In the Mood for Love

2000 [CANTONESE]

Action / Drama / Romance

134
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 94% · 192 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 94% · 50K ratings
IMDb Rating 8.0/10 10 185621 185.6K

adultery newspaper secret love martial arts lovesickness husband wife relationship

Plot summary

Two neighbors form a strong bond after both suspect extramarital activities of their spouses. However, they agree to keep their bond platonic so as not to commit similar wrongs.

Director

Kar-Wai Wong Photo
Kar-Wai Wong

Top cast

Tony Chiu Wai Leung Photo
Tony Chiu Wai Leung as Chow Mo-wan
Maggie Cheung Photo
Maggie Cheung as Su Li-zhen - Mrs. Chan
Paulyn Sun Photo
Paulyn Sun as Mrs. Chow
Rebecca Pan Photo
Rebecca Pan as Mrs. Suen
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay 2160p.BluRay
837.56 MB
1204*720
Cantonese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 38 min
Seeds 64
1.58 GB
1792*1072
Cantonese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 38 min
Seeds 100
4.42 GB
3840*2160
Cantonese 2.0
NR
Subtitles cn  
23.976 fps
1 hr 38 min
Seeds 98

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by Shostakovich343 7 / 10

In the Mood for Love

Whenever a serious list of the 'Greatest Films Ever Made' stretches into the the new millennium, bets are "In the Mood for Love" is included. I would personally not heap such praise upon the film, but it is hard to deny it boasts one of the most nuanced and subdued relationships in modern cinema.The film plays like an Asian "Una giornata particolare". Our Loren and Mastroianni are Maggie Cheung and Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, known for playing action heroes and lovers, (or both, together, in the case of "Hero"). Here, they play everyday people: an editor and a secretary, both married, neighbours in a narrow Hong Kong apartment building.Their respective spouses are never fully seen. More often than not they are absent, always at the same time. It is hard to say when they begin to suspect, but before long our leads are faced with the fact that their partners are having an affair with each other. This discovery brings the two of them together in need of consolation and, perhaps, love. They are visibly attracted to each other, but agree to keep their relationship platonic.It is the smaller things that earn "In the Mood for Love" its place on the 'Best of All Time' lists. The acting, writing, and directing are so subtle that describing the film in terms of events renders it meaningless. The great touches of drama lie in the way a person slightly turns his head, moves weight from one leg to the other, or closes a door.That being said, "In the Mood for Love" suffers from too much of a good thing. The film's central fifty minutes follow the same pattern over and over again: our protagonists make an appointment; they meet; they decide not to have sex; repeat. Sometimes there are minute variations -- he decides to write a newspaper serial; one time it is raining -- but the basic pattern of meet, cut, repeat does not change.This repetition is intentional to a certain extent. Whenever characters retread locations -- the street, the stairs, the hallway -- they are always filmed from the same angle, like rhyming stanzas in a poem on mundanity. However, these scenes stop presenting new information before long. The emotions don't intensify, they just drag on. We already know the relationship between these people is not going to change, yet are put through the motions another five or six times.It is one of the medium's great tragedies that nobody cares about one-hour films. We have accepted that novels can be 100 or 3,000 pages long, that paintings can be the size of a matchbox or The Night Watch, but motion pictures of less than eighty minutes rarely qualify as feature films. "In the Mood for Love" certainly would have benefitted from being an hour long. Its intimate filmmaking demands to be seen, but for a 98-minute film to be this long-winded is a flaw too prominent to disregard.
Reviewed by lilaqueen 9 / 10

what a poetic way to make a film....

When I fist watched the movie, I said to myself, "so a film can be made like this." Wong Kar Wai's gorgeous poetic love story captured me throughout and even after the film. I must admit this is one of the best love movies, maybe the best of all, I have ever watched. The content and the form overlaps perfectly. As watching the secret love we see the characters in bounded frames that limits their movements as well as their feelings. Beautiful camera angles and the lighting makes the feelings and the blues even touchable. I want to congratulate Christopher Doyle and Pin Bing Lee for their fantastic cinematography which creates the mood for love. Also the music defines the sadness of the love which plays along the beautiful slow motion frames and shows the characters in despairing moods. And of course the performances of the actors which makes the love so real. Eventually, all the elements in the film combined in a perfect way under the direction of WKW and give the audience the feeling called love.
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