Johnnie To

A collection of 23 posts

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Johnnie To

The Mad Monk (Johnnie To, 1993)

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Ching Siu-tung

The Heroic Trio and Executioners (Johnnie To & Ching Siu-tung, 1993)

The Odd One Dies

The Shaolin Cinematic Universe

This was originally commissioned by the Vulgar Cinema website in July 2014, and was published in December 2015. Then, after that site disappeared, it was revised and republished at Frame.land in May 2019. Now that site too appears to be defunct, so I'm posting it once again

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Johnnie To

The Bare-Footed Kid (Johnnie To, 1993)

The 36th Chamber

Septet: The Story of Hong Kong (Various, 2020)

It’s hard to imagine how long I’ve been talking about the film that would eventually become Septet: The Story of Hong Kong. The first time I tweeted about it appears to have been August of 2017, although that tweet is phrased as a reminder, which means I must

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Johnnie To

The Running Out of Time Series (Johnnie To, 1999 and 2001)

Johnnie To

The Mission (Johnnie To, 1999)

After a few rough years at the start of his Milkyway Image studio, producing great movies that never really caught on at the box office, and constantly at odds with his subordinate directors, in 1999 Johnnie To just decided to give up the pretense and begin directing most of his

Johnnie To

Running on Karma (Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai, 2003)

The first two-thirds play as a fairly typical Johnnie To/Wai Ka-fai cop movie. There are some supernatural elements of course, but it’s very much of a piece with the later Mad Detective and Blind Detective, in which superhuman perception is used to solve crimes long-hidden from the understanding

Johnnie To

Johnnie To Capsule Reviews

A Moment of Romance (1990) — February 22, 2016 As Tears Go By told in the style of the last five minutes of All About Ah-long. Directed by Benny Chan, produced by Johnnie To, Ringo Lam, and Wong Jing (among others), but To claims much of the authorship credit, and he’

Johnnie To

A Moment of Romance III (Johnnie To, 1996)

For his final film before launching the Milkyway Image studio, Johnnie To took a super-generic script, applied a Steven Spielberg visual aesthetic, and almost made an FW Murnau movie out of it. A rarity for To, it's a period film, a romance set during the second World War,

Johnnie To

The Fun, the Luck, and the Tycoon (Johnnie To, 1990)

Following up on the smash hit that was All About Ah-long, Johnnie To went back to television for a two-part film called The Iron Butterfly. I haven’t been able to track it down, but it looks to be a modern cop/Triad thriller, with Anthony Wong and Mark Cheng

Johnnie To

All About Ah-Long (Johnnie To, 1989)

After an auspicious, if commercially unsuccessful, debut with the New Wave wuxia The Enigmatic Case in 1980, To spent the early 80s working in Hong Kong television. In 1986 he returned to film working under Raymond Wong Bak-ming at the Cinema City studio, where he made the popular, if not

Johnnie To

The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 1993)

Before becoming a renowned auteur, a favorite of critics and film festivals the world over, Johnnie To was known primarily in the West for the two films he made in 1993 in collaboration with director and action choreographer Ching Siu-tung. The Heroic Trio and Executioners star Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung,

Johnnie To

The Big Heat (Johnnie To, 1988)

So here we come to the first film in the genre that Johnnie To would become best known for: the urban crime thriller. Released a mere seven months after his first big hit, The Eighth Happiness, The Big Heat finds To working with Tsui Hark for the first and only

Johnnie To

The Eighth Happiness (Johnnie To, 1988)

Following up on the Cinema City romantic comedy Seven Years Itch, To re-teamed with producer-writer-star (not necessarily in that order) Raymond Wong Bak-Ming for an ensemble film designed for release during the Lunar New Year holiday, a week-long (more or less) celebration that is the highlight of the Hong Kong

Johnnie To

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 (Johnnie To, 2014)

Beginning one year after the first film ends, financial analyst Cheng Zixin (Gao Yuanyuan) is still engaged to the winner of that film’s love triangle, reformed alcoholic Qihong (Daniel Wu) (recall that for her he quit drinking and built a skyscraper in the shape of her silhouette). They communicate

Johnnie To

Drug War (Johnnie To, 2012)

From the beginning, it explains that this is not your typical heroic bloodshed Triad film, concerned more with codes of honor and brotherhood and the mirroring of good and evil than anything else. No, instead this is going to be a straight police procedural, with no metaphysical mumbo jumbo: “You’

Johnnie To

Seven Years Itch (Johnnie To, 1987)

After finding success in his return to filmmaking with 1986’s Happy Ghost III, Johnnie To re-teamed with actor-writer-producer-Cinema City studio head Raymond Wong for a more conventional romantic comedy, loosely inspired by Billy Wilder’s popular 1955 Marilyn Monroe vehicle The Seven-Year Itch. Wilder’s film is an adaptation

Johnnie To

The Happy Ghost Series (Clifton Ko & Johnnie To, 1984-1986)

After the failure of his debut film, The Enigmatic Case, Johnnie To went back to television for several years (where he directed, among other things, an acclaimed adaptation of Louis Cha’s Legend of the Condor Heroes), not returning to film until 1986, when Raymond Wong hired him to direct

Johnnie To

The Enigmatic Case (Johnnie To, 1980)

After getting his start working in television at Hong Kong’s TVB studio in the mid-1970s, Johnnie To made his feature debut in 1980 with a dark, stylish martial arts film made on the cheap for a small, leftist studio. Though quite similar in tone and style to the debut

Johnnie To

Blind Detective (Johnnie To, 2013)

The big draw in Blind Detective is the reunion of Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng. Pop stars and cultural icons, it was the series of romantic comedies they made with To in the early 2000s that essentially saved his Milkyway Image company from collapse. The first few years of the

Andrew Lau

Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, 2002)

In the midst of a lengthy binge on Johnnie To movies, preparing for a They Shot Pictures episode we hope to record this weekend, I’ve tried to fit in a few other Hong Kong films that I thought might have influenced or been influenced by To’s work. I

Johnnie To

The Johnnie To Whimsicality Index

All 41 of the films by Johnnie To and/or Wai Ka-fai that I’ve seen, by Whimsicality Score over time. Whimsicality Score is how whimsical I think the film is on a scale of 0–100. The recent film with the lowest Whimsicality Score I can think of right