To’s most French film (in Melville mode), a delightful caper movie with touches of magical realism and diabolical wit. Mega-star Andy Lau, in a brilliant performance, is a master thief and magician with a fatal disease (the ticking clock syndrome so popular in fin de siècle HK cinema), who organizes a elaborate jewel heist as his last gesture. His tool in this enterprise is cop and master negotiator Lau Ching-wan: the two perform a unpredictable cat and mouse game that propels this classic instance of the cinema of spectacle. A textbook case of how To takes a commercial genre — this film was a substantial commercial success – and through brilliant craft and inventive subversion repurposes it as art. (S. Kraicer)
