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His work marries the larger-than-life glamour of golden-age-Hollywood studio moviemaking (вЂњI like stars,вЂќ he says) to a quicksilver formal daring inspired by everyone from Michelangelo Antonioni and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Tennessee Williams and Nan Goldin.

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Wong makes movies that viewers everywhere fall in love with-itвЂ™s not for nothing that Time critic Richard Corliss dubbed him вЂњthe most romantic filmmaker in the world.вЂќ As is evident from the films in this collection-seven of his most beloved features, plus his radiant anthology episode The Hand-WKW has a sensibility that is equal parts high and low, mass and mandarin. If anything, audiences are even more smitten.

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Yet one finds the true measure of his achievement out in the world, where his influence is plainly apparent in acclaimed work thatвЂ™s as crazily diverse as Sofia CoppolaвЂ™s Lost in Translation, Matthew WeinerвЂ™s television series Mad Men (which introduces its hero, Don Draper, with a shot borrowed directly from WKW), Barry JenkinsвЂ™s If Beale Street Could Talk, and Bi GanвЂ™s Long DayвЂ™s Journey into Night (where, oddly, Wong is cross-pollinated with Andrei Tarkovsky).

In Sight & SoundвЂ™s most recent international criticsвЂ™ poll of the greatest films of all time (from 2012), In the Mood for Love was the only member of the top twenty-five to come from this millennium. Like Haruki Murakami on the literary scene, WKW became the first Asian filmmaker to occupy the leading edge of cool globally.ДЄlong the way, Wong has, of course, won countless awards and honors. Yet even as theyвЂ™re devoutly personal, WongвЂ™s films also define a late-twentieth-, early-twenty-first-century cultural moment, both in Hong Kong-where his success upped the artistic ante in a notoriously money-mad film industry-and on international screens. With his blend of pop exuberance and alienated melancholy, he is one of those rare filmmakers whose work is always recognizably their own: you can feel his presence in every ticking clock (there are scads), in every shiver of photogenic heartbreak, in every moment of inspired silliness-such as a policeman talking to his bar of soap. Few films do that better than those of Wong Kar Wai, the Hong Kong auteur whose iconic sunglasses are more famous than many other directorsвЂ™ movies.

While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the movies to be set free from our daily lives and carried off to a world richer, more delightful, and more resonant than our own. вЂњPleasure,вЂќ wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, вЂњis a safer guide than either right or duty.вЂќ Surely this is true when it comes to watching films.