Film at Lincoln Center announces “The Grandmaster: Tony Leung,” a 13-film retrospective running April 29 through May 7 celebrating one of cinema’s most iconic actors. Presented ahead of the theatrical release of “Silent Friend“, the program will feature Tony Leung in person for a number of special appearances—his first return to Film at Lincoln Center in more than 25 years—including post-screening Q&As with Leung and director Ildikó Enyedi and a career-spanning “An Evening with Tony Leung” conversation.

The defining face of the Hong Kong New Wave, an international icon of romantic longing and existential searching, Tony Leung Chiu-wai has made restraint his signature. Across five decades of genre-spanning, globally celebrated work, he embodies the radical idea that the most resonant performances are often the most controlled; that minimalism can be magnetic, hypnotically complex, and aching with emotional depth. After winning fans as a fresh-faced television heartthrob in 1980s Hong Kong, one of TVB’s celebrated “Five Tiger” young idols, Leung established his early command of both interior drama and high-stakes action with Hou Hsiao-hsien and in John Woo’s “Bullet in the Head” (1990). He then went on to forge one of contemporary cinema’s most enduring actor-director partnerships with Wong Kar Wai, spanning seven films in which his quiet volatility, emotional reserve, and uncanny fluency in the language of longing found their purest expression. Their project reached perhaps its sublime apex with “In the Mood for Love“ (2000), which earned him the Best Actor prize at Cannes—the first Hong Kong actor to receive the honor. Since then, his filmography has expanded into something both vast and remarkably cohesive, with indelible performances in the landmark cops-and-triads thriller “Infernal Affairs“ (2002), later remade in the U.S. as “The Departed“, Ang Lee’s lush wartime melodrama “Lust, Caution“ (2007), Woo’s two-part historical epic “Red Cliff“ (2008-2009), and even a rare, scene-stealing turn in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This career-spanning retrospective gives audiences the chance to rediscover, on the big screen, why the world continues to fall for Tony Leung time and time again.

Organized by Florence Almozini, Vice President of Programming, Film at Lincoln Center and Tyler Wilson, Senior Programmer, Film at Lincoln Center.

Travel support for this series is in part generously provided by Mike Audet.

“The Grandmaster: Tony Leung“ is sponsored by Criterion, your trusted home for the best in classic and contemporary films, on the Criterion Channel and in the Criterion Collection’s definitive physical editions.

Acknowledgments:
1-2 Special; Academy Film Archive; Janus Films; University of Colorado Boulder Libraries and Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Tickets will go on sale on Monday, April 6 at noon, with an early access period for FLC Members beginning on Friday, April 3 at noon. Retrospective tickets are $18; $15 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $13 for FLC Members. See more and save with a 3+ Film Package ($16 for GP; $13 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $11 for FLC Members). Tickets for “An Evening with Tony Leung” are $40; $35 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $30 for FLC Members.

Tickets for Silent Friend are $19; $16 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $15 for FLC Members. Tickets for Silent Friend screenings with Q&As are $25; $22 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $20 for FLC Members. 3+ Package excludes “An Evening with Tony Leung” and Silent Friend screenings. Learn more here.

FILM DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street)

Opens May 8

Silent Friend
Ildikó Enyedi, 2025, Germany/France/Hungary, 147m
German, English, and Cantonese with English subtitles
Ildikó Enyedi, whose On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlinale and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film, returns with a century-spanning triptych that moves from 1908 to the early months of the pandemic, unfolding around an ancient ginkgo in the botanical garden of Marburg University, the fixed witness to a century’s worth of passing faces. From a young woman forcing her way into the male-dominated scientific establishment at the dawn of the 20th century (played by Luna Wedler, winner of the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actress at the 2025 Venice Film Festival), to idealistic lovers in the politically turbulent 1970s, Enyedi considers how consciousness itself is historically situated, mapping the incremental rewiring of how people think and connect over time. Tony Leung anchors the 2020 chapter with a characteristically subtle, deeply felt performance as a visiting neuroscientist stranded on campus during lockdown, whose attempt to measure the tree’s electromagnetic signals—guided remotely by a French plant biologist, played by Léa Seydoux—gradually opens into a meditation on perception itself. Shifting between silvered monochrome 35mm, warm 16mm, and digital macro-photography, Silent Friend attends to the rhythms of time in all its forms, where the tremor of a leaf in late afternoon carries the same gravity as a held glance across a room. A 1-2 Special release.
Wednesday, May 6 at 1:30pm – Q&A with Ildikó Enyedi and Tony Leung
Thursday, May 7 at 5:30pm – Q&A with Ildikó Enyedi and Tony Leung
Friday, May 8 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Ildikó Enyedi and Tony Leung

