In the Mood for Love · reception & legacy

2000 · Wong Kar-Wai

How In the Mood for Love has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Acclaimed out of Cannes in 2000 as an arthouse triumph, it has only climbed since — topping BBC-and-critics polls of 21st-century cinema and landing at #5 on the 2022 Sight & Sound list, the highest of any film made this century. Few films have gone from 'festival darling' to 'consensus masterpiece' so completely.

What's debated

The eternal fan fight: is its restraint the most romantic thing ever put on screen or two hours of beautiful people not saying anything — and, among Wong devotees, does it even beat Chungking Express?

Its footprint

The slow-motion noodle-run set to 'Yumeji's Theme' — cigarette smoke, cheongsams, rain-slicked alleys — is one of the most gif'd, homaged, and video-essayed sequences in modern cinema; Barry Jenkins has openly channeled Wong's style, and the film is shorthand for 'longing' itself.

Where it stands

A permanent Letterboxd top-tier favourite and the default answer to 'greatest film of the 21st century' — the arthouse film even non-arthouse people are told they must see.

★ Did you know? Tony Leung won Best Actor at Cannes 2000 for the role — the first Hong Kong actor ever to take the prize — after a famously marathon shoot that stretched over a year as Wong Kar-Wai rewrote and reshot the film as he went.

Named by the director

Influences Wong Kar-Wai has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Alfred Hitchcock — Wong said he approached the film like a Hitchcock thriller — a suspense film in which the crime is an affair, with tension built from what's withheld.