New Trailer on Quicktime:

www.apple.com/trailers/mi...affairs.html

Official International Site (Trilogy):
www.infernalaffairs.com/

Official UK Site:
www.infernalaffairs.co.uk/

Official French Site:
www.tfmdistribution.com/infern...dex.htm

Photos:
www.tfmdistribution.com/infern...dex.htm

Official US Site:
www.miramax.com/infernalaffairs/

Loyalty and Betrayal, With Detectives Caught in a Web
By ELVIS MITCHELL

Published: September 24, 2004
NY Times: movies2.nytimes.com/2004/09/...AFFA.html

Infernal Affairs" was shown as part of last year's New Directors/New Films series. Following are excerpts from Elvis Mitchell's review, which appeared in The New York Times on March 27, 2003; the full text is available below. The film, in Mandarin with English subtitles, opens today in Los Angeles and in New York, at the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village.

"Infernal Affairs" is so beautifully shot that the images occasionally distract you from the condensed policier plot; the cinematography by Andrew Lau (who is also co-director with Alan Mak) almost looks as if it's reflected off a sheet of silver.

You shouldn't let yourself get too carried away by the exquisite visual scheme, though. This stripped-down noir, about a pair of detectives leading undercover lives — Yan (Tony Leung) has lived deep inside organized crime for 10 years, while Ming (Andy Lau, not to be confused with the director) is a highly placed, corrupt internal affairs officer — can't really bear being looked away from for more than a couple of beats, or else you'll get lost.

This intricate and well-told story of loyalty and betrayal has been the stuff of other Hong Kong crime melodramas. If John Woo's "Hard Boiled" comes to mind, it's not only because that film was also about a cop gone so far into his undercover life that he can't come out. The always dependable Anthony Wong, who plays the police supervisor Wong, was the wild-haired crime boss in "Hard Boiled." Here he's the only person who knows of Yan's double life.

"Infernal Affairs" feels boiled, too; it's cooked down to bare-bones storytelling. The picture signals a new era for Hong Kong filmmaking; its mean-streets crispness doesn't derive from the two-gun firepower of Mr. Woo, or even from the earlier gangster-lean films Andrew Lau directed on his own, like "Young and Dangerous."

"Infernal Affairs" uses a vibrating terseness usually found in the writer and director Michael Mann's work. Thematically this film deploys the techniques Mr. Mann brought to bear on "Heat," right down to using a similar cold-blooded electronic score.

The picture uses disconnectedness and alienation to drive the drama, rather than depending on bullet-time choreography to keep the audience riveted or, for that matter, awake. "Infernal Affairs" begins at a point when Yan and Ming's lives intersect. They first meet at an electronics store. When the drug transaction of the roly-poly triads' boss Sam is broken up by a bust, he figures there's a mole inside his organization. Sam gets Ming to use his resources to divine the traitor's identity.

The acting styles of the two stars, Mr. Lau and Mr. Leung, dovetail intriguingly. Mr. Lau is given to a devilish coolness here: Ming relishes all of the aspects of his life.

The picture retains some of the most amusing de rigueur Hong Kong cop movie traditions, like following Yan and Ming from their early days at training to the present. But the sophistication of the stylized minimalism here in "Infernal Affairs" is dazzling. The most grating thing is the title; it sounds like something from a Hong Kong version of the "Police Academy" movies, and coarse is the last adjective to apply to this film.

source NY Times:
movies2.nytimes.com/2004/09/...AFFA.html

Infernal Affairs (2002) Official Website:
www.infernalaffairs.com/2002/

Infernal Affairs II (2003) Official Website:
www.infernalaffairs.com/2003/

Infernal Affairs III (2003) Official Website:
www.infernalaffairs.com

Lau & Mak on the Infernal Affairs Trilogy
comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php
Source: Edward Douglas

October 8, 2004

Police and crime dramas have a rich history in Asian cinema, but few other films have had as big an impact on the continent as Infernal Affairs, a trilogy of films by directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak that sheds light on the never ending battle between the Hong Kong police and the Triad crime families using undercover moles planted to keep tabs on each other.

A huge hit in Asia, the first part of the trilogy has been in select theatres the past few weeks, but on Sunday, the New York Film Festival will show all three chapters of the trilogy at the Walter Reade Theatre. It will be the first time American audiences will have a chance to see the entire crime drama in theatres and get some idea of how the trilogy inspired director Martin Scorsese to develop an English language remake to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon.

Directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak are an interesting team, the former a veteran who did cinematography for the Shaw Brothers Studios, the latter a promising young blood filmmaker. Their different sensibilities and backgrounds have allowed the two to create an interesting mix of classic storytelling with cutting edge filmmaking. Although they were busy working on their next film, they took some time to answer some questions we had about their groundbreaking trilogy.

for the rest of the article:
newyork.tribe.net/thread/3f...009b10660f