A Better Tomorrow (1986) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Nakul ★★★★ 1

  Nobody understands the male friendship & brotherhood better than John Woo.

• Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★

  john woo just earnestly loves guys being dudes, loads of bros crying their hearts out in the rain and hugging each other and fighting for honor and loyalty and chivalry, it f*cking rules

• Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 5

  Brotherhood and ethics vs. blood and fire. The DNA strand to just about every great action melodrama for the next two decades.

• Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★★ 3

  After an up and down decade as a director for hire in the last days of the Shaw Brothers, working alternately in the wuxia and wacky comedy genres, John Woo finally hit it big in 1986 when he teamed up with Tsui Hark and the Cinema City studio to remake Patrick Lung Kong's 1967 drama The Story of a Discharged Prisoner. One of the most influential films of the past 30 years, A Better Tomorrow established the formal and thematic template for a new era of crime movie: everything that has followed, from Woo’s follow-up masterpieces The Killer and Hard-Boiled to the triad films of Johnnie To, to myriad international imitators, has in some way been a response to it.…

• Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★★ 1

  Somebody told John Woo that ACAB meant All Cops Are Bros and no one bothered to correct him.

• Review by Netscape Negro ★★★★★ 1

  Don’t get me wrong, this is great, but it really needs a beaver with box braids.

• Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  The last time I wrote here about this one, I talked about the relationship to A Story of Discharged Prisoner and Chang Cheh's brotherhood films. Rewatching it today, I was thinking about the signficance of the casting. Ti Lung was, of course, one of Chang Cheh's main leads of the 70se near the end of his leading man days and opposite to him there was Leslie Cheung who was along with Andy Lau, one of the two main romantic heartthrobs of the era. So old values and new values, Chang Cheh's chivalry and 80s new affluence. The cantonese title "The Essence of Heroes" is very Cheh and refers to Ti Lung and Chow Yun-Fat brotherhood while the english title A…

• Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  Finally having seen STORY OF A DISCHARGED PRISONER it seems very clear that Woo took inspiration from its social realism and tried to marry that to a Shaw-style story of martial brotherhood using their shared shifting codes of honor as a bridge. Once the catalyst for those shifts was, say, a splinter clan trying to steal a powerful scroll, but now it's an economic bubble emerging from an influx of cheap foreign money. Either way loyalty and fraternity are the only things that end up having real, intrinsic value.

• Review by Kaijuman ★★★★ 5

  Lighting a cigarette with a burning 100 dollar bill is one of the coolest things to ever happen in cinema.

  You can actually feel John Woo being born over the course of this film. Heroes Shed No Tears started his accession but this helped form it into what would become Woo’s signature style. The Killer a couple of years later would forever solidify it.

  The first 20 minutes of this play out almost like a comedy before everything goes to absolute sh*t. Everything after that is pure testosterone-fueled family drama and bloody shootouts. Woo hadn’t perfected the drama to shootout ratio yet so there’s a considerable amount more drama than action. But when your drama is as sweaty and aggressively…

• Review by BananaPudding ★★★½ 4

  Chow Yun-Fat light his cigarette with a burning cash not even 5 minutes into the movie, 6 stars

• Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★½

  I'm going to have a double feature of this & the pilot to Miami Vice and ascend into heaven one of these days

• Review by CinemaJoe ★★★★ 9

  Imagine a world where action scenes today were anything like the final scene in A Better Tomorrow.
  
  It would be a beautiful world.