Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Thomas Tokmenko This movie is absolutely straight-up bonkers, nuts, crazy, insane. To say "the cinematographer's fueled by a combination of drugs" is an understatement. Seeing a few of Wong Kar-Wai's other features I really had high hopes for this one, however at the end I found it disappointing as it doesn't capture the same charisma or structure of his other films, for example like As Tears Go By or Chungking Express. The biggest problem in my opinion is Michelle Reis' character as the set-up girl. She isn't given enough screen time to establish a decent bond with the audience, the charm surrounding her is flat. Karen Mok's character of Blondie is unfortunately average, she comes across as annoying rather than afflicted and thus fails to capture the audience's interest too. The women in this movie just don't tote the same amount of power as in other Kar-Wai films. The females are cold and don't intend to change, which goes against the male characters and flow of the movie. Again the cinematography feels overzealous and at some moments, even pretentious which I never thought I could say about Kar-Wai. Complaints aside, Takeshi Kaneshiro steals the show with his bizarre character, and I would actually watch the movie again just to see his portion. There's a lot of great themes here, and the sense of grittiness and isolation is done extremely well. Overall I didn't enjoy Fallen Angels, but I do understand the attraction. Other Wong Kar-Wai fans may love it. -6/10

Pierre Radulescu Fallen Angels: like the companion movie (Chungking Express), it's a pure cinematographic gem born unexpectedly. Wong Kar-Wai and Chris Doyle were working on Ashes of Time, and the project was exhausting. They decided suddenly to put Ashes of Time on hold and to produce quickly something light, unpretentious, just to warm their spirits. There was no script, just a loose idea: some slices of life in today's Hong Kong, kind of romantic comedies with young heroes hanging around Chungking Mansions and Midnight Express. Two vignettes were made this way, with young cops falling in love, drug dealers wearing sun glasses and blond wigs, barmaids becoming flight attendants and flight attendants returning from San Francisco: this was Chungking Express, released in 1994.As the third vignette was unfolding, it became clear for the director that the mood of the story was different, and it deserved a separate movie: that was Fallen Angels, released in 1995. Two completely distinct plots evolving in parallel, and intertwining only in brief moments and only by hazard. A young hit-man getting his assignments through a fax machine and a sympathetic and totally immature mute (played with irresistible charm by Takeshi Kaneshiro, who was also an irresistible cop-in-love in Chungking Express).Well, a mute cannot talk, everybody knows it, but what happens in Fallen Angels is that actually nobody seems able to communicate through human speech. The agent (Michelle Reis - I saw her also in Flowers of Shanghai) who gives the assignments to the hit-man (and even visits his narrow apartment when he is out) is a gorgeous girl, unconditionally in love for his subordinate. However she never meets him and prefers to masturbate instead. It is a terrifying impression of loneliness in a frenetic city, everybody is alone there, on her or his own, deepened in her or his own thoughts and dreams, and everybody's dreams seem crazy while only dreams keep you there to not get crazy.I remember the cabs in a region I used to live for many years: the driver had a small computer on board and all communication with the dispatcher was through the screen, no room for bargaining of any kind, no space for any human feeling, of joy or sorrow, of sympathy or sarcasm. Here in Fallen Angels it's the fax machine, the same sensation of alienation, of loss of humanity. Humans transformed in robots, keeping their human condition for themselves only, through masturbating dreams of impossible love.And it remains the city itself. Mark Rothko has a great observation about the relation between foreground and background in an art work: sometimes the personages (or the objects) have only the function to glorify the background ("... may limit space arbitrarily and thus heron his objects. Or he makes infinite space, dwarfing the importance of objects, causing them to merge and become part of the space world"). The same observation is somehow made by Malevich when analyzing the way Monet had rendered the Cathedral of Rouen: "...when the artist paints, and he plants the paint, and the object is his flower-bed, he must sow the paint in such a way that the object disappears, because it is merely a ground for the visible paint with which it is painted." Is this movie about people alienated by Hong Kong, or is it here a meditative poem about the city itself? One of the personages in the movie has an unexpected sentence, "Buddha said, If I don't descend into hell, who will?" The sentence passes quickly and seems at first sight without any meaning in the logic of the story. Maybe it offers the clue: Hong Kong, this space of "hyper-sub-reality" (as one of the reviewers puts it), this "Űbertraumstadt of ultimate nightmare" (apud another reviewer), actually offers the image of hell, and the heroes of the story descend there, why? To follow the archetype? And if we go again to the observation made by Malevich on Monet and Rouen Cathedral, here in Fallen Angels subject and city disappear in the gorgeous cinematic language: a great movie pushing the cinematic language to its ultimate expression. A couple of great creators: Wong Kar-Wai and Chris Doyle. Let me add here that another great contemporary cinematographer was also part in the team: Mark Lee Ping-Bin.And if I were to choose an image from Fallen Angels, this one would be: the city in the night with its endless traffic and movement and changing lights, near the narrow apartment where the hit-man inspects quietly the fax machine.