New 4K Restoration

Bullet in the Head
John Woo, 1990, Hong Kong, 136m
Cantonese with English subtitles
John Woo’s Vietnam War-cum-gangster saga begins amid the unrest of 1967 Hong Kong, where three friends—Ben (Tony Leung), Frank (Jacky Cheung), and Paul (Waise Lee)—skip town after a wedding-night gang fight turns deadly. Their escape plan lands them in Saigon, but its lawless war zones teeming with opportunists and profiteers pull them into an escalating spiral of greed and betrayal. Something like The Deer Hunter by way of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bullet in the Head showcases Woo at his most ferocious and somber, whiplashing from street fights to one punishing, large-scale set piece after another while Leung’s tremulous, man-under-fire performance cuts against the surrounding pyrotechnics with an unusual magnetism, and transforms Ben’s frenzied arc into something tragically relatable.
Thursday, April 30 at 6:00pm

New 4K Restoration

Hard Boiled
John Woo, 1992, Hong Kong, 128m
Cantonese with English subtitles
Two years after Bullet in the Head, Tony Leung reunited with John Woo as a dapper, ice-cool hit man whose divided loyalties anticipated the stoic, enigmatic screen presence that would define him by the new millennium and, in particular, the conflicted soul he would immortalize in Infernal Affairs. When jazz-loving detective “Tequila” Yuen (Chow Yun-fat, already an icon from A Better Tomorrow and The Killer) tears through Hong Kong’s gun-smuggling underworld after his partner is killed, the impeccably dressed killer in his sights (Leung) inevitably proves to be another cop in disguise, giving Woo the perfect excuse to pair Chow’s swaggering cowboy with the subtly mesmerizing Leung. Swooping camera moves, slow-motion doves, and tequila glasses giving way to frantic close-ups of muzzle flashes and bodies hurled through the air, this is Woo at the height of his formal powers—an action landmark whose perversely poetic expressions of destruction set the stage for Woo’s run in Hollywood.
Thursday, April 30 at 8:50pm
Friday, May 1 at 12:45pm

New 4K Restoration

Chungking Express
John Woo, 1992, Hong Kong, 128m
Cantonese with English subtitles
Wong Kar Wai, 1994, Hong Kong, 102m
Cantonese, Mandarin, and English with English subtitles
For American audiences who first encountered Tony Leung during Chungking Express’s U.S. theatrical release (his first major stateside breakthrough), it was a revelation, marking his emergence from Hong Kong stardom into an international arthouse icon and Wong Kar Wai’s defining muse, paving the way for masterpieces like In the Mood for Love and 2046. In it, two heartsick Hong Kong cops (Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro), both jilted by ex-lovers, cross paths at the Midnight Express takeout restaurant stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye (Faye Wong) works, but it is Leung’s Cop 663, drifting through the film’s dreamy second half in a state of quiet heartbreak, who gives this pop-infused city symphony its soulful center. This gloriously shot (by Christopher Doyle), utterly unexpected charmer cemented the sex appeal of its gorgeous stars and forever turned canned pineapple and The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” into tokens of longing—one of the defining works of ’90s cinema. An NYFF32 selection.
Wednesday, April 29 at 6:30pm
Thursday, May 7 at 12:15pm

Cyclo
Trân Anh Hùng, 1995, Vietnam/France/Hong Kong, 35mm, 123m
Vietnamese with English subtitles
Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Trân Anh Hùng’s feverish follow-up to The Scent of Green Papaya plunges into post–Đổi Mới Saigon and marked a radical, darker departure for Tony Leung, here conjuring a haunting blend of tortured interiority and taciturn charisma. He plays the Poet, a near-silent gangster orbiting the city’s underworld, who ensnares an orphaned cyclo driver after his bicycle taxi is stolen, coercing the boy into running drugs while the boy’s sister is groomed for prostitution. Shot in 35mm with a gritty immediacy that slips into an increasingly hallucinatory grammar, Cyclo is a ’90s gem that transfigures neon, sweat, and pop music into a punishingly sad fever dream, with Leung’s tight-lipped performance—all eyes and pensive cigarette drags—at its center. 35mm film print generously provided by the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries and Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts.
Wednesday, April 29 at 3:45pm
Friday, May 1 at 8:30pm

New 4K Restoration

Happy Together
Wong Kar Wai, 1997, Hong Kong/Japan/South Korea, 96m
Cantonese and Spanish with English subtitles
One of Tony Leung’s most vulnerable performances anchors Wong Kar Wai’s raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown. He plays Lai Yiu-fai, a homesick Hong Kong exile in Buenos Aires, locked in an on-again/off-again spiral of passion, jealousy, and “starting over” with the mercurial Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung). Lai moves from tango bars to kitchen shifts and, in a heartbreaking stretch, nurses Ho back to health with quiet, wounded steadiness. Capturing the dynamics of a queer relationship with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong—when the country’s LGBTQ community suddenly faced an uncertain future—Wong portrays the cycle of a love affair that is by turns devastating and delirious. Shot by Christopher Doyle in both luminous monochrome and saturated color, Happy Together is an intoxicating exploration of displacement and desire. An NYFF35 selection.
Wednesday, April 29 at 8:45pm
Monday, May 4 at 9:15pm

