For his directorial debut, Wong came up with a (fully scripted!) riff on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Andy Lau plays the two-bit punk torn between romancing the innocent-but-ailing Ngor (Maggie Cheung) and trying to keep his hopelessly self-destructive buddy Fly (Jackie Cheung) out of trouble. Moodier and more mature performances than you’d find in most Hong Kong genre movies, plus kinetic visuals from Andrew Lau and early signs of Wong’s mastery of light, shade and contradictory thoughts.