DICK STEEL I've got a strange affinity with Wong Kar-wai's movies, and they seem to somehow present themselves in reverse order to me, where often I find myself visiting his earlier works backwards. Like watching 2046 first before In the Mood for Love, or right now, watching Fallen Angels before Chungking Express, where I have both movies on DVDs sitting on the shelves, but decide to pick Angels before Chungking, knowing jolly well that this one came after, and was like the film that expanded itself so much that it had to break away and stand alone on its own two feet.Deciding between Chungking Express and Fallen Angels also boiled down to pure laziness on my part to want to pop a Region Free DVD into my default player, hence the latter. And I can't help but to chuckle at how Leon Lai's killer character Wong Chi Ming paralleled this laziness of mine, in wanting things on a sliver platter, of getting the preparation work all set out for him, and he just enters the scene with his swagger as the executioner. And the woman behind him acting as his agent and cleaning lady, is played by Michelle Reis.As his agent, she gets the contracts, does the legwork to draw up plans, and with time as she hangs out at his apartment to clean it up, she nurses an aching heart, knowing that perhaps in their profession, to fall in love would spell doom. And it doesn't take one too long to identify with such longing, of being so near yet so far, and she exorcises her unrequited passion by either visiting the places he visits just to hang on to his lingering presence long after he's gone, or by pleasuring herself on his bed. Kinda kinky, don't you think?While Chungking Express dealt with the relationship issues that two cops had to experience (from my fuzzy knowledge of it anyway), Fallen Angels seemed to be its evil twin, again dealing with relations of the heart, but now from the viewpoints centered on two criminals, one in Lai's character, and here the other in Takeshi Kaneshiro (who was also in Chungking Express) with his mute He Zhiwu, who breaks into shops and plays plenty of make belief. In his story arc, his unrequited love stems from his chance encounter with Charlie Young's Charlie, who too suffers a broken heart, but goes over the bend. In fact, I would have thought that Eating Air took a huge leaf out of certain aspects of their courtship, especially with the lovers on a bike careening through Hong Kong's underground highways. And Charlie Young I thought did substantially more than the flower vase roles she's more famous for perfecting.While Zhiwu can't speak, it is perhaps this arc that has a lot to say about love in classic WKW pathos. We listen in to the thoughts of Zhiwu as he narrates them in Mandarin voiceovers, such as topics of relationships having their expiration date, and the keeping of someone's memory alive. With Chi-Ming, he consciously rejects someone who takes an extreme liking of him, to go for a random, temporary lover in the form of Karen Mok's Blondie, who again might be another throwback to a similar character back in Chungking Express. But being cautionary here, is yet again the tale of not incurring the wrath of the wrong woman, though I chose to interpret the events in his story thereafter as being one of a set up, or a fix, versus just being a case of coincidental bad luck.And you cannot get away with not talking about frequent WKW collaborator Christopher Doyle's cinematography in this film, with its obtuse angles like a fish eye twitching all around with plenty of kinetic energy, boasting of shots within shots with its use of captured mirror images. Time lapse also gets used quite frequently, giving it a sense of broad fast forwarding motion, with the devil in the details treated quite casually. With a variation of Massive Attack's Karma Coma by Roel Garcia featured in an eclectic soundtrack, it already bowled me over with its collection of songs featured, whereLove stories that don't go anywhere except to serve as personal reminders, familiar pathos as presented by WKW, a star studded cast and excellent visuals and music, easily make this film one of my firm favourites. I suppose I shouldn't waste too much time before embarking on my journey onboard the more illustrious Chungking Express.

tbyrne4 I was first introduced to this film about ten years ago (man, its already been ten years!!), along with Takeshi Kitano by a friend who was really into Asian cinema. At the time Beat Takeshi and Wong Kar Wai were not well known in the US at all. All the little fan boys (myself included) were still stuck on John Woo. My friend handed me a bootleg of "Fallen Angels" along with a copy of Beat Takeshi's "Violent Cop". I went home and put them in and thought, "what the hell am I watching!!!?!?? "Fallen Angels" had to be the weirdest, most unorthodox, most elliptical piece of film I'd ever looked at. EVERY SHOT looked weird and wrong. It seemed the director looked at every rule in the Hollywood filmmaker's guide and did the exact opposite! Also, it looked like the whole thing was shot with a security camera. Everything was fish-eyed. Too strange. But something about it made me keep watching. It actually took me a couple of tries to get all the way through it. It was just so odd, and hallucinatory.Then finally, I was able to get through the entire thing in one sitting, and that's when the magic happened. You MUST watch this film all the way through till the end in one sitting in order to "get it". The very end of the film is when the illuminating flash happens and when the film suddenly makes sense. If you do, I promise you, it will be a magical, sad and sweet, and extremely rewarding experience. This film by miles transcends the gangster genre. It is so many things at once. More than anything, in fact, it is a love story. But a love story in the same way (odd as it may sound) that "Last Picture Show" is a love story. It's about being madly in love with someone who will never be able to love you back.I actually liken this film to some of Sam Shepard's absurdist theater pieces from the 60s and 70s. Where for much of the duration you don't quite understand what you're looking at, although it seems the director MUST have some sort of plan, and then, at the end, all of the strands come together and it makes total sense.