City on Fire
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
A detective goes undercover on a risky mission within a gang of robbers. Caught between the gang’s suspicions and the police hunt—who have no idea who he really is—he grows close to the gang leader. Through a tense plot set against the backdrop of a chaotic Hong Kong, Ringo Lam delivers a stunning direction, and Chow Yun-fat reaches new heights of expressiveness. One of Tarantino’s favorite films, and he has never hidden the fact that it inspired Reservoir Dogs.
Ringo Lam
Ringo Lam was a Hong Kong filmmaker. He was known for his action and crime films produced during the Hong Kong New Wave, many of them comprising entries in the heroic bloodshed subgenre. He was nominated for six Hong Kong Film Awards, winning Best Director for his 1987 film City on Fire, which he followed with other similar films that shared a dark view of Hong Kong society, collectively known as the On Fire cycle. Lam's other notable films include Aces Go Places IV (1986), Prison on Fire (1987), Undeclared War (1990), Twin Dragons (1992, co-directed with Tsui Hark), and Full Contact (1992). Many of his films starred Chow Yun-fat. He also directed several films in the United States, beginning with 1996's Maximum Risk, with Jean-Claude Van Damme. He would continue working on film productions in both Hong Kong and two more American productions with Van Damme until 2003.
