Sightlines · reception
How In the Mood for Love was received
2000 · Wong Kar-Wai · In the Mood for Love on Sightlines
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 favorite 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
- 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.