Directed by Patrick Tam | 90 mins | 1989
One of the unheralded masterworks of the Hong Kong New Wave, Tam’s high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as friends bound by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, luxuriously expressionistic imagery (courtesy DP Christopher Doyle), and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, "My Heart Is That Eternal Rose" exists at the intersection between Wong Kar-wai’s cinema of longing and John Woo’s cinema of wrathful vengeance.