Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 17: Sat Jan 17

In the Mood for Love (Kar-wai, 2000): Prince Charles Cinema, 3pm

This is a 35mm presentation with other screenings throughout January and February. Full details here. Exactly one year on from selecting this film when the Prince Charles Cinema started its regular run of screenings of this film it's remarkable to discover that it is now entering its 104th consecutive week at the movie house, a run that, within a year or so may well break the British record for the longest continuous theatrical engagement of a single film. The longest continuous theatrical run ever recorded in the UK belongs to softcore porn film Come Play With Me, which screened at the Moulin Cinema on Great Windmill Street for 201 weeks between 1977 and 1981, a record listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. "What began as a revival has quietly become one of the most extraordinary long-term relationships between a cinema, a film, and its audience. Still playing, still selling, still stopping people in their tracks, often from our stunning original-release 35mm print," stated the Prince Charles Cinema team in a recent press release.

Chicago Reader review:
A brooding chamber piece (2000) about a love affair that never quite happens. Director Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s most romantic filmmaker, is known for his excesses, and in that sense the film’s spareness represents a bold departure. Claustrophobically set in adjacent flats in 1962 Hong Kong, where two young couples find themselves sharing space with other people, it focuses on a newspaper editor and a secretary at an export firm (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the sexiest duo in Hong Kong cinema) who discover that their respective spouses are having an affair on the road. Wong, who improvises his films with the actors, endlessly repeats his musical motifs and variations on a handful of images, rituals, and short scenes (rainstorms, cab rides, stairways, tender and tentative hand gestures), while dressing Cheung in some of the most confining (though lovely) dresses imaginable, whose mandarin collars suggest neck braces.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.