Popular reviews

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  Review by Nakul ★★★★ 1

  Nobody understands the male friendship & brotherhood better than John Woo.

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 4

  brotherhood and ethics vs. blood and fire. the dna strand to just about every great action melodrama for the next two decades.

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★★ 3

  After an up and down decade as a director for hire in the last days of the Shaw Brothers, working alternately in the wuxia and wacky comedy genres, John Woo finally hit it big in 1986 when he teamed up with Tsui Hark and the Cinema City studio to remake Patrick Lung Kong's 1967 drama The Story of a Discharged Prisoner. One of the most influential films of the past 30 years, A Better Tomorrow established the formal and thematic template for a new era of crime movie: everything that has followed, from Woo’s follow-up masterpieces The Killer and Hard-Boiled to the triad films of Johnnie To, to myriad international imitators, has in some way been a response to it.…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★

  john woo just earnestly loves guys being dudes, loads of bros crying their hearts out in the rain and hugging each other and fighting for honor and loyalty and chivalry, it fucking rules

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  Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★★ 1

  Somebody told John Woo that ACAB meant All Cops Are Bros and no one bothered to correct him.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  The last time I wrote here about this one, I talked about the relationship to A Story of Discharged Prisoner and Chang Cheh's brotherhood films. Rewatching it today, I was thinking about the signficance of the casting. Ti Lung was, of course, one of Chang Cheh's main leads of the 70se near the end of his leading man days and opposite to him there was Leslie Cheung who was along with Andy Lau, one of the two main romantic heartthrobs of the era. So old values and new values, Chang Cheh's chivalry and 80s new affluence. The cantonese title "The Essence of Heroes" is very Cheh and refers to Ti Lung and Chow Yun-Fat brotherhood while the english title A…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  Finally having seen STORY OF A DISCHARGED PRISONER it seems very clear that Woo took inspiration from its social realism and tried to marry that to a Shaw-style story of martial brotherhood using their shared shifting codes of honor as a bridge. Once the catalyst for those shifts was, say, a splinter clan trying to steal a powerful scroll, but now it's an economic bubble emerging from an influx of cheap foreign money. Either way loyalty and fraternity are the only things that end up having real, intrinsic value.

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  Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★½

  I'm going to have a double feature of this & the pilot to Miami Vice and ascend into heaven one of these days

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  Review by Lou (rhymes with wow!) ★★★★ 8

  John Woo's (heroic bloodshed) movies truly ushered in a new era for action cinema. Chow Yun-Fat is great here, but so are Ting Lung, Waise Lee and Leslie Cheung. Woo would come to refine his "bullets and melodrama" formula with each subsequent movie, but this is already an excellent starting point.

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  Review by BananaPudding ★★★½ 4

  Chow Yun-Fat light his cigarette with a burning cash not even 5 minutes into the movie, 6 stars

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  Review by laird ★★★★½

  Ambition is hell. Sacrifice is salvation. The iconic image of Chow Yun Fat lighting a cigarette with a counterfeit bill preempts the kind of flaunting, ostentatious cool imagery that would fill gangsta rap videos the next decade. They should've updated the 100 dollar bill to have *that* on the back.

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  Review by Cinemonster ★★★½

  ki·net·ic /kəˈnetik/
  adjective
  of, relating to, or resulting from motion.

  John Woo’s relationship with Tsui Hark did not last very long, but it produced three of the most iconic films that Hong Kong ever produced (A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2, The Killer). A Better Tomorrow, the first of these, took director Woo from a boring and mundane recent resume to a hyper-kinetic career path that thrust him into the international consciousness. The film also introduced Chow Yun-Fat to the world, propelling him to superstardom in the East and stardom in the West.

  The film follows two brothers who start the film on opposite sides of the law, and birthed many Woo and modern action cinema tropes. Among them: dusters, two-hand…