Hong Kong Cinema

2000 · Wong Kar-wai · 98 min · Romance / Drama

Wong Kar-wai made a film about two people who don't have an affair, and somehow it burns hotter than most love stories that show everything. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung deliver performances built on glances, pauses, and the weight of things left unsaid, and Christopher Doyle's cinematography turns cramped Hong Kong corridors into spaces charged with longing. The deliberately restrained pacing and elliptical storytelling will frustrate viewers who want their romances to arrive at clear destinations. But the ache this film creates is unique in cinema, a love story defined entirely by what its characters deny themselves, gorgeous and heartbreaking in equal measure.

1994 · Wong Kar-wai · 102 min · Romance, Drama, Comedy

Chungking Express is Wong Kar-wai's exhilarating, bittersweet love letter to Hong Kong, telling two stories of heartbroken cops and the women who pass through their lives with a kinetic visual style that makes loneliness feel electric.

2002 · Andrew Lau, Alan Mak · 101 min · Thriller, Crime, Drama

Infernal Affairs is the taut, brilliantly constructed Hong Kong thriller about a cop infiltrating the Triads and a Triad mole infiltrating the police, whose dual identity crisis became the foundation for Scorsese's The Departed.

2004 · Stephen Chow · 99 min · Action Comedy

Stephen Chow's wildly inventive martial arts comedy blends Looney Tunes physics with genuine kung fu mastery, creating something that shouldn't work at all and works brilliantly.