Here is something that rarely gets acknowledged in the cinephile conversation: for roughly twenty-five years — from the mid-1970s to the handover and its immediate aftermath — Hong Kong ran one of the most productive, creative, and genuinely influential national cinemas on earth. At its peak in the early 1990s, Hong Kong was the world's third-largest film producer and the second-largest exporter of films after Hollywood. The city shaped global action cinema, inspired generations of filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski siblings, and produced artists of Wong Kar-wai's stature, whose work stands among the finest cinema of any era.
This list is not fifty entries in descending order with scores attached. That would flatten a cinema that operates across wildly different registers — the Shaw Brothers' martial arts pageantry is no more comparable to In the Mood for Love than Beethoven is to the Blues Brothers, and both deserve their place. Instead, what follows is a curated guide by era: what defined each period, which films you need to see, and why Hong Kong cinema matters globally.
Eras Covered
- The Shaw Brothers Era (1960s–1970s)
- Bruce Lee and the Kung Fu Explosion
- The New Wave (Late 1970s–1980s)
- Jackie Chan — A Category Unto Himself
- John Woo and the Heroic Bloodshed Cycle
- The Golden Era (1987–1997)
- Wong Kar-wai — The Poet
- Post-Handover and the New Millennium
- Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema
- The Quick 50 at a Glance
The Shaw Brothers Era — 1960s and 1970s
The Shaw Brothers studio — founded by Sir Run Run Shaw and his brother Runme — was the foundation on which all Hong Kong popular cinema rests. At its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, Shaw Brothers operated the largest privately owned film studio in the world outside Hollywood, producing over 800 films. Their wu xia (martial arts) and kung fu pictures established the genre templates that Hong Kong, and eventually global cinema, would draw on for decades.
King Hu's breakthrough work and one of the founding texts of wu xia cinema — a female warrior (Cheng Pei-pei, later Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) on a rescue mission through a world of corrupt officials and sword-fighting bandits. The choreography, the use of sound, and Hu's visual intelligence were years ahead of the genre.
Chang Cheh's defining work and one of the studio's biggest box-office hits. The one-armed swordsman became an archetype that would echo through Hong Kong action cinema for the next thirty years — the physically compromised hero who transcends limitation through will and technique. Raw, violent by the standards of its day, and genuinely moving.
The film that broke Hong Kong martial arts cinema in North America. Distributed by Warner Brothers in the US in 1973, it introduced Western audiences to the kung fu film as a genre. Its iconic use of the Ironside theme during fight scenes became a touchstone — Quentin Tarantino borrowed the same piece for Kill Bill.
Gordon Liu's masterpiece — both a film and a complete philosophy of martial arts training. The long central section following the hero's progress through the Shaolin temple's thirty-six training chambers is unlike anything else in genre cinema: patient, visually inventive, and genuinely instructive about the discipline it depicts. The Wu-Tang Clan drew extensively from it. Its influence on hip-hop culture alone would make it essential viewing.
Bruce Lee and the Kung Fu Explosion
Bruce Lee did not invent Hong Kong martial arts cinema — he transformed it. Between 1971 and his death in 1973 at 32, Lee made five films that restructured the global market for action movies and created a mythology that persists fifty years later. His physical charisma was matched by genuine philosophical rigour; his Jeet Kune Do philosophy and his critique of rigid martial arts tradition were controversial precisely because they were accurate.
Lee's first major film for Golden Harvest, the studio that would challenge Shaw Brothers' dominance. Crude in places and rough around its narrative edges, but the fight sequences — Lee's coiled intensity, his speed, the way the camera finally didn't have to edit around him — announced something new.
Arguably Lee's most politically pointed film — a story of Chinese national identity, colonial humiliation, and resistance set in 1930s Shanghai. The scene with the "No Dogs or Chinese" park sign became an iconic image in Chinese popular culture. Lee's performance is more controlled and more furious simultaneously than in The Big Boss.
The film that fully crossed Lee's stardom into the Western mainstream, and which he did not live to see released. The mirror-room fight sequence, the underground tournament structure that influenced decades of action cinema (and video games), and Lee's own screenplay contributions make this more than a simple co-production cash-in. It remains a perfectly constructed action film.
The New Wave — Late 1970s and 1980s
The Hong Kong New Wave emerged from a generation of filmmakers — many trained overseas in the UK, US, and Australia — who returned to Hong Kong in the late 1970s with ambitions beyond genre entertainment. Directors including Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Allen Fong, Patrick Tam, and Alex Cheung brought documentary realism, psychological complexity, and formal experimentation to a cinema that had been largely genre-defined.
Hui's most politically urgent early work — a film about Vietnamese refugees and their experiences in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, made when the "Boat People" crisis was ongoing and Hong Kong was a first-port-of-refuge for hundreds of thousands. Her commitment to giving marginalised communities screen time predates and informs all her subsequent work.
Tsui Hark's technically dazzling wu xia fantasy that pioneered the use of Western special effects technology in Hong Kong cinema. Chaotic, visionary, and exhausting in its inventiveness — it pointed toward both the late-1980s revival of wu xia cinema and the CGI-heavy blockbusters of thirty years later.
