Skip to main content
In the Mood for Love collage; a woman on the left and a man on the right

Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai spent two years obsessively shooting and reshooting this tale of two neighbours, Chow (Tony Leung) and Su-Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their spouses. When they realize why these absences always coincide, they are shocked and hurt. In their imaginations, they entertain scenarios of revenge and tit-for-tat, rehearsing the infidelities so as to understand what can have gone awry, even as they vow never to stoop to such betrayal. And over time, quietly, but unmistakably, they fall in love…

A hypnotic, intoxicating film, In the Mood for Love is radically experimental, but only ever concerned with revealing the human heart. Wong never shows us the spouses. He structures the movie as a cycle of myriad echoes and repetitions. Yet in the space between the repetitions we sense everything that cannot be said: desire, passion, rapture and rhapsody.

In the Mood for Love has long since been recognized as a modern classic and came fifth in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time.

+ In The Mood for Love 2001 (9 mins)

Initially conceived as one third of a triptych about food, In the Mood for Love was expanded into a stand-alone feature that won immediate recognition as a modern-day classic. Another third—intended as the “dessert,” as Wong Kar Wai has put it—was, until now, only screened during his masterclass at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Now available in wide release for the first time, In the Mood for Love 2001 demonstrates the director’s masterful ability to generate palpable atmosphere and striking characterizations on a miniature canvas—with Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung Man Yuk once again providing the sizzling chemistry— evoking the mystery of transient, unexpected connections in the modern city through his inimitable romantic touch.

Wong expands the simple anatomy of a thwarted love affair into an elastic meditation on personal unrest, political statelessness and the violence of time’s unrelenting passage.

Guy Lodge, Sight & Sound

Director

Wong Kar-wai

Cast

Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung

Credits
Country of Origin

Hong Kong/France

Year

2000

Language

In Cantonese and Mandarin with English subtitles

Awards

Best Actor, Tony Leung, Cannes

19+
107 min

Book Tickets

Wednesday July 09

7:30 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Book Now

Friday July 11

6:15 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Book Now

Tuesday July 15

8:00 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Book Now

Thursday July 24

6:30 pm
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Book Now
8:45 pm
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Book Now

Credits

Producer

Wong Kar-wai

Screenwriter

Wong Kar-wai

Cinematography

Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee Ping-Bing

Editor

William Chang

Original Music

Michael Galasso

Also in This Series

These movies speak to our times and push the boundaries of the art form — the true modern classics we’re confident will withstand the test of time.

In the Mood for Love

Dir. Wong Kar-wai
107 min

Wong Kar-wai's most acclaimed and popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses + a newly released short companion piece from 2001.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Oldboy

Dir. Park Chan-wook
120 min

The second movie in Park's Vengeance Trilogy. Choi Min-sik stars as Dae Su, inexplicably held captive by he-knows-not-who for 15 years, and then, just as inexplicably, released. Not surprisingly, after all this time, he has only one thing on his mind...

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Children of Men

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón
109 min

2027: 18 years since the last baby was born, disillusioned Englishman Theo (Clive Owen) becomes an unlikely champion of the human race when he is asked by his former lover (Julianne Moore) to escort a young pregnant woman out of the country.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

The Gleaners and I

Dir. Agnès Varda
82 min

This lovely essay film about the art of foraging is also a self portrait of the artist at 72.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

The Headless Woman

Dir. Lucrecia Martel
87 min

The pictures tell the story -- and you better not blink -- when Veronica (the superb Maria Onetto) hits something on the road home. But what? She is too traumatized, or panic-stricken, to go back and look, and her fears are too terrible to acknowledge.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Zodiac

Dir. David Fincher
157 min

David Fincher is the most exacting American filmmaker since Stanley Kubrick. It makes him the perfect director for this compelling procedural consumed by the unsolved mystery of the Zodiac killer.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

A Serious Man

Dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
106 min

The Coen brothers' best movie is a painfully funny existentialist comedy about a physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), benumbed but bewildered by his wife's announcement that she wants a divorce. That's only the start of his troubles.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

The White Ribbon

Dir. Michael Haneke
145 min

A German village in 1913 is rocked by a series of macabre events. Michael Haneke's most expansive filmm a Palme d'Or winner, explores the roots of fascism.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Paprika

