Critics reviews

Fallen Angels is an under-appreciated Wong Kar-wai gem that reflects his auteurist style, with well-crafted, haunting background music and sublime cinematography accentuating the beauty of melancholy and loneliness, adding a harrowingly poetic rhythm to the film.

Despite its sense of defeat and melancholy, perhaps even a touch of nihilism, Fallen Angels does however end with a sense of peace and positivity even in that which may or may not be a transitory connection for the gentle warmth it imparts.

Instead of maintaining the viewer's interest in these characters, these people feel more like cartoon mice spinning an elaborately constructed circus wheel, their interactions with each other made frequently nonsensical by the incessantly hyperbolic style... Strung all together, Fallen Angels is overwhelming, but individual parts stand out. Even at less than peak form, Wong is incapable of crafting anything less than fascinating cinema.

These tumultuous emotional coordinates, charted via Wong's achingly beautiful montage, render Fallen Angels the most existential of action flicks, a fluorescent fever dream of kinetic energies and inarticulate amour fou... If Wong's chosen dramas feel less serendipitous here than in Chungking Express, Fallen Angels still represents intuitive filmmaking of a rare order.

While not [Wong's] best movie, ["Fallen Angels"] is probably the sharpest distillation of his nocturnal, ultra-romantic sensibility... [It] should be experienced in the same spirit with which one of its characters dashes into the monsoon rains—arms out, eyes open, ready to get drenched.

In pushing his visual approach and his feel for hopeless romantics to extremes, he carries his modern style to its zenith. In emphasizing the changes his characters experience, I think Wong is implicitly looking ahead in his own career: wanting to enjoy the same free-spiritedness as his characters—-a freedom reflected not only in those characters, but also in Wong’s rampant technique throughout the film—-but realizing, with a wince, that even in a big city like Hong Kong, there’s a price to be paid for living such a lifestyle.

Fallen Angels – which admittedly has a few dull spots, and is often a little difficult to follow – works best as a cumulative series of these transcendent, breathtaking sequences, building up to a final minute that must rank among the most remarkable and indelible in the whole of cinema.

Almost all films, even the best ones, are made with a certain anxiety about what the audience will think: Will it like it? Get it? Be bored by it? Wong Kar-Wai, like Godard, is oblivious to such questions and plunges into his weird, hyper style without a moment's hesitation... ["Fallen Angels"] is not for your average moviegoers--unless of course, they want to see something new.

“Fallen Angels” is an exhilarating rush of a movie, with all manner of go-for-broke visual bravura that expresses perfectly the free spirits of his bold young people... “Fallen Angels” grew out of “Chungking Express” only to surpass it in complexity of style, perception and emotional impact.

No one is better than Wong at evoking the intoxicating, emotionally dissociative power of life in our sprawling First World metropolises... If you're fed up with the stultifying, formula-driven character of today's mainstream films, give Fallen Angels a try. At the very least you'll be engaged, and if you're lucky you may just recapture some of your original wonder at the seductive power of movies.

As stylish and audacious as "Days of Being Wild" and "Chungking Express," Wong Kar-Wai's film is another poignant but occasionally playful study of forlorn romance and melancholy solitude... Exhilarating and, in the end, unexpectedly touching.

"Fallen Angels" is proof that Wong will try anything, and the result is an eclectic mix of images and disjointed editing, sounds and rhythms that are at times as powerful as any piece of filmmaking likely to be seen all year.