In her 2008 essay "Chungking Express: Electric Youth" (included as an extra in the booklet of the Criterion Blu-Ray), critic Amy Taubin compares Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express to Jean-Luc Godard's seminal 1966 film, Masculin Feminin. It's a perceptive parallel, acknowledging both films as quintessential products of their time in depicting youthful romance and disaffection.

There's a certain set of expectations that come with movies about dogs. They tend to be fairly saccharine affairs, if not particularly deep. W.C. Fields once said, "Never work with children or animals," and while he likely had a different idea in mind when he said that - both tend to be used as shortcuts and crutches by filmmakers because they are who audiences will likely sympathize with the most.

A quick look at post-COVID box office returns might suggest that the R-rated comedy is dead. There have been a couple of exceptions (2023's No Hard Feelings springs to mind ), but it's notable that two of this year's best R-rated comedies, You’re Cordially Invited and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, movies that once upon a time would have been surefire theatrical hits, went straight to streaming in the United States. The days of Wedding Crashers (2005), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), and Superbad (2007) seem well behind us, not to mention more recent hits like Blockers (2018) and Game Night (2018).