Showtimes: 6/24, 6:30pm and 6/26, 4:30pm at the Anthology [BUY TICKETS]

Hong Kong has always had a gift for action, but ONE NIGHT IN MONGKOK raises the emotional stakes to an almost unbearable level. A gang dispute goes bad, and a hitman from Mainland China is brought in to settle things. For one long, dark bloody Christmas Eve the cops, led by Officer Milo (Alex Fong) and Brandon (veteran Hong Kong stuntman, Chin Kar-lok), try to keep a lid on the seething tensions and track down the killer before he can finish his job. Tense, claustrophobic, and as pitch black as the ocean floor, this film is about what happens when everything falls apart. The hitman, Lai Fu (Daniel Wu) is a country bumpkin who doesn't seem like the brightest bulb in the box and he's not even that interested in rubbing out his target, mostly he just wants to find his sister who emigrated to Hong Kong and vanished. He hooks up with an ambitious Mainland hooker, Dan Dan (Cecilia Cheung), who's counting down her last hours in Hong Kong before she heads back home with her hard-earned cash. After she sees Lai's bankroll, she agrees to guide him around Hong Kong , hoping to get her mitts on his dough. Officer Milo is trying to keep things under control, but he's mostly looking for whoever put his girlfriend in the hospital so he can extract some vengeance of his own.

A hard, swift and smart punch to the brain, this movie is all about lost hope, second chances, and desperate characters trying to crawl out from under the hopeless weight of poverty. It's the best thriller to come out of Hong Kong since INFERNAL AFFAIRS and, unbelievably, it's based on a true story. Soaked in shadows, this flick is a distress call from out of the night. Please, send help, it says. We're all going down.