A Better Tomorrow

A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色, 1986) is John Woo's Hong Kong action landmark, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Ho is a respected triad operator who runs a counterfeiting racket and lives by an old code of honour. His younger brother Kit wants nothing from that world except to become an honest cop.

A counterfeit deal in Taipei collapses into an ambush. Ho takes a three-year prison fall, and his partner Mark (Chow Yun-fat), once a swaggering charmer in a trench coat and shades, is crippled in the shootout and left limping around a parking garage for tips. When Ho gets out, he wants to go straight. But the gang is now run by Shing, a former errand boy hungry to bury the old bosses and drag Kit into the filth along the way. Kit, meanwhile, has learned what his brother really was and stopped treating him like family.

This is the film that turned Chow Yun-fat into a superstar and made Woo the father of "heroic bloodshed": a matchstick clenched in the teeth, dual pistols, gunfights staged like ballet over tears about loyalty and honour. Leslie Cheung's wounded younger brother gives it all a raw ache. Half of 1990s Hollywood action owes it a debt. Essential viewing for anyone who loves Hong Kong cinema. Stream A Better Tomorrow (1986) online on iFILM.