How Hong Kong New Wave directors hijacked martial arts and crime films to make art

It is easy to misremember the Hong Kong New Wave of the late 1970s and 80s. Nearly five decades after its inception, that iconic chapter in the city’s cinema history is generally thought of as a socially inclined art-house movement that addressed everyday issues – a stark contrast to the martial arts films that dominated the local box office at the time. While partially true, viewing New Wave films merely as local iterations of 1960s and 70s rarefied European art-house cinema misses the mark....