New 4K Restoration

Flowers of Shanghai
Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998, Taiwan/Japan, 113m
Mandarin with English subtitles
In one of his most quietly devastating performances, Tony Leung stars as Master Wang, a wealthy patron drifting through the opium-laden “flower houses” of fin-de-siècle 19th-century Shanghai. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ravishing chamber drama follows the intertwined intrigues of four courtesans in a hermetically sealed world that seems to float outside of time. Torn between the demanding Crimson (Michiko Hada) and the more eager-to-please Jasmin (Vicky Wei), Wang gradually realizes he is looking for love in all the wrong places. Hou’s first film set outside of Taiwan, Flowers of Shanghai is a transfixing masterwork—an achingly, intoxicatingly sensuous touchstone and a pivotal chapter in Leung’s career that placed his famously modern melancholia inside an exquisite late-Qing tableau. An NYFF36 Main Slate selection and NYFF58 Revivals selection.
Friday, May 1 at 6:00pm
Tuesday, May 5 at 12:30pm

New 4K Restoration

In the Mood for Love + In the Mood for Love 2001
Wong Kar Wai, 2000/2001, Hong Kong/France, 107m
Cantonese and Shanghainese with English subtitles
Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung, in the career-defining performance that earned him Best Actor at Cannes) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic yearning and its fleeting moments, anchored by Leung’s controlled portrayal of desire held just below the surface. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past quarter-century of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong and Leung’s redoubtable artistic partnership. An NYFF38 Main Slate selection and an NYFF58 Revivals selection.

The feature will be followed by In the Mood for Love 2001, a nine-minute coda—the “dessert” after the main course, as Wong put it. It imagines Leung and Cheung, now as different characters, reuniting in a modern-day Hong Kong convenience store. Brisk, comic, and unconstrained, yet no less beguiling. A Janus Films release.
Saturday, May 2 at 6:00pm
Thursday, May 7 at 9:00pm

Hero
Zhang Yimou, 2002, China/Hong Kong, 35mm, 99m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Zhang Yimou’s lush wuxia unfurls an assassination plot through a Rashomon-like chain of flashbacks. In the Warring States period, Nameless (Jet Li) claims he has killed three rebels—Sky (Donnie Yen), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Broken Sword (Tony Leung)—which earns him an audience with the King of Qin. Each retelling shifts motive and allegiance, from a rain-drenched duel scored to a zither, to a crimson-soaked calligraphy school pierced by volleys of arrows. Reuniting the In the Mood for Love pair in a more openly tragic key, Leung and Cheung bring aching romantic force to Yimou’s hyper-stylized parable about the cost of peace under authoritarian rule, as Ching Siu-tung’s wire-fu choreography and Christopher Doyle’s cinematography turn each duel into a precise, operatic set piece. 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive.
Sunday, May 3 at 1:00pm

4K Restoration

Infernal Affairs
Andrew Lau, Alan Mak, 2002, Hong Kong, 101m
Cantonese with English subtitles
A blockbuster in Asia, and later the source for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, the first part of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s groundbreaking policier saga traded the high-octane ballistics of earlier Hong Kong films for a cooler, crisper style and a head-spinning plot full of twists that forever changed the genre. After being thrown out of the police academy, Yan (Tony Leung) is buried alive in the criminal underworld as a long-term undercover cop, his grip on identity pushed to the breaking point. Recruited by the triads as a teenager, Ming (Andy Lau) is the mirror image: a mole inside the police department’s Criminal Intelligence Bureau. Co-written by Mak with Felix Chong, Infernal Affairs draws symmetrical lines of action between mob and police, capturing with precision the swelling pressures as each man hunts the traitor who is, in fact, himself. A sleek, visually exacting thriller for two great stars, Infernal Affairs is also one of Leung’s defining roles (shot the same year as Hero), channeling the gravitas of his art-house work into one of modern crime cinema’s most quietly devastating performances.
Friday, May 1 at 3:30pm
Sunday, May 3 at 9:15pm

