Full Contact (1992)

A night full of rain lit by the flames from multiple explosions. Motorcycle silhouette and hair metal power ballad wailing on the soundtrack. The Whitesnake MTV music video aesthetic crossed with the HK action cinema Heroic Bloodshed. This is Full Contact (1992), directed by Ringo Lam and reuniting him with star Chow Yun-Fat after films […]

Sparrow (2008)

Movies in love with the movies. Hong Kong director Johnnie To began making Sparrow (2008) over three years in between other projects, most of them crime movies about cops and/or gangsters like Election and Exiled. There’s an element where it feels like Sparrow was another lane to escape to, and even though it is still […]

The Mission (1999)

Johnnie To is someone whose movies I’ve wanted to dig into more, with him and his company Milky Way having an international reputation for Hong Kong action cinema. Though To has a prolific and diverse output of genres, people tend to talk most about his crime movies, usually about cops and triads. I’ve seen a […]