Paris has romance and New York has the skyline. Hong Kong has heartache, mystery — and Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and a wealth of stylised, site-specific, vastly influential action and crime movies. Film-industry history and real life both played a role in that. A longtime liking for martial arts crowd-pleasers among the city’s producers was turbocharged by Lee — until, in the 1980s, spikes in the crime rate inspired local film-makers to make underworld thrillers that outdid Hollywood.

But there have always been other movie Hong Kongs too. Take the swooning, colour-soaked love stories made by director Wong Kar Wai, raised in the city by parents exiled from Shanghai by the Cultural Revolution. His films find their characters pulled this way and that, in keeping with a place whose past has been bound up with both Britain and mainland China, and whose movies have always been a back-and-forth dialogue with America.

In the Mood for Love (2000)