For Fans of Wong Jing

God of Gamblers from 1989 is the film that defines everything Wong Jing does well: a charismatic star at peak powers, genre mechanics that are simultaneously sincere and self-aware, and a third act that delivers on promises no reasonable filmmaker would have made. It spawned sequels, imitators, and an entire sub-genre of Hong Kong gambling pictures. None of them matched the original, which tells you something about how much of the film lives in the specific chemistry of Chow Yun-fat playing the world's most elegant amnesiac.

Chasing the Dragon (2017, co-directed with Jason Kwan) is Wong Jing operating at an altitude you might not expect: a methodical, genuinely brutal Hong Kong crime epic tracing a real-life triad boss's rise through the 1960s and 70s. It is the film that reminds you he always understood the genre he was usually playing for laughs. Donnie Yen and Andy Lau are both doing career-quality work, and most Western audiences have never heard of it.

Wong Jing produced and often wrote the early Stephen Chow pictures, but the relationship ended badly. What Chow took from that period and turned into something lasting, in Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, is exactly the formula Wong Jing had been running: slapstick stretched until it hurts, an emotional core buried under so many layers of parody that it lands harder when it finally surfaces. Chow refined and deepened the method. Wong Jing invented it.

Naked Killer has a reputation built entirely on its most extreme moments, and that reputation undersells what it actually is: a slick, stylised noir with two genuinely compelling lead performances and an absurdist logic that holds together more firmly than most straight thrillers of the same period. The Category III rating gave Wong Jing and director Clarence Fok a freedom the mainstream would not have allowed, and they used it for more than exploitation.