Vibe
Watchability-first placement: entertainment, rewatchability, star power and Hong Kong personality lead the decision.
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In feels like Hong Kong action cinema building a shrine to its own past and then starting a brawl inside it. Raymond Lam plays Chan Lok-kwun, an undocumented young migrant in 1980s Hong Kong who flees a triad boss and disappears into Kowloon Walled City. There he finds Cyclone, Louis Koo’s calm local leader, a group of young fighters and something he has never had: a community with rules strong enough to become home. Soi Cheang turns the vanished Walled City into the film’s great character. Corridors stack on corridors, electrical cables hang over tiny shops, rooftops become streets and every fight uses cramped architecture as part of its choreography. Veteran stars—including Sammo Hung—connect the production to earlier generations, while Kenji Tanigaki’s action design gives the younger cast speed and impact without simply imitating 1980s stunt style. The story eventually becomes mythic, but the movie earns that scale by spending time on haircuts, meals, medicine and neighborhood labor. Cannes programmed it as a Midnight Screening; Hong Kong audiences made it a major hit; the Hong Kong Film Awards later gave it Best Film, Best Director and a sweep of craft prizes. Rank #50 makes it the midpoint statement: this tradition is not finished.
Watch for
- The Walled City production design as functional geography: barbers, clinics, food stalls, wiring, rooftops and hidden passages establish a community before the same spaces become action arenas.
- Kenji Tanigaki’s choreography using walls, narrow corridors and vertical drops so fighters constantly interact with the environment instead of performing on empty stages.
- The generational casting, especially Louis Koo and Sammo Hung, which lets older Hong Kong screen authority coexist with a younger ensemble without turning the film into nostalgia cameos.
- Small rituals of belonging—food, work, medical help, haircuts and protection—that make the later defense of the Walled City emotional rather than merely territorial.
Production notes
Soi Cheang adapted Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In from the City of Darkness material associated with Andy Seto, working from a screenplay credited at Cannes to Au Kin-yee, Chan Tai-lee, Shum Kwan-sin and Lai Chun. Cheng Siu-keung photographed the film, while the large production-design team reconstructed an expressive version of the demolished Kowloon Walled City rather than attempting a neutral museum replica. That set was essential because the action is inseparable from architecture: Kenji Tanigaki’s choreography sends performers through corridors, over railings, across rooftops and into rooms dense with practical detail. The cast deliberately spans generations, with Raymond Lam and a younger ensemble sharing the film with Louis Koo, Richie Jen, Philip Ng and Sammo Hung. Cannes selected the 125-minute feature for an Out of Competition Midnight Screening in 2024, giving the film immediate international visibility. Its local theatrical run became one of Hong Kong’s biggest successes of the year. At the 43rd Hong Kong Film Awards in 2025, it won nine prizes, including Best Film, Best Director, cinematography, editing, art direction, costume and makeup design, action choreography, sound and visual effects.
Trivia
- The film premiered internationally in Cannes’ 2024 Midnight Screenings program.
- Its story is set in 1980s Kowloon Walled City, a dense settlement demolished in the 1990s and reconstructed for the production on an enormous practical set.
- Kenji Tanigaki won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Action Choreography for the film.
- At the 2025 Hong Kong Film Awards, the movie won nine awards including Best Film and Best Director for Soi Cheang.
- It became one of Hong Kong’s biggest local box-office successes of 2024 and served as Hong Kong’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.
Legacy
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In mattered before anyone could know whether it would last for decades because its success changed the present-tense conversation around Hong Kong cinema. The film demonstrated that a large-scale local action production, rooted in Cantonese performance traditions and a specifically Hong Kong urban myth, could still become a theatrical event. Its Cannes slot brought international genre attention, but the local response was more important: strong box office and the subsequent Hong Kong Film Awards sweep made the picture feel like a vote of confidence in a battered industry. The recreated Walled City also gave younger audiences a tactile pop-cultural image of a place they had never experienced, inevitably romanticized but filled with enough labor, grime and community detail to feel inhabited. For veterans such as Sammo Hung and established stars such as Louis Koo, the film links contemporary production to older action lineages without asking them to carry the whole spectacle. For Soi Cheang, it proved that his darker sensibility could operate at blockbuster scale. Its long-term ranking may move as the decade settles, but Movie Night should not wait twenty years to acknowledge a movie that made Hong Kong action feel communal, current and proudly excessive again.
Why it is on Movie Night
This collection is intentionally different from the historical Hong Kong Top 100. A film can rank high because it is irresistible to rewatch, enormously entertaining, packed with memorable stars or simply captures the feeling that made people fall in love with Hong Kong movies.