20 Best Looking Movies Since 2000

Twenty years after Days Of Being Wild, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai once again returned to the 1960s setting with In The Mood For Love, reuniting with Days... star Maggie Cheung to explore how a married man (Tony Leung) and woman (Cheung) come to terms with the discovery that their respective spouses are having an affair.

In The Mood For Love is a small scale feature in visual terms - there are no extravagant landscapes or cityscapes and most of the action follows the filmmaking principles of Robert Bresson, who taught directors how important keeping the camera close to the action is if you want to create as many questions as answers.

But while what we see on screen might feel restrictive on paper - stuffy offices, compact apartment buildings and rainy alleyways - on the screen it transcends the mundane and becomes achingly beautiful.

The troubled production meant that the initial cinematographer Christopher Doyle (working with material far removed from his later 21st century masterpiece, Hero) dropped out of the project, and ended up sharing cinematography credits with Mark Lee Ping-bin, whose 2015 movie The Assassin very nearly made it to this list.