Hong Kong Movies Bucket List

Ip Man opens a school in 1949 Hong Kong and ends up in a ring against a British boxer.

Donnie Yen as the Wing Chun master during the Japanese occupation; ten black belts at once.

A developer moves on the school and Mike Tyson turns up as his boss; the fight in the lift is the set piece.

A triad and his reckless little brother; Wong's first film, and the most conventional.

Norah Jones drives across America after a breakup; Wong's English-language road film.

Ip Man between the wars, in the rain; Wong's martial-arts epic.

A wuxia of exiled swordsmen in a desert, cut and recut for years; Christopher Doyle's desert light.

Laura Poitras in the Hong Kong hotel room as Edward Snowden hands over the files.

Stephen Chow's cartoon martial-arts comedy in a 1940s Shanghai slum.

Jackie Chan learns the drunken boxing style from a beggar; kung fu comedy at its purest.

A hitman, his agent and a mute who breaks into shops at night; Chungking Express after dark.

Chow Yun-fat in a hospital shootout of one continuous take; John Woo's Hong Kong farewell.

Bruce Lee at a martial-arts tournament on an island fortress; the mirror room.

Chow Yun-fat lights a cigarette with a burning banknote; the heroic bloodshed genre begins.

A hitman tries to fund an eye operation for the singer he blinded; Woo's doves and two-gun ballet.

A cop in the triads and a triad in the police; the film The Departed remade.

Leslie Cheung as a playboy in 1960 Hong Kong; the first of Wong Kar-wai's loose trilogy.

Jackie Chan slides down a pole of lights through a shopping mall; his own best film.

Two men from Hong Kong falling apart in Buenos Aires; Wong Kar-wai and the Iguazu falls.

A writer in a Hong Kong hotel and a science-fiction train to 2046; the sequel to In the Mood for Love.

Two Hong Kong cops and two women, canned pineapple and "California Dreamin'"; Wong Kar-wai's pop masterpiece.

Two neighbours in 1962 Hong Kong fall in love by never saying so.