For Fans of Gordon Chan

Start here. Not because it is the most personal film Gordon Chan has made, but because it is the one where every element is working at once: Yuen Woo-ping's choreography is genuinely virtuosic, the political subtext about Japanese occupation and Chinese identity is handled with more care than the genre usually allows, and Jet Li gives a performance that uses his physicality as character expression rather than mere spectacle. It is a remake of Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury that quietly argues a more complicated case than Lee was making. Watch it before anything else.

It won Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1998 and has been largely ignored outside Hong Kong ever since. That is a genuine critical failure, not a matter of taste. Anthony Wong plays a cop so embedded in Triad social life that the question of whose side he is on has simply stopped being meaningful to him, and the film refuses to resolve that ambiguity tidily. It sits closer to Abel Ferrara than to John Woo. Gordon Chan co-directed here with Dante Lam, and the shared credit may have diluted both directors' reputations for the result. Either way, this is the film that shows what Chan can do when he is not managing a star vehicle.

Sifu (2022) and Sleeping Dogs (2012) carry the specific DNA of Hong Kong action cinema more faithfully than most films made in the last decade. Sifu is obsessive about the cost and logic of fighting in a way that would make Gordon Chan's stunt coordinators feel understood. Sleeping Dogs nails the moral compromise and cultural texture of a cop operating inside criminal networks, which is exactly what Beast Cops was doing in 1998. The heirs to Hong Kong action are increasingly interactive.

Stephen Chow's physical comedy has aged in strange ways, but King of Beggars (1992) holds up better than most of his early work because the absurdity has a genuine point: it is about the pretensions of martial heroism, about who actually holds power, about the gap between the official story and what really happened. Chan's direction keeps it moving too fast to become smug about any of this. It is the film that shows where he came from before Fist of Legend made him look like a prestige director.