As Tears Go By

Wah, an enforcer working in Mong Kok, is trying to pull his reckless friend Fly out of the triads. Meanwhile his distant cousin Ngor comes from Lantau Island and stays with him for a while, and something grows between them. Wah has two lives to choose between and they will not hold together. It is Wong Kar-wai's first film, starring Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung and Jacky Cheung. The director named Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets as its starting point. It screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989. It took 11.5 million Hong Kong dollars locally and remained Wong Kar-wai's highest-grossing Hong Kong film until The Grandmaster in 2013. At the 8th Hong Kong Film Awards it received several nominations including Best Film and Best Director. Jacky Cheung won Best Supporting Actor and William Chang won Best Art Direction. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 85 percent and Metacritic at 67. The New York Times described it as heralding a new vision not yet in perfect focus. Who it is for: anyone who loves Wong Kar-wai's later films and wants to see where he started. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the maturity of In the Mood for Love. This film is still inside genre shapes, and the style occasionally gets ahead of the story.