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Our screening of Chunking Express for tonight has been cancelled due to weather. It has been rescheduled to March 22nd at 7:00pm at The Rialto.
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Sunday, March 22nd, 2026
Chunking Express
Released the same year as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express is a masterfully romantic and formally daring ‘90s classic, one of the most enduring of all Hong Kong films and the one that catapulted its director to the forefront of world cinema. With its inventive juggling of disparate stories and timelines, it’s easy to see why Tarantino was enamored with the film and championed its release stateside.
Set in then-present-day Hong Kong, the film features two superficially connected stories centered on the theme of romantic longing and missed connections.
In the first, heartbroken Hong Kong police officer He Zhi Wu
(Takeshi Kaneshiro) is recovering from a traumatic breakup with his girlfriend when he encounters and becomes infatuated by a mysterious woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin), who we soon learn is in trouble with the drug underworld.
The second story focuses on another police officer, Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chi-wai), also dealing with a bad breakup with his flight attendant girlfriend. Visiting the same food store that He Zhi Wu frequents, he becomes the secret object of affection for Faye (Faye Wong), one of the store’s workers, who takes it upon herself to break him out of his funk and help him re-enter his life.
Chungking Express builds a wonderful rhythm out of its repeating motifs and Western-infused soundtrack, with impressionistic cinematography that brings to mind the early works of Jean-Luc Godard. It doesn’t hurt that the film is populated by some of the most beautiful people world cinema has ever given us. Kaneshiro and Leung are appropriately lovelorn as the sadsack policemen, while Brigitte Lin is mysteriously sexy as the in-too-deep object of affection. The real find of the film, however, is Faye Wong, whose energetic performance and “manic pixie dream girl” energy recalls Shirley MacLaine’s enchanting debut in Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry.
More than 30 years since its debut, Chungking Express remains a romantic blast, an effervescent classic of second-wave Hong Kong New Wave cinema and a joyful valentine to lovesick dreamers the world over. (MVH)
