So why all this fuss over Hong Kong movies? You read in a trade magazine that Jackie Chan signed another deal, or Martin Scorsese decided to remake a Hong Kong action flick, so you head down to your local video store to see what everyone’s talking about. So you can be excused for feeling baffled over what you find: shelves of schlock like “The Enforcer,” “The Legend,” “The Legend 2,” “The Legend of the Red Dragon,” and “The Legend of the Swordsman” featuring cover art of Jet Li’s head Photoshopped onto the body of a Caucasian body builder. It’s like being in bad movie hell.

This situation largely comes courtesy of Harvey Weinstein, who scooped up Asian movies like popcorn for years, then either buried them in the Miramax vault or dumped them onto video with all the class and dignity of a fly-by-night porn producer. But paradoxically, this situation might also change because of Mr. Weinstein, who has just launched a new venture called Dragon Dynasty. Despite bearing the name of a Chinese take-out joint, it’s actually a DVD line aimed at releasing respectful versions of Hong Kong classics into the mainstream video market. Four months and approximately seven discs into its existence, Dragon Dynasty seems, if slowly, to be redeeming the Weinstein name.

Dragon Dynasty’s 43 titles, together with a special collection of 50 classic Shaw Brothers movies and a number of independent acquisitions, will combine to make the Weinstein Company the leader in Asian cinema in North America.

So if you still want to know what all the fuss over Hong Kong movies is about, check out Dragon Dynasty’s recent “Infernal Affairs” boxed set, the 2002–03 trilogy that Mr. Scorsese remade as “The Departed.” As ferociously Buddhist as Mr. Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” was ferociously Catholic, this story of an undercover cop versus an undercover criminal replaces the comparative sagginess of “The Departed” with a tension that can cut diamonds.

Taking an hour less to tell their story than Mr. Scorsese did, the directors of “Infernal Affairs,” Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak somehow make their movie far less violent and far more complex. Pop star Andy Lau plays Matt Damon’s role of the mob mole inside police headquarters not as a baddie who practically twirls his moustache in every scene but as an overachiever who desperately wants to be a real cop, but cannot turn on the criminal father figure who gave him his career. The actors in “Infernal Affairs 1 & 2” include a fistful of Wong Kar-Wai regulars such as Tony Leung (“In the Mood for Love”) and Carina Lau (“2046”), both of whom give the fatalistic, tamped-down performances of lost souls; it’s like watching a film noir shot in the 1940s and only recently rediscovered. And, despite having an ending with approximately five fewer gallons of blood than “The Departed,” it’s also five times bleaker.

“Infernal Affairs 3” is a minor work, head-splitting in its commitment to existing in the off-screen moments of the original “Infernal Affairs,” but “Infernal Affairs 2” should be taken immediately after watching the first movie and, together, they rival “The Godfather” as epic pop opera. A prequel set on the eve of Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997, “Infernal Affairs” overturns everything you thought you knew from the first film: the good guys turn out to be the bad guys, the bad guys turn out to be not so bad after all, and original sins are dug up and their stinking corpses are dragged across the screen.

Mr. Scorsese is a great director, but he’s more interested in character than in story. Hong Kong movies, on the other hand, are driven by high performance story engines that throb beneath their hoods courtesy of directors who had the essentials of plotting laser-etched into their genes. In their 1980s and ’90s heyday, Hong Kong directors shot fast with little interference from producers and with as little as a month to turn in their completed films. Moviemaking happened at warp speed and a film had to have good bones or it would fall apart.

New movies were dragged fresh from the editing room and tested at midnight screenings in front of rowdy audiences who became violent if the pace of the story flagged for even a moment. Movies that didn’t keep the audience enthralled were sent back to the editing room sometimes just 24 hours before they were due to be released. Speed and clarity were king.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Jackie Chan’s self-directed “Police Story” movies (1985 and 1988), also just out from Dragon Dynasty. These two bland-sounding tales of a cop who has to disappoint his girlfriend and defy his superiors as he takes justice into his own hands are each 90 minutes of sudden reversals, split-second twists, and oddball character behavior that leap, whirl, and spin across the screen with all the grace and speed of Mr. Chan himself.

What’s notable about these two films isn’t just the way Mr. Chan can turn a mid-size Mitsubishi into a jungle gym for a jaw-cracking action scene, or how he demolishes a shopping mall full of glass with his face or flattens a hillside village with a herd of hatchbacks, but for the way nothing can stop the story. Whenever things slow down, the plot gets goosed by scenes of split-second farce full of mistaken identities, petty jealousies, doors slamming, and people hiding in closets.

And that’s why academics and fans swoon for Hong Kong films. For all its reputation as a sweatshop for cheap, disposable movies, Hong Kong has been the last bastion of classic movie storytelling, taking old-school Hollywood genres like noir or bedroom farce and shooting them full of adrenaline and invention. It’s no coincidence that the last of the old-time movie studios was Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers, which shuttered in 1985.

So why such shoddy treatment in the West? Mr. Weinstein signed deals with dozens of Asian companies for their films, at one point even claiming he was going to start an all-Asian cable channel. But Miramax’s deal with Disney actually made it more profitable for the Weinsteins (Harvey and brother Bob) to release fewer movies, so they never did much more than dump a fraction of their acquisitions onto video. After their split from Disney, the Weinstein brothers found themselves with a warehouse full of titles, a need to generate cash, and a bad reputation among fans. The first thing they did was hire Brian White, formerly of the well-respected British DVD label Hong Kong Legends, to run Dragon Dynasty. Suddenly, they’re promising two-disc special editions of movies like Jet Li’s “Tai Chi Master” which they’d previously dropped onto a crummy DVD as “Twin Warriors.”

While fans may decry double-dipping, it’s welcome in this case, as the Weinsteins are finally giving these classic titles their due. And it’s cheap irony that the same company responsible for plot-free entertainments like “Scary Movie 4” and “Hannibal Rising” is the one that has finally decided to reissue these watertight classics from Hong Kong.