A diseased hybrid of Orson Welles’ Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, Patrick Yau’s neo-noir The Longest Nite (1998) is a blistering real-time crawl through the sewer stink of human corruption. Bad cop Sam (The Great Magician’s Tony Leung) is trying to keep the peace for 24 claustrophobic hours as two rival gangs sit down for a truce on the Portugese gambling island of Macau. Dashing all over the steaming island, he administers beatings, tortures suspects and makes bodies disappear—a high-functioning multitasker if there ever was one. Then the hitman Tony (Ching Wan Lau) appears. Bald-headed and ominously-tattooed, he seems to know something that Sam doesn’t, and the two men start tweaking each other’s volumes as the haunted kaleidoscope of corruption they’re trapped in slowly becomes clear. Sweating in the rotten summer air, the two men start going at each other, maintaining the balance of power with generous applications of blood and viscera. A powerful movie that inhales sin, and exhales style. —Grady Hendrix, Subway Cinema