Like Kurosawa digested through a kaleidoscope, "Ashes of Time" (1994) was Wong Kar-wai's fourth hallucination masquerading as motion picture. "Ashes of Time Redux," more restoration than reinvention, is a second attempt to get it right, when no one thought he'd gotten it wrong.

What makes Wong among the most exciting filmmakers of the past 15 years is precisely what sends a lot of moviegoers scurrying for Best Buy and Netflix: His near-lack of interest in conventional narrative; an ability to create rather then re-create context, and a need to wallow in lush and lushly fractured visuals.

"Ashes" is really a movie about free enterprise and malleable business ethics. Having been abandoned for his brother by the woman he loves, Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) operates in the desert as a kind of broker -- for contract killings. Tell me who you want dead, he tells customers, and I'll get a swordsman to do the job. One of these subcontractors is Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai), Ouyang's old friend, who brings him a wine that dissolves one's memory; Ouyang doesn't drink, but Huang does, and this leads to disaster.

It is Ouyang's experience that provides the narrative purpose of this deliriously beautiful movie -- it is he who develops and changes and learns and regrets. And with apologies to all the flat-screen salesmen and mail-order movie companies, it isn't a film to be seen anywhere but on the largest screen available.

-- John Anderson (Oct. 24, 2008)

Contains strong violence.