Muriel Award: 10th Anniversary Award for Best Film of 2000

A lot of strong contenders for the award this year. Any of the top five could have taken the top slot and I doubt most people would have had much issue. But there's a winner - there's always a winner.

Third place:



Yi Yi (Edward Yang) [80 points / 12 votes]

Second place:



Memento (Christopher Nolan) [81/14]

And your winner...





In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai) [136/20]

"People who know me are well aware how I feel about In the Mood for Love. Hell, if you skimmed over my Muriels ballot last year, you might have seen that it was my pick for best film of the decade.

Even though David Lynch’s surreal and seductive Mulholland Drive, a film Mood was either in front of or behind on several best-of-decade lists, got the top Muriels spot for best aughts film, Mood is, for me, the more imaginative, heartbreaking and, shall we say, movierific selection.

On paper, Wong Kar-wai’s story of a budding relationship between two married next-door neighbors in 1960s Hong Kong sounds like pure period-piece melodrama. But when it’s played out in front of your eyes, it’s like a cinematic dream, hitting your senses and emotions so perfectly that you eventually become awed by its fluid, celluloid potency.

In my opinion, Mood is a virtually flawless film. Just how flawless? Well, longtime Wong cinematographer Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin created cinematography that was both striking and beautiful. William Chang basically was a triple threat during filming, coming up with the immaculate production design, the crisp film editing and the stunningly stylish costumes. Even the collection of musical pieces used in the soundtrack — from traditional Chinese music to popular music of the era to Shigeru Umebayashi’s “Yumeji’s Theme” (originally from the soundtrack to Seijun Suzuki's Yumeji), which becomes a recurring waltz for our couple and the right complementary music for Wong’s scenes of slo-mo poetry — is amazing.

And, of course, there are the two leads: the stunning Maggie Cheung and the debonair Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, the coolest, most charismatic romantic leads I’ve seen since Bergman and Grant in Notorious. As the two people who are forced to console one another as their respective spouses blatantly creep around on them, they are both vessels of pained longing, finding the affection and understanding they are supposed to get from their so-called significant others. Their platonic bond eventually morphs into an emotionally intense romance that’ll have viewers afterwards asking that universal question: did they or didn’t they? Thankfully, Wong doesn’t serve up any easy answers.

With Mood, Wong crafted a love story so haunting and hypnotic, so visually intoxicating and narratively pleasing, that it has kind of pissed me off that no one has tried to do anything like it since. Mood delves into not just the indescribable passion two people can have for one another but also the passion people look for in movies. It strives to be not just another film you can digest and immediately discard, but a film that sticks in your craw, a film you may end up revisiting time and time again (as I have this past decade).

No matter where you see it, whether on the big screen or on a big-screen TV at your momma’s house, In the Mood for Love is a film that may leave you with basically the same reaction: Gotdammit, I love this movie." — Craig D. Lindsey

See the full results.