A milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, this masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema.
Set amidst Hong Kong’s ruthless, neon-lit gangland underworld, Wong Kar Wai’s operatic debut stars Andy Lau as a small-time mob enforcer who finds himself torn between a burgeoning romance and his loyalty to his loose cannon partner in crime.
The director’s inaugural collaboration with both cinematographer Christopher Doyle and actor Tony Leung is a ravishing drift through a bygone Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward 20-somethings pull together and push apart in a cycle of frustrated desire.
Two heartsick Hong Kong cops, both jilted by ex-lovers, cross paths at the Midnight Express take-out restaurant stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye (Faye Wong) works. One of the defining works of ‘90s cinema.
Swinging between hardboiled noir and slapstick lunacy, this hyper-cool head rush charts the subtly interlacing fates of a handful of urban loners, including a coolly detached hitman looking to go straight and a mute delinquent who wreaks mischief by night.
One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and jealousy.
Originally conceived for the omnibus film EROS, THE HAND — presented in this retrospective for the first time in its extended cut — tells the tale of a shy tailor’s assistant enraptured by a mysterious client.