Dir. Satoshi Kon
90 min

A device capable of transmitting dreams falls into the wrong hands in this dazzling anime meta-movie from visionary filmmaker Satoshi Kon. The imagery here is never less than overwhelming; it's probably the greatest scifi movie of our times.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
157 min

Neither a fairytale, nor a Leonesque shoot-em-up, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's somber, melancholy masterpiece is both a ruminative comedy about mortality and a subtle, poignant murder mystery.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Under the Skin

Dir. Jonathan Glazer
108 min

Between Birth and the death camps of Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer gave us sex, with Scarlett Johansson, picking up and disposing with interchangeable men. It's a bleakly unforgettable movie, with a mesmeric Mica Levi score.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

It's Not Me

Dir. Leos Carax
42 min

“Where are you at, Leos Carax?” To this question, the French filmmaker assembles an unpredictable essay-film made in the spirit of the late Jean-Luc Godard — an endlessly inventive self-portrait of an artist reflecting on his place in cinema history.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Holy Motors

Dir. Leos Carax
116 min

Carax's film a dazzler, a requiem for cinema that somehow breathes new life and new hope into the form. Denis Lavant (Beau Travail) plays 11 roles and the accordion. Absurdist, surreal, poignant and unforgettable, this is truly one of a kind.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Enter the Void

Dir. Gaspar Noé
161 min

Venturing where angels fear to tread, virtuoso filmmaker Gaspar Noé (Vortex) creates a dazzling journey into the Tokyo night, a mind-bending exploration of the outer reaches of human experience inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Margaret

Dir. Kenneth Lonergan
186 min

Seventeen-year-old Lisa is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident. But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Certain Women

Dir. Kelly Reichardt
107 min

Spare, incisive portraits of four Montana women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone) brushing up against the everyday wears and tears of difficult men, their own circumstances, and the desire for something better.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Toni Erdmann

Dir. Maren Ade
162 min

This hilarious and acerbic comedy follows a retiree as he stages a series of outrageous pranks to disrupt his executive daughter's latest business deal.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Shoplifters

Dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu
121 min

A Palme d'or winner in 2018, Shoplifters is both a hard-edged and heartwarming drama about a makeshift family of impoverished urchins and orphans in contemporary Tokyo.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Melancholia

Dir. Lars von Trier
135 min

Lars von Trier squares up to the end times with this grandly luxuriant but surprisingly punky sci-fi, set in an imposing country mansion house, where Justine (Kirsten Dunst) blows up what's supposed to be the happiest day of her life.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Moonlight

Dir. Barry Jenkins
111 min

Moonlight is many things -- a portrait of a young black man coming of age in Miami in the 1980s, a film about fathers and sons, about mentorship and about the scourge of drugs -- but it is also one of the most piercing movie romances of the last decade.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Get Out

Dir. Jordan Peele
104 min

Guess who's coming to dinner? Daniel Kaluuya is the Black boyfriend justifiably anxious about meeting his white girlfriend's folks for the first time.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Lady Bird

Dir. Greta Gerwig
94 min

Greta Gerwig's first film as writer-director is a delightful, painful comedy about "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a Sacramento teen on the point of swapping high school for college, and her hard-working mom, Marion (Laurie Metcalf).

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Silence

Dir. Martin Scorsese
141 min

This sober, probing examination of faith, ego, cruelty and compassion is the most underrated film from the often under-valued latter half of Martin Scorsese's brilliant career; a passion project, about Catholic missionaries in 17th Century Japan.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood

Dir. Quentin Tarantino
160 min

A film of luxuriant and sinister beauty, Tarantino's last movie to date is a rich and lovely immersion in the dying days of Old Hollywood, LA, 1969.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Petite Maman

Dir. Céline Sciamma
72 min

This "small" film from the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire speaks volumes. It's a poetical modern fairy tale about an 8-year-old girl who meets a new friend her own age in the woods behind her late grandmother's house.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Synecdoche, New York

Dir. Charlie Kaufman
124 min

Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- all great, all successful -- then turned director with Synecdoche, which is a masterpiece and which basically went unseen. It's overdue rediscovery.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema