In an early episode in 2046, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) – the international correspondent and aspiring wuxia novelist of Wong’s preceding film, In the Mood for Love (and now a struggling journalist and pulp writer of erotic serials) encounters a former acquaintance from Singapore named Lulu (Carina Lau) at a seedy nightclub on Christmas Eve, […]
In the Mood for Love, 2000
There is a recurrent sound of a sensual waltz that accompanies each encounter between Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) as they invariably cross paths in a crowded residential complex: the first is a polite glance as Mo-Wan leaves the room of a friendly card game; and then during the subsequent encounters […]
Days of Being Wild, 1991
A handsome young man named Yuddy (Leslie Cheung) stops by a stadium concession stand to buy a soft drink. He approaches the shy, beautiful store attendant and catches her attention by correctly guessing her name as Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung), and confidently predicts that she will see him in her dreams. One afternoon, he asks […]
As Tears Go By, 2003
The film opens to a symbolic shot of Wah lying obscured beneath a blanket that is half cast in shadow on a sunny late spring afternoon as he is rudely awakened by the repeated telephone calls of a persistent, overly familiar aunt. Explaining that a distant cousin named Ah-Ngor (Maggie Cheung) has gone to the […]
Humanity and Paper Balloons, 1937
At an unassuming, low-rent tenement district in Edo, a group of street vendors setting off to hawk their wares at the dawn of a seemingly auspicious bright, sunny day following several days of steady rain are detained by a team of police inspectors on a routine investigation of an elderly neighbor’s suicide. The news immediately […]
Delwende, 2005
S. Pierre Yameogo returns from last year’s NYAFF mid-career retrospective with perhaps his most mature, immediately relevant, and socially confrontational film to date, a provocative moral tale on the barbaric (and largely misogynistic) tribal custom of scapegoating through witch denunciation and exile – often of the most weak, disempowered, and vulnerable members of the village […]