As Tears Go By
- sombre
- intense
- signature
Sombre, kinetic, measured crime / romance, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Mid-level gangster Wah falls in love with his beautiful cousin, but must also continue to protect his volatile partner-in-crime and friend, Fly.
Our read · As Tears Go By (1988) reads as a sombre, kinetic, grounded crime · romance entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, nihilistic in outlook, with a strong directorial signature. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of As Tears Go By
What watching it is actually like.
“You want Wong Kar-wai's neon gangster romance before his style fully blooms.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if triad violence and tragic inevitability are not your late-night mood.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself