Even in an age of digital temptation, and despite the unabated appetite for frenzied cutting, satisfying fights are not yet extinct in Hollywood movies. Eastern Promises, last year's London-set mob thriller by the great Canadian director David Cronenberg, contains what might very well be a Platonic ideal of a fight scene, standing as it does outside all cinematic trends. In his previous feature, A History of Violence, Cronenberg doesn't recoil from the excitement and even eroticism of physical violence or from its horrific aftermath, and Eastern Promises effortlessly smuggles those complexities into this masterful scene (which Cronenberg expanded from a single line of stage direction).

Viggo Mortensen's Russian gangster, cornered in a bathhouse, must fend off a pair of murderous thugs. Mortensen performs the scene in the nude, utterly vulnerable and with his character's prison tattoos—his history of violence—inscribed on his flesh. The scene raises heart rates. But it also communicates just how hard it is to inflict and withstand physical pain. It's no surprise that Cronenberg, the originator of the body-horror genre in films like Shivers and Videodrome, would instinctively recognize the paramount requirement for a fight scene: a profound respect for the possibilities and the limits of the human body.