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Abstract
Two years after the phenomenal success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, another Chinese martial arts film Hero, opened in the United States to enthusiastic critics and audiences. This study examines the reception of Hero by a specific group of the films U.S. audiences film reviewers in an effort to understand the appeal of a genre considered very Chinese to American viewers, and to explore issues regarding culture and international communication. Drawing on globalization theories and film studies literatures, discourse analysis of Heros reviews reveal that Hero is not perceived as a film from a foreign cinema or a foreign genre the exotic other, but a hybrid film from a familiar, stylized and hybrid genre. This study articulates two contradictions of globalization convergence and disjunction, local and global, and suggests that hybridity is the critical lens through which contemporary cultural formation and international communication ought to be conceptualized.