Co-presented by New York Asian Film Festival.

Cited by Jackie Chan as his personal favorite among his more than 100 feature films, Police Story marked the action superstar’s triumphant return to his home turf after an ill-fated attempt to break into the American market, and paired him with two equally legendary leading ladies of the 1980s Hong Kong new wave: Maggie Cheung and Brigitte Lin. The plot—which serves mainly to carry us from one magnificent, death-defying set piece to the next—finds Chan’s honest cop, Chan Ka-Kui, pursuing a triad kingpin while trying to protect the kingpin’s imperiled secretary (Lin) and assuaging the jealousy of his own girlfriend (Cheung). On wheels and on foot, through layers of glass and concrete he goes, resulting in several of the most crazily balletic, duly celebrated sequences in the Chan canon—including Jackie’s perilous dangle from a speeding bus with nothing more than an umbrella for support. Take that, Gene Kelly! 

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“Superb, unpretentious entertainment from one of the world’s two remaining centers of truly popular cinema, Hong Kong.” —NYFF25 program note

“In Police Story Jackie’s manic urge to make the scene maximally gripping is itself a little scary. Nonetheless, when a director isn’t afraid of tapping the real power of movies, a fight scene can give us an adrenalin transfusion. Who needs 3-D?” —David Bordwell, Observations on Film Art