February 2021 Capsules

PTU
The apartment raid, with the slow staggered ascent of Yam and his team with manually flickering flashlights, is at once one of the great summits of To’s ethos and its antithesis, with all that elegiac cool in service of a pointless raid that terrorizes a few women. Such is the greatness of PTU, a film that totally embodies everything masterful and terrifying about To’s filmmaking, where the wanton police brutality combined with the assuredness of the filmmaking could be repugnant if it weren’t for the interfering elements: a child riding a bike, an unexpected stabbing, an invitation to mahjong. Truth is subjective, bound to be written by the forces in charge, and it doesn’t matter who gets caught in the crossfire.