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FREDELL POGODIN & ASSOCIATES
Since its debut In Competition at Cannes earlier this year, where it won the Best Actor Award and Technical Grand Prize, the film has garnered rave reviews. Here's what the critics say: "A glamorous evocation of illicit love in the days when people still cared what the neighbors thought. . .and that is the insinuating genius of IN THE MOOD: it portrays an absence - the turbulent emotions that married people hide from their spouses and themselves. Visually and dramatically, the film never raises its voice above the soundtrack of soothing Nat King Cole standards and Sixties Brazilian pop - because it is not about passion expressed but passion concealed." - Mary Corliss, Film Comment "The film is a romantic idyll in which all the sex, confessions and cafe conversation have been excised, leaving gestures and shards of feeling in their place. Nominally about tow married people who discover that their spouses are having and affair with each other, the film is instead about aquarium green and gold-vermilion, the moist tenderness at play in Tony Leung's eyes and the way in which Maggie Cheung's fingers brush against a doorjamb. As always, love is ephemeral, the mood indigo. . . The film is achingly, shockingly beautiful - somehow, it ends in Angkor Wat - more quiet and still than most of the director's more recent films. . . The film is undeniable in its poignancy, though as much for its story as for the fact that the whole thing dissolves like a paper fan in rain, an evanescent masterwork." - Manohla Dargis, LA Weekly "With IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, Wong Kar-wai confirms his growing reputation as one of the major talents to emerge from Asia during the past decade. The two (lead) performances are simply wonderful. Cheung maintains just the right balance of modesty and passion until her character absolutely must decide where her like must go. Leung shows us a man adrift, a man who has allowed his creativity to get cut off by work and marriage: - Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter "Wong Kar-wai's exquisite memory piece. . .less a narrative than a poetic evocation of desire. It works its spell through Cheung's swaying hips, Leung's yearning glances, and the silken samba rhythms of Naat King Cole." - Amy Taubin, Village Voice "Swooningly cinematic. . .visually ravishing." - Ken Turan, Los Angeles Times "A seductive mood piece. . .IN THE MOOD dazzles with a heady atmosphere of romantic melancholy and ravishing visuals." - David Rooney, Variety "Hong Kong's cinema dandy has made a visually exquisite chamber piece, filled with romantic heartache, great early sixties clothes and a beautifully suffering couple in Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, in a movie that could be a homage to soap master Douglas Sirk." - Liam Lacy, (Toronto) Globe & Mail "A movie about what people don't - can't - say to one another, IN THE MOOD feels like a masterpiece of subliminally articulated urges. . .What's repressed in this movie seeps into its very texture until even the drab and closed world of this quietly fixated couple takes on the flushed and engorged qualities of a clear but unconsummated sexual attraction to each other As a movie in which nothing much of apparent carnal interest ever happens, Kar-wai's IN THE MOOD, might well be the sexiest thing in which sex never happens." - Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star "Brilliant." "Swooningly cinematic.
Visually ravishing." "Undeniable in its poignancy,
the film is achingly and shockingly beautiful." "Luminous and sensuous." "Superb." . |