An Autumn's Tale (1987)

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.