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1
An Autumn's Tale (1987)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
Chow Yun-fat a year after A Better Tomorrow, with no gun in sight. Mabel Cheung sets her romance among Hong Kong emigrants scraping by in New York's Chinatown, and Chow plays a loud, broke, big-hearted chancer who looks out for a homesick student cousin, played by Cherie Chung. Watching the era's biggest action star be clumsy and tender is the whole pleasure. It won Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and its view of Hong Kong people building lives abroad feels like an early sketch of the departures that followed.
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Rouge (1987)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
The ghost story that is really about memory. Anita Mui plays a 1930s courtesan from the Shek Tong Tsui teahouses who returns as a ghost to 1987 Hong Kong, searching for the lover, Leslie Cheung, from whom a suicide pact was meant to unite her. Stanley Kwan cuts between the lacquered, lamplit past and a brisk, indifferent modern city, and the contrast does the mourning for him. Mui won Best Actress at the Golden Horse Awards, and the film took Best Film and Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards. It is the clearest case for why those two stars still matter so much to Hong Kong audiences.
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The Eighth Happiness (1988)
6.3/10on IMDb
Released
The Lunar New Year comedy at full volume. Johnnie To, years before his crime films, directs an ensemble built around three brothers and the women they meet when a phone line fails, with Chow Yun-fat camping it up as a flamboyant womanizer alongside Raymond Wong and Jacky Cheung. The gags are broad and the cast is stacked, which is exactly what these holiday releases were for: a whole family laughing in one row. It is the clearest view of the industry's mainstream at its most confident, and of Chow having more fun than any gunfight allowed him.
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Chicken and Duck Talk (1988)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Michael Hui, the comic behind The Private Eyes, owns a grubby Cantonese roast duck restaurant, and a gleaming fried chicken chain opens across the street. That is the whole premise, and it lands as a sharp, very funny look at a city where old family shops were losing ground to franchises and shiny frontage. Hui co-wrote it with director Clifton Ko, and his stingy, scheming, oddly lovable owner is one of the great comic performances of the decade. A good first comedy for anyone who finds Stephen Chow too frantic.
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Song of the Exile (1990)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
Ann Hui's semi-autobiographical drama about a daughter, played by Maggie Cheung, who comes home from studying in London in the 1970s and clashes with her Japanese mother. Then the film reaches back into the mother's own past in wartime Manchukuo and follows the two of them to her birthplace in Japan, and the outsider who never quite belonged in a Chinese household comes into focus. Few Hong Kong films are this precise about being caught between places, and the theme of where home really is hits harder knowing the decade that followed. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1990; come for Cheung, stay for Lu Hsiao-fen as the mother.
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Fight Back to School (1991)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
The film that made Stephen Chow's nonsense comedy the biggest thing in Hong Kong. Chow plays a washed-up police officer sent undercover as a student at an elite school to recover a stolen revolver, and the joke is a grown man failing at exams, crushes and teenage politics. The finale turns to guns and hostages, but the reason to watch is Chow and Ng Man-tat's double act, which Gordon Chan's film builds into its own little world. It ranks among the highest-grossing local films the territory ever produced.
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Center Stage (1991)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
Also released as Actress. Stanley Kwan's portrait of Ruan Lingyu, the Shanghai silent star who died in 1935, mixes Maggie Cheung's re-created scenes with clips from Ruan's own films and interviews with people who knew her, and even shows the cast discussing the production. The structure sounds dry; the effect is haunting, a Hong Kong film looking back at a lost Chinese cinema and asking who gets remembered. Cheung won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin, and for anyone who first met her as a sidekick in action films, this is the performance that shows what she could really do.
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All's Well, Ends Well (1992)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
If you watch one Lunar New Year comedy, make it this one. Clifton Ko puts Leslie Cheung, Stephen Chow, Maggie Cheung, Sandra Ng, Teresa Mo and Raymond Wong into one story about three hapless brothers and their romances, and every scene trades on audiences knowing exactly who these stars were. Leslie Cheung as an effeminate flower arranger caught in a gender-bending battle of the sexes is a joke about his own image that he clearly enjoys, while Chow's womanizing DJ and Maggie Cheung's movie-mad girlfriend stage parodies from Pretty Woman to Ghost. A huge hit that spawned a long run of sequels.
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Justice, My Foot! (1992)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
A courtroom comedy in Qing dynasty costume. Stephen Chow plays Sung Sai-kit, the slipperiest lawyer in Guangdong, who has retired to run his businesses until a suspicious murder drags him back to court, with Anita Mui as his formidable wife. Mui handles the occasional fight scene; Chow handles everything else with his mouth, and the fun is in the rapid-fire legal trickery, much of it built on Cantonese wordplay that subtitles struggle to carry. Johnnie To directs, and the pairing of Chow's motor-mouth and Mui's dry authority is one of the best of his career.
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The Legendary La Rose Noire (1992)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
Released as 92 Legendary La Rose Noire. Jeffrey Lau's comedy is a fond, ridiculous tribute to Black Rose, the vigilante of Chor Yuen's 1960s Hong Kong films, in which a novelist who imitates the heroine ends up kidnapped by the real Black Rose's apprentices. Much of the fun is in how lovingly it mimics the look and manners of those old pictures, and it still works if you have never seen one. Tony Leung Chiu-wai, in a rare goofy turn, won Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and Fung Bo Bo took Best Supporting Actress.
