A reforming ex-gangster tries to reconcile with his estranged policeman brother, but the ties to his former gang are difficult to break.
Alvo Duplo, 영웅본색, Gangland Boss, โหด เลว ดี, 男たちの挽歌, Για Ένα Καλύτερο Αύριο, Ying xiong ben se, Rapid Fire, Otoko tachi no banka, Otoko tachi no banka I, Un Mañana Mejor, City Wolf - A Better Tomorrow, A Better Tommorrow I, City Wolf, Un mañana mejor, Le Syndicat du crime, Crime em Hong Kong, Светлое будущее, אויב המחר, Lepší zítřek, Byle do Jutra, Anh Hùng Bản Sắc, Szebb holnap, Un viitor mai bun, Yarın Çok Güzel Olacak, За боље сутра
Germany Berlin International Film Festival 
Greece Panorama of European Cinema 
China Pingyao International Film Festival 
Brazil16 
USAR ChinaR 
Hong KongIIB USAR 
Japan 
South Korea15 
France12 
Netherlands16 China Netherlands16 Brazil China France Germany Greece Hong Kong Japan Netherlands South Korea USA 
john woo just earnestly loves guys being dudes, loads of bros crying their hearts out in the rain and hugging each other and fighting for honor and loyalty and chivalry, it fucking rules
Nobody understands the male friendship & brotherhood better than John Woo.
Chow yun-fat fortnite skin i need it
Brotherhood and ethics vs. blood and fire. The DNA strand to just about every great action melodrama for the next two decades.
Chow Yun-Fat light his cigarette with a burning cash not even 5 minutes into the movie, 6 stars
Somebody told John Woo that ACAB meant All Cops Are Bros and no one bothered to correct him.
Don’t get me wrong, this is great, but it really needs a beaver with box braids.
After an up and down decade as a director for hire in the last days of the Shaw Brothers, working alternately in the wuxia and wacky comedy genres, John Woo finally hit it big in 1986 when he teamed up with Tsui Hark and the Cinema City studio to remake Patrick Lung Kong's 1967 drama The Story of a Discharged Prisoner. One of the most influential films of the past 30 years, A Better Tomorrow established the formal and thematic template for a new era of crime movie: everything that has followed, from Woo’s follow-up masterpieces The Killer and Hard-Boiled to the triad films of Johnnie To, to myriad international imitators, has in some way been a response to it.…
Make action films gay again.
Lighting a cigarette with a burning 100 dollar bill is one of the coolest things to ever happen in cinema.
You can actually feel John Woo being born over the course of this film. Heroes Shed No Tears started his accession but this helped form it into what would become Woo’s signature style. The Killer a couple of years later would forever solidify it.
The first 20 minutes of this play out almost like a comedy before everything goes to absolute shit. Everything after that is pure testosterone-fueled family drama and bloody shootouts. Woo hadn’t perfected the drama to shootout ratio yet so there’s a considerable amount more drama than action. But when your drama is as sweaty and aggressively…
Living and dying with your bros. One of the great male weepies. I always forget how much of a little shit Leslie Cheung is through this. By far Woo’s most masochistic film. It seems like Woo set a bet to see if he could give Chow Yun Fat as many indignities as possible while making sure he looked like the coolest movie star ever in 90% of his shots.
Finally having seen STORY OF A DISCHARGED PRISONER it seems very clear that Woo took inspiration from its social realism and tried to marry that to a Shaw-style story of martial brotherhood using their shared shifting codes of honor as a bridge. Once the catalyst for those shifts was, say, a splinter clan trying to steal a powerful scroll, but now it's an economic bubble emerging from an influx of cheap foreign money. Either way loyalty and fraternity are the only things that end up having real, intrinsic value.