2046
Wong Kar Wai, 2004, Hong Kong/China/France/Italy/Germany, 35mm, 128m
Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese with English subtitles
In Wong Kar Wai’s future-set 2046 (a loose continuation of Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love), the titular number is many things at once: the year when mainland China assumes absolute control of Hong Kong; the number of the hotel room across from that of Mr. Chow (Tony Leung), inhabited by a parade of women he pursues and abandons; and the name of the mysterious place where disappointed lovers escape to in Chow’s erotic science-fiction novel. Wong’s concentration and control—of the Cinemascope frame, light, color, and the most minute gestures—are at their most accomplished in a work enamored of the limitless expanse of memory and imagination, where reality and fiction dissolve into regret and yearning. Leung’s reprisal of the affable, self-mocking Chow, this time with a bitter edge, makes the film’s reality and fantasy feel like one continuous ache. Faye Wong, Carina Lau, Gong Li, Maggie Cheung, and an electrifying Ziyi Zhang are the women in his life, indelible as ghosts from a forgotten past.
Saturday, May 2 at 8:45pm
Tuesday, May 5 at 3:00pm

Lust, Caution
Ang Lee, 2007, U.S./China/Taiwan/Hong Kong, 35mm, 158m
Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Japanese with English subtitles
In 2007, Ang Lee set out to “create a Tony Leung you’ve never seen before,” and his Mr. Yee in Lust, Caution is exactly that: a high-ranking collaborator responsible for torture and executions, whose terrifying aura of power registers in the smallest gestures and an inscrutable gaze. Against the shifting backdrop of Japanese-occupied Hong Kong and Shanghai, a student resistance cell recruits shy actress Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) to infiltrate Yee’s circle as “Mrs. Mak,” using seduction to draw him into a trap she reprises years later when an assassination plot is finally set in motion. Lee turns mahjong games, shopping trips, and tea-room small talk into slow-burn suspense, ignited in scenes of brutal intimacy and sudden bloodshed. Leung’s performance—a master class in control—loads every glance into an expression that might be a test, or a threat, in this exacting, sensuous espionage tragedy that remains as seductive as it is devastating. Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Wednesday, April 29 at 12:30pm
Monday, May 4 at 6:00pm

Red Cliff
John Woo, 2008–09, China/Hong Kong/Japan/South Korea/Taiwan, 35mm, 287m
Mandarin with English subtitles
John Woo’s colossal five-hour epic recreates the Battle of Red Cliffs (208–209 A.D.) as a thriller of tactics and temperament, anchored by Tony Leung’s soulful performance as Zhou Yu—a “warrior-poet” general of the southern kingdom of Wu, leading an uneasy alliance against Chancellor Cao Cao’s overwhelming northern invasion. As Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) drives this campaign to unify China by force, Zhou Yu helps broker an uneasy alliance between southern ruler Sun Quan (Chang Chen) and the exiled warlord Liu Bei, whose forces are guided by master strategist Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), sealed in a candlelit guqin duet that doubles as a test of wills. What follows is Woo at operatic scale: cavalry trapped in the Eight Trigrams formation, plague corpses floated downriver, a “borrowed arrows” gambit at dawn, and a fire-ship assault that sets the Yangtze ablaze. Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to present this exceptionally rare 35mm screening of Red Cliff in its complete two-part version, with a 35-minute intermission on April 30 and 45-minute intermission on May 3.
Thursday, April 30 at 12:00pm (with 35-minute intermission)
Sunday, May 3 at 3:15pm (with 45-minute intermission)

The Grandmaster (Hong Kong Cut)
Wong Kar Wai, 2013, Hong Kong/China, 130m
Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese with English subtitles
Nearly 10 years in the making and the culmination of Wong Kar Wai’s seven-film partnership with Tony Leung, The Grandmaster is his most ambitious project: a propulsive action epic inspired by the life of legendary kung fu master Ip Man, played by Leung, who trained for four years—enduring injuries along the way—to bring the role’s physical and philosophical rigor to life with effortless precision and cool. The story spans the tumultuous Republican era following the fall of China’s last dynasty, a time of chaos, divided loyalties, and war, but also the golden age of Chinese martial arts. Filmed across snow-swept northern landscapes and the subtropical South, this original 130-minute Hong Kong cut features exquisitely staged action and virtuosic performances by Leung and Ziyi Zhang, who lends a transfixing allure to the fictional Gong Er, Ip’s friend and fellow martial artist.
Tuesday, May 5 at 9:00pm
Thursday, May 7 at 2:30pm

An Evening with Tony Leung
In anticipation of his latest role in Silent Friend, opening at Film at Lincoln Center on May 8, and as part of our career-spanning retrospective, Tony Leung joins us in the Walter Reade Theater for a special onstage conversation tracing one of the most extraordinary screen careers of the past five decades. From his emergence in the Hong Kong New Wave to his enduring collaborations with many of the defining filmmakers of contemporary cinema, Leung will reflect on the roles, working methods, and creative instincts that have shaped his singular screen presence.
Tuesday, May 5 at 6:00pm

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER