The Screengrab

With My Blueberry Nights getting a limited-release opening in major cities across the country this weekend, Hong Kong legend Wong Kar-Wai will finally make his English-language feature film debut, and, after twenty years of building his reputation as a filmmaker, get a shot at the cherished American audience that can make or break a director. The only question is, will My Blueberry Nights be his Fritz Lang moment or his John Woo moment? Early reviews indicate that it might be the latter; the movie wasn't especially well-received when it opened Cannes last year, and producer Harvey Weinstein's drastic cut is said not to have helped matters any. The jury, likewise, is still out on whether or not Norah Jones can act, but the testimony onscreen is said to be pretty damning. If it turns out that it's a stiff, it might be all to the good and he can return to the environment in which he did his greatest work; and regardless of its quality, we're all geeked about his upcoming remake of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai. We'll have to wait and see, but even if it turns out that My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-Wai's first major dud, he's still one of the most innovative, fascinating and consistently talented directors in contemporary film. Here's five movies that prove it.

CHUNG KING EXPRESS (1994)

Although he'd shown flickers of brilliance before (and already begun his tradition of naming his films after pop songs with his 1988 directorial debut, As Tears Go By), Chung King Express is the movie that established Wong Kar-Wai as a director capable of legitimate greatness. The highly stylized film, about a heartbroken Hong Kong cop on the prowl who falls in with a gorgeous and mysterious young woman in a drug gang, so impressed Quentin Tarantino that he invested a chunk of his own money to get this and Wong Kar-Wai's other films released in the United States. Even now, after he's stretched substantially, this is still a stunning film, chock full of quirky moments, philosophical speculation on the mediated life, and his ability to coax stellar performances out of his actors. A Godardian triumph.

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As noted in our Rep Report last week, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting a week-long series dedicated to recent Hong Kong Cinema. This is a diverse series as evidenced by the two films I was able to catch — Wong Kar-Wai’s criminally underseen Happy Together and Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Confession of Pain. Both feature Tony Leung in a lead role but are otherwise polar opposites.

Happy Together is an exploration of the dissolving relationship between two gay Chinese men who came to Buenos Aries as vacationers and now find themselves stranded without enough money to return home. The film is more raw and intimate than any of the master director’s other work, but explores similar themes of loneliness, displacement and the inability to find happiness. Christopher Doyle’s incredible camera work switches from black and white to pastels to faded color, and creates a sense of stylized reality that is not only beautiful but helps propel the film’s story with its immediacy. Throwing traditional narrative structure out the window, this film is unflinching in its honesty and craftsmanship.

Confession of Pain is an ultra-modern, big-budget thriller from the same creative team behind Infernal Affairs, the film from which The Departed was adapted. This is popcorn fare, simply too glossy to ever feel authentic. The story also goes through a predictable series of twists and turns. But where the audience for Happy Together is surely limited by both its subject matter and challenging presentation, Confession of Pain has a much broader appeal. Not un-tasty, but it's empty calories. — Bryan Whitefield

NEW YORK: Now, here's what I'm talking about: the Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates the successful completion of the New York Film Festival by firing its guns in the air with 10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema (October 17 - 25). The program ranges from Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together and 2046 to a very welcome helping of action master Johnnie To, whose steady refining of his technique and stubborn reluctance to bolt for Hollywood give his recent work a last-man-standing quality. (He is represented here by the The Mission, the 1999 brothers-in-arms shoot-em-up that was of no small help to its star, Anthony Wong, in his quest to be crowned World's Coolest Actor, and the more recent Election and its companion piece, Triad Election.) The newer offerings include Triangle, a caper flick co-directed by the three Hong Kong amigos, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To, and films by the team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, whose Infernal Affairs is perhaps (if unjustly) best known in the U.S. as the original version of Scorsese's The Departed.

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