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Title: A First-rate Guide to Hong Kong Cinema
Review: This book is not only a collection of reviews, but a veritable history of recent Hong Kong cinema, as seen through the eyes of the man who is arguably the leading expert on Chinese Film today. The reviews are not only informed, elegant, witty, and to the point; together they reveal a consistent and illuminating perspective on the Hong Kong film industry of the last decade. Fonoroff clearly has his own, Hollywood-derived aesthetic, but in this his judgments always have the ring of truth insofar as the Hollywood style remains the pretension of most mainstream Honk Kong film products through to today. In this respect, Fonoroff's "At the Hong Kong Movies" is an excellent companion piece to his earlier volume "Silver Light" (still largely unavailable in the US), which is an indispensible pictorial history of Hong Kong cinema from its inception through the 1960s. Together the two volumes provide the best introduction to Hong Kong film that one could wish.
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