The Museum of Modern Art is in the process of opening its big fall shows, and among these is a retrospective in the film department of the Hong Kong director Johnnie To. To has been called “one of the great virtuosos of the gangster film” by the New York Times. While this description is accurate, it’s also as reductive as it would be if you applied it to Martin Scorsese. His offbeat fare, like Sparrow (2008), is only superficially concerned with crime and just as interested in lipstick on a cigarette, passed from one person to another in slow motion. We caught up with curator La Frances Hui, who organized the retrospective with Dave Kehr, to hear more about how it all came together.

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Johnnie To’s movies have so much diversity within them, but superficially they tend to deal in pulp. How did a distinguished institution like MoMA decide to stage a retrospective like this?

The late film scholar David Bordwell, who is a teacher to nearly everyone who ever studied film as an art form, wrote an entire book (Planet Hong Kong) to examine the Hong Kong film industry as a popular cinema and artistic tradition. While acknowledging Hong Kong films can be “sentimental, joyous, rip-roaring, bloody and bizarre,” he remarks that “these outrageous entertainments harbor remarkable inventiveness and careful craftsmanship. They are Hong Kong’s most........

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