A visually dazzling and endlessly rich fusion of offbeat romantic comedy and coolly postmodern reverie, acclaimed Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express has become a signature film of millennial cinema, an announcement of the transfigurations the medium would undergo as it entered a new century. Combining parallel, inverted stories of unrequited love involving two unnamed cops—Officer 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who pursues a mysterious, be-wigged criminal (Brigitte Lin), and Officer 663 (Tony Leung), pursued by a spunky noodle stand vendor (Faye Wong)—Wong Kar-wai and his master cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Lau Wai Keung transform Hong Kong into a woozy array of sublime neons and entropic slow-motion, a dizzying dance of disorientation and displacement. Rushed to completion in just under two months during the protracted shooting of the director’s swordplay epic Ashes of Time, Chungking Express has become a remarkably influential cinematic dispatch on life in contemporary urban space: its anomie, its loneliness, its pure silliness and its breathless speed.

Christopher Doyle joins us for the opening weekend of Chungking Express.

Opens Thursday, April 21. Please revisit this page on Wednesday, April 20 for showtimes.