The film that created the "heroic bloodshed" genre and made Chow Yun-fat a star. Two brothers on opposite sides of the law; a criminal underworld defined by codes of brotherhood and loyalty; and Woo's extraordinary ability to make violence both operatic and morally heavy. The influence on global action cinema — from Michael Mann to Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowskis — is incalculable.
Jackie Chan — A Category Unto Himself
Jackie Chan is the most physically gifted filmmaker Hong Kong has produced, and one of the most gifted in cinema history. His achievement was to combine Bruce Lee's martial arts legitimacy with Buster Keaton's physical comedy and Harold Lloyd's daredevil stunts, staging sequences of seemingly impossible choreography and actually performing them himself — the outtakes at his films' end credits, showing the injuries and failed attempts, are as important as the successful takes.
Chan's masterpiece and the finest action comedy ever made — a controlled demolition of a shopping mall in its climax, performed by Chan himself at genuine risk of serious injury. The fight sequences are constructed with the elegance of precision watchmaking; the comedy is broad and perfectly timed. Nothing ages. Nothing is CGI. Everything is earned.
Chan's tribute to Harold Lloyd and the great Hollywood silent comedians — the clock tower fall, staged and performed without CGI or stunt doubles, announced his ambitions and his fearlessness simultaneously. Chan directs himself alongside Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao in a period martial arts comedy of extraordinary physical ambition.
Roger Ebert named this among the greatest action films ever made, and it is difficult to argue. The final fight sequence — Chan's Wong Fei-hung, fighting on drunken legs, on hot coals, against a vastly physically superior opponent — is fifteen minutes of sustained choreographic brilliance unlike anything in the cinema. The real fire was real; Chan was genuinely burned.
John Woo — The Poet of Controlled Chaos
John Woo created a visual language for action that the whole world borrowed. The slow-motion gunfight; the two-handed pistol; the dove in the chapel; the code of male loyalty that transcends law — these became global genre currency. His Hong Kong output from 1986 to 1993 represents the most concentrated period of creative achievement in action cinema since Peckinpah.
Chow Yun-fat as a hitman who accidentally blinds a nightclub singer during a job and accepts a final contract to fund her eye operation. The Catholicism is sincere; the violence is operatic; the bromance between hitman and pursuing cop is one of cinema's great male partnerships. Woo's most purely beautiful film.
Woo's final Hong Kong film before moving to Hollywood, and his most technically accomplished. The hospital sequence — a single extended take following Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung through collapsing corridors, firefights, and a maternity ward rescue — is the finest action sequence in cinema history by most reasonable measures. Woo took nothing quite like it to Hollywood.
The Golden Era — 1987–1997
The decade before the handover was Hong Kong cinema's most productive and in many ways its finest. With the prosperity of the 1980s economic boom fuelling studio expansion and the looming 1997 deadline creating a peculiar creative urgency, the industry produced genre films, arthouse work, comedies, and thrillers of extraordinary variety and quality.
Hong Kong's most beloved supernatural romance — a tax collector shelters in a haunted temple and falls in love with a ghost. The mix of comedy, romance, horror, and wu xia action is uniquely Hong Kong; the film was a massive box-office success and launched two sequels and a preoccupation with ghost-romance narratives that continues in East Asian cinema today.
Chow Yun-fat as a gambling genius who loses his memory in an accident and is guided back by small-time grifters. Pure popular entertainment, deliberately unpretentious, and enormously influential on a gambler-film sub-genre that Hong Kong rode into the early 1990s. Chow's charisma is at its most magnetic here.
The film that made Brigitte Lin's character Asia the Invincible one of Hong Kong cinema's great screen presences — a gender-fluid, enormously powerful villain whose tragedy is entirely sympathetic. The wu xia action is spectacular; the queerness is handled with more sophistication than Hollywood managed for another two decades.
Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai as mainland Chinese migrants building lives in Hong Kong through the 1980s and 1990s, their orbits never quite aligning. Peter Chan's most emotionally devastating film; Teresa Teng's songs as the soundtrack of diaspora longing; and a final scene in New York that earns every tear. Essential.
Wong Kar-wai — The Poet
Wong Kar-wai is the most internationally celebrated Hong Kong filmmaker and among the most important filmmakers of the late twentieth century by any measure. His work is characterised by oblique narrative structures, extraordinary cinematography (almost all his films shot by Christopher Doyle in collaboration with William Chang's production design), and a preoccupation with memory, time, and the impossibility of love's perfect coincidence.
Shot in an astonishing 23 days, Chungking Express captures Hong Kong with an intimacy and energy no other film matches — the Midnight Express snack bar in Tsim Sha Tsui; Faye Wong in a flight attendant jacket; Tony Leung talking to his household objects. Two interleaved stories of longing and missed connection, united by the California Dreamin' aesthetic of the mid-1990s city. Tarantino distributed it in the US personally, calling it one of his favourite films.
The dark twin of Chungking Express — neon-lit, nocturnal, centred on a hitman and his handler who never meet. The most visually radical of Wong's films; Christopher Doyle's wide-angle cinematography in confined MTR corridors and nighttime Kowloon streets created a visual grammar that informed music videos and advertising for a decade.
Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as a Hong Kong gay couple cycling through attraction and repulsion in Buenos Aires, made in the year of the handover. Wong's most emotionally raw film — the relationship is toxic, the loneliness is immense, and the Iguazu Falls sequence at the end is one of cinema's great acts of mourning. Dedicated to Leslie Cheung.
The most widely celebrated Hong Kong film ever made. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung as neighbours in a 1962 Shanghai-expat building who discover their respective spouses are having an affair, and begin a relationship defined by restraint, propriety, and unacted desire. Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin's cinematography — slow-motion fabrics, cheongsam, corridor shadows — is the most beautiful in world cinema. Wong Kar-wai has never equalled it; nor has anyone else.
Post-Handover and the New Millennium
The handover did not kill Hong Kong cinema — but it transformed it profoundly. The talent exodus to Hollywood (Woo, Chan, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Chow Yun-fat, Jet Li) depleted the industry for a period. What emerged in the early 2000s was a more constrained but often more formally ambitious cinema, defined by the crime thriller and social drama genres.
The most influential Hong Kong film of the post-handover era and arguably of the 2000s globally — remade by Scorsese as The Departed (which won Best Picture), adapted by others around the world. Andy Lau as a triad mole in the police; Tony Leung as an undercover cop inside the triads; two men whose identities have been entirely consumed by their covers. The film's moral elegance — it takes both sides with complete seriousness — is what elevates it above genre.
Stephen Chow's most polished work — a kung fu comedy that manages to be simultaneously a loving tribute to the Shaw Brothers era, a Looney Tunes cartoon, and a genuinely touching story of latent heroism. The CGI is used as heightened cartoon logic rather than spectacle; the film is deeply Hong Kong in its black humour and its sympathy for the little people of a working-class tenement.
Johnnie To's most serious work — a triad election procedural that makes the criminal brotherhood's internal politics feel as consequential as any boardroom drama. The violence is sudden and terrible; the film's final scene, with its implications about Hong Kong's own governance, is one of the most chilling in the city's cinema.
Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema — 2010s and Beyond
Contemporary Hong Kong cinema is smaller in volume but richer in documentary and political complexity than its predecessors. The events of 2019 and their aftermath gave filmmakers urgent new material and urgent new restrictions — the negotiation of memory, identity, and loss that has always characterised Hong Kong culture became literally existential.
Ann Hui's masterpiece — Deanie Ip as an elderly domestic helper who suffers a stroke, and Andy Lau as the film producer she has served for sixty years who cares for her in her final months. A film about care, about class, about what people mean to each other beyond the structures of contract and role. Profoundly simple; profoundly moving. Hui's most personally felt film.
Five short films imagining Hong Kong ten years into the future — all dystopian, all politically pointed, all made on minimal budgets by young filmmakers. Won Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards to extraordinary controversy; the ceremony was reportedly not broadcast on mainland Chinese television. A document of a city processing its anxieties through art.
The Quick 50 — At a Glance
Essential Films by Era
| Era | Film | Director | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shaw Brothers | Come Drink with Me | King Hu | 1966 |
| Shaw Brothers | One-Armed Swordsman | Chang Cheh | 1967 |
| Shaw Brothers | Five Fingers of Death | Jeong Chang-hwa | 1972 |
| Shaw Brothers | 36th Chamber of Shaolin | Lau Kar-leung | 1978 |
| Bruce Lee | Fist of Fury | Lo Wei | 1972 |
| Bruce Lee | Way of the Dragon | Bruce Lee | 1972 |
| Bruce Lee | Enter the Dragon | Robert Clouse | 1973 |
| New Wave | A Better Tomorrow | John Woo | 1986 |
| New Wave | Zu: Warriors | Tsui Hark | 1983 |
| Jackie Chan | Police Story | Jackie Chan | 1985 |
| Jackie Chan | Project A | Jackie Chan | 1983 |
| Jackie Chan | Drunken Master II | Lau Kar-leung | 1994 |
| John Woo | The Killer | John Woo | 1989 |
| John Woo | Hard Boiled | John Woo | 1992 |
| Golden Era | Chinese Ghost Story | Ching Siu-tung | 1987 |
| Golden Era | Comrades: Almost a Love Story | Peter Chan | 1996 |
| Golden Era | God of Gamblers | Wong Jing | 1989 |
| Stephen Chow | Shaolin Soccer | Stephen Chow | 2001 |
| Stephen Chow | Kung Fu Hustle | Stephen Chow | 2004 |
| Wong Kar-wai | Chungking Express | Wong Kar-wai | 1994 |
| Wong Kar-wai | Fallen Angels | Wong Kar-wai | 1995 |
| Wong Kar-wai | Happy Together | Wong Kar-wai | 1997 |
| Wong Kar-wai | In the Mood for Love | Wong Kar-wai | 2000 |
| Post-Handover | Infernal Affairs | Lau/Mak | 2002 |
| Post-Handover | Election | Johnnie To | 2005 |
| Contemporary | A Simple Life | Ann Hui | 2012 |
| Contemporary | Ten Years | Various | 2015 |
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