Blast from the Past

Every good action director knows that before you get the boom, you need the tick, tick, tick. That instant of anticipation occurs near the start of Breaking News , when the roving dread director Johnnie To has carefully built up crystallizes in a single glance that passes between an oblivious cop and a laconic hit man (Richie Jen) posing as a lost motorist. It's pure To, who's proved in classic cops-and-triad films like The Mission and PTU that he possesses a finely tuned mastery of suspense, of those last moments before the ordinary everyday plunges into sudden violence.

To...