12 essential Tony Leung movies

In the beautiful 1990 film “Days of Being Wild,” Tony Leung gets one of the greatest entrances — and exits — ever accorded an actor in a single movie. Remarkably, the entrance and the exit are the same scene.

In the movie’s final moments, the writer-director Wong Kar-wai turns the camera on a character we haven’t met yet: a handsome young cardsharp in a low-ceilinged flat, preparing for a night on the town. Who this man is and how he relates to the other characters is a mystery. Still, you can tell a lot about him just from the way he buffs his nails, runs a comb through his hair and casually slips a deck into his pocket. He’s all slippery elegance and wily charm, someone whose mere presence renders words superfluous. He’s Tony Leung, in other words.

After “Days of Being Wild,” Wong and Leung went on to make six more features together, a hopefully unfinished collaboration that cemented them both as world-cinema titans.

Leung has become a sex symbol, a style icon and one of the world’s biggest movie stars — all without ever appearing in a Hollywood movie.

Until now. Leung (often identified by his full name, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, to avoid confusion with fellow Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai), is getting a lot of attention for his work in the new Marvel superhero epic “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” As Shang-Chi’s estranged father and one of Marvel’s more notorious supervillains, the Mandarin, Leung gives a playful, brooding and ultimately devastating performance that’s even more resonant if you’ve seen some of his others.

Here is my extremely nondefinitive list of 12 all-time great Leung films and performances, presented in no particular order and as a series of double bills.

‘Ashes of Time’ (1994) and ‘Hero’ (2002)

As it happens, both Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Tony Leung Ka-fai appeared in Wong’s “Ashes of Time,” a shimmering, enigmatic swordplay drama that was underappreciated in its initial mid-’90s tour of festivals and art-house theaters. While neither “Ashes” nor Zhang Yimou’s ravishing martial-arts epic “Hero” features Leung (Chiu-wai) at his deepest, they are tributes to his matinee-idol magnetism and his ability to slip effortlessly into period roles.

‘A City of Sadness’ (1989) and ‘Flowers of Shanghai’ (1998)

The revered Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien likes to film in unbroken, distanced long takes with minimal close-ups — not a style exactly conducive to star turns. All the more remarkable, then, that in these two masterpieces, Hou taps into Leung’s gift for expressing emotional volumes with nary a word. In “A City of Sadness,” Leung plays a photographer whose family is swept up in the White Terror violence that convulsed Taiwan from 1949 to 1987. In “Flowers of Shanghai,” he’s a regular visitor at one of that city’s 19th century brothels, or “flower houses.”

‘Chungking Express’ (1994) and ‘Infernal Affairs’ (2002)

A cop comedy and a cop drama par excellence. In Wong’s joyous diptych “Chungking Express,” Leung plays a lovelorn police officer who’s plainly terrible at detecting things, like the fact that the woman of his dreams (Faye Wong) is secretly raiding and redesigning his apartment when he’s out, in the mother of all romantic pranks. He’s smarter and sadder as a cop who goes deep undercover in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s tense and soulful gangster thriller “Infernal Affairs,” which Martin Scorsese famously remade as “The Departed.”

‘Happy Together’ (1997) and ‘Lust, Caution’ (2007)

Love and lust become corrosive forces in both Wong’s “Happy Together,” which stars Leung and Leslie Cheung as a gay couple unhappily adrift in Buenos Aires, and Ang Lee’s World War II-era spy drama “Lust, Caution,” in which Leung plays a corrupt bureaucrat locked in a slowly riveting tango of desire with a femme fatale (Tang Wei).

‘Red Cliff’ (2008-09) and ‘The Grandmaster’ (2013)

Leung appeared in several early John Woo classics, including “Bullet in the Head” and “Hard-Boiled,” but “Red Cliff,” Woo’s magnificent two-part adaptation of the 14th century Chinese novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” might be their towering achievement. He gives a similar wow of a performance as a very different kind of fighter, the legendary Ip Man, in “The Grandmaster,” Wong’s dizzyingly kinetic plunge into the shadow-world of China’s greatest martial artists.

‘In the Mood for Love’ (2000) and ‘2046’ (2005)

In “In the Mood for Love,” Leung plays a 1960s writer who falls for his across-the-hall neighbor (the great Maggie Cheung); in “2046,” he plays that same man (or does he?), a chivalrous soul turned unrepentant cad, forever ruined by the memory of his great, lost love. I don’t know if these are Leung’s two greatest performances, but they are the ones I can’t imagine his career without.