If my memory of her has an expiration date, let it be 10,000 years...
Overview
Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal server at a late-night restaurant.
A dazzling, emotionally slippery romance that turns urban loneliness into visual poetry. Its two interlocking love stories are funny, wistful, and deeply alive, with style that feels as important as feeling itself.
Best for
viewers who like romantic melancholy and offbeat humor
fans of highly stylized, music-driven cinema
people drawn to stories about loneliness, longing, and missed connections
audiences open to fragmented, mood-first storytelling
Skip if
you want a straightforward plot
you dislike repetition, voiceover, or loose narrative structure
you prefer restrained visual style over kinetic, dreamy filmmaking
you need romance to be conventional or neatly resolved
Overview
Chungking Express is one of the great city movies: restless, neon-bright, and full of people who are trying to connect while life keeps moving faster than they can. Wong Kar-Wai treats heartbreak like weather, something that hangs in the air and changes the way every face, hallway, and convenience store feels. The result is tender, funny, and quietly devastating.
Worth noting
What makes it endure is the balance between style and feeling. The film is full of motion, color, pop music, and playful repetition, but none of it feels empty or decorative. Every flourish is in service of longing, whether it’s a cop clinging to routine or a woman hiding behind mystery and performance.
Bottom line
It’s a romance film, but not a tidy one. The movie understands that people often fall in love with timing, with possibility, with a version of someone they only briefly know. That uncertainty gives it its ache, and its charm. Even now, it feels like a perfect expression of being young, lost, and briefly convinced that a stranger might change everything.
Top Letterboxd reviews
yazz! *･ﾟ✧ (4.5★) · 21696 likes
bitches be like ACAB then rate chungking express 4.5 stars
DirkH (5★) · 20814 likes
I love the stupidity of holding on to what has moved on.
I love the smallness of the biggest emotion we know.
I love the pain that doesn't seem to leave but you know somehow it will.
I love seeing love.
And I love how Wong Kar-Wai manages to capture all of the above and mold it into a piece of visual poetry, instilled with the melancholy, pain, joy, frivolity and promise our species' most powerful four letter word possesses.… more
iana (5★) · 14582 likes
sometimes i feel like a can of expired pineapples
˗ˏˋ suspirliam ˊˎ˗ (4★) · 10048 likes
all the leaves are brown ᵃˡˡ ᵗʰᵉ ˡᵉᵃᵛᵉˢ ᵃʳᵉ ᵇʳᵒʷⁿ
and the sky is grey ᵃⁿᵈ ᵗʰᵉ ˢᵏʸ ᶦˢ ᵍʳᵉʸ
Brendan Michaels · 8317 likes
I always love films about people feeling...lost. It reminds me of who I am. There's this feeling of trying to find a connection to something but there's a struggle as you don't know how to work that connection. That's what I think Wong Kar-Wai pulls off so well with this film. He creates these parallel stories of people who want to connect but are too lost to do anything about it. This is the true work of a master and… more I always love films about people feeling...lost. It reminds me of who I am. There's this feeling of trying to find a connection to something but there's a struggle as you don't know how to work that connection. That's what I think Wong Kar-Wai pulls off so well with this film. He creates these parallel stories of people who want to connect but are too lost to do anything about it. This is the true work of a master and… more