Film
A Better Tomorrow
John Woo's 1986 breakout is where the modern Hong Kong crime film learns to fly: two brothers, one a reforming triad, one a cop, torn apart by loyalty and blood. It's melodrama and gunfight opera in one package, unabashedly sentimental, and it made Chow Yun-Fat a legend overnight. Watch it for the birth of a genre, not subtlety.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you like crime stories where loyalty and guilt weigh as heavily as the gunfights, and you don't mind melodrama played with total sincerity.
Skip it if you find sentimental brotherhood scenes hard to sit through, or prefer subtle, understated acting, since the emotions here are big, loud and often played at full volume.
What it asks of you: Settle in for roughly ninety-five minutes of brisk set pieces with a slower, talkier core between them; the gunfights arrive in bursts, and the quieter scenes need patience.
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Recommended by
Infernal Affairs, The Killer, Jonathan Creek, City on Fire, A Bittersweet Life, Hard Boiled, Young and Dangerous, The Purge: Anarchy, Exiled, Long Arm of the Law, SPL: Kill Zone, Sugar Hill, Magnificent Warriors, Peking Opera Blues, Monga, Kabali, Eternal Summer, The Warlords, Eastern Condors, Burning Paradise, Forced Vengeance, Bullet in the Head, The Story of Woo Viet, Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone, Once a Thief, My Heart Is That Eternal Rose, A Better Tomorrow II, Full Contact, The Mission, Safeguard, V, Triads: The Inside Story, Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong, Day of Thunder, Crime Story, Gonin, Encounters of the Spooky Kind, The Bodyguard from Beijing, Righting Wrongs, Hong Kong 1941, Bodyguards and Assassins, God of Gamblers