes films from mainland China (including Ching dynasty dramas Burning of the Imperial Palace and its sequel, Reign behind the Curtain, both with Tony Leung Kar-Fei), Thailand (a must-see: Killer Tattoo, in which a pair of popular Thai comedians play hit men entangled in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-style adventures), Indonesia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The fest also busts out a two films from the Philippines, the domestic drama Hubog and the ambitious (if over-the-top) Yamashita: The Tiger's Treasure, which incorporates melodrama, teen angst, World War II flashbacks, shoot-outs, car chases, kidnappings, a stunningly mulleted villain, and – as the title suggests – the race to recover buried riches worth "a hundred trillion dollars."

The fest also includes a little something for the guilty-pleasure set: the return of Johnnie To's Chinese New Year flick Love for All Seasons, in which a playboy businessman (Louis Koo) meets a martial artist (megastar Sammi Cheng) who's hell-bent on experiencing heartbreak. Word is, it's no Love on a Diet – there is, after all, only one Love on a Diet – but Cheng hardly ever disappoints.