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Cageman (1992)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
The most direct look on this list at how poor Hong Kong lived. Jacob Cheung's satirical comedy-drama follows the tenants of a cage house, where each bed is boxed in by metal mesh, who refuse to leave when the landlord announces he will take back the building and demolish it. It is funny and angry in turns, with councillors and TV crews circling the residents for their own reasons. It won Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Liu Kai-chi at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and it explains the city's housing squeeze better than most documentaries.
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Tom, Dick and Hairy (1993)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
The early-1990s Hong Kong romantic comedy at its most relaxed. Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Tony Leung Ka-fai and Lawrence Cheng play three men in one tenement building with very different love lives, and Peter Chan and Lee Chi-ngai let it ramble through dates, bars and bad decisions without forcing a big plot. It is the film to watch if you know both Tony Leungs from crime and period epics and want to see them simply hanging around, being charming and a bit pathetic. It was one of the hits for United Filmmakers Organization, the company Chan co-founded, which went on to make He's a Woman, She's a Man and Comrades, Almost a Love Story.
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C'est La Vie Mon Cheri (1993)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
A melodrama that earns its tears. Lau Ching-wan plays a struggling jazz musician who refuses to sell out, and Anita Yuen is the Cantonese opera performer who drags him back into life before she is diagnosed with bone cancer. The outline is pure weepie, but Derek Yee fills it with the noise and warmth of working-class Hong Kong, and Yuen's mischief keeps it from wallowing. It took nearly every major prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress for Yuen, who won again the following year for He's a Woman, She's a Man.
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He's a Woman, She's a Man (1994)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
The romantic comedy that defined mid-1990s Hong Kong pop culture. Anita Yuen plays a fan who dresses as a man to enter a male-only talent search run by Leslie Cheung's star producer, and Peter Chan wrings every possible confusion out of a man unsettled to find himself falling for his new protege. It is light, quick and quietly braver about desire than it lets on, with Carina Lau superb as the pop diva caught in the middle. Yuen won Best Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and Cheung's theme song Chase won Best Original Song.
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From Beijing with Love (1994)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Stephen Chow's James Bond spoof, and the easiest of his early films to love if you know only his later work. He plays Ling Ling Chat, a name that sounds like 007 in Cantonese, a mainland agent working undercover as a pork butcher in Shenzhen who is sent to Hong Kong to recover a stolen dinosaur skull. Anita Yuen plays the woman who comes to buy pork and is not what she seems. The gadget gags are a joy, and a hapless mainland spy loose in Hong Kong three years before the handover adds a sly edge to the silliness. Chow co-directed with Lee Lik-chi.
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Summer Snow (1995)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
Ann Hui's comedy-drama about a middle-aged housewife who finds herself caring for her widowed father-in-law as Alzheimer's disease takes hold. It is far funnier than that sounds: Josephine Siao's harried, practical May copes with a husband who offers little support and a family in upheaval, and Roy Chiao makes the old man's confusion both comic and frightening. Siao won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin, and the film took Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards, with Chiao winning Best Actor. The best film here about ordinary family life in a crowded city.
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Hu-Du-Men (1996)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Josephine Siao again, this time as a star of Cantonese opera whose husband's career has stalled and who wants her to quit the troupe and emigrate with him to Australia. The title is the opera term for the threshold between backstage and the stage, and Shu Kei's gentle comedy is all about the line between who you play and who you are. It is the film on this list that most directly captures the emigration wave of the 1990s, when families were weighing a new passport against everything they would leave behind. Hong Kong chose it as its Academy Awards entry.
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Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
The essential Hong Kong love story of the decade. Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung play two mainland migrants who come to Hong Kong to make a living, fall in love and keep missing each other across almost ten years, from the 1987 crash to New York. Peter Chan treats the songs of Teresa Teng, which gave the film its Chinese title, as the thread running through a whole generation's hopes. It won nine Hong Kong Film Awards including Best Film and Best Director, and the Golden Horse festival ranked it 16th in its 2011 list of the 100 greatest Chinese-language films. If you watch one film from this list, make it this.
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Viva Erotica (1996)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
A comedy about the Hong Kong film industry from the inside, made by people who knew it well. Leslie Cheung plays a struggling director, living off his girlfriend, who agrees to make a Category III adult film for a triad boss to get his own script financed, and Derek Yee and Lo Chi-leung have great fun with the gangsters, egos and doubts about artistic integrity that follow. Shu Qi, as the starlet he must direct, won Best Supporting Actress and Best New Artist at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Funny, a little sad and the best film on this list about how the local industry actually worked in its final boom years.
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The God of Cookery (1996)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Stephen Chow at his most gleefully absurd. He plays a corrupt celebrity chef, all showmanship and no conscience, who is exposed as a fraud by a rival, loses his empire and has to win back his title the hard way. The street food war that ends in Pissing Beef Balls and the barbecue pork Sorrowful Rice of the final competition are the scenes fans still quote, and Karen Mok, playing both the devoted street vendor Turkey and a goddess, matches him joke for joke. Chow co-directed with Lee Lik-chi, and if you only know Shaolin Soccer, this is where that sensibility was born.
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Made in Hong Kong (1997)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
The handover-year film that says what the comedies could not. Fruit Chan wrote, directed and edited this drama about a teenage dropout called Moon who collects debts for a triad, falls for a girl with a failing kidney and drifts through a city that seems to have no plans for him. Shot for half a million Hong Kong dollars and released a few months after the handover, it gave newcomer Sam Lee his first film role, and it looks nothing like the polished studio films above it, rough and restless and close to the street. It won Best Film, Best Director and Best New Performer at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and Chan has said it is about young people first and the handover second.
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