Wong Kar-Wai is hip. They are calling the young Shanghai-born film-maker an Oriental Godard. Drawing comparisons to Scorsese and Melville. Querentino likes him, but don't let that put you off. For once the Big-Chinned One is backing a winner.

Kar-Wai's breakneck fifth feature is fostered from an offcut of his Chungking Express, wherein a contract killer subplot fell by the wayside. Unrequited love occurs a lot in the films of Wong Kar-Wai; it's all over Fallen Angels like an unfortunate rash. Leon Li’s Chi-Ming has taken hits for three years from a woman he rarely meets. She (Michele Reis) loves him madly but says nothing. Elsewhere, an ex-convict (Takeshi Kaneshiro) reopens shops at night and intimidates passers-by into playing customer, before helping a woman track down the rival to her boyfriend's affections. Then he takes to videotaping his own father.

The director's subtle handling aside, what marks Fallen Angels out from the flash-bang of obviously chic cinema is Australian Chris Doyle's ebullient, dizzying cinematography. Shooting cramped compositions (the product of working in a claustrophobic Hong Kong, says the director) through a wide-angle lens, experimenting with hand-held, close-up, frame-speed, step-printing, the results are disorienting, dangerous, but never dull; kinetic but never afraid of stillness.

Sturm und drang for it's own sake, though, is a terrible thing (ask John Woo), but Kar-Wai has sufficient purpose to save him from asinine MTV clichés. You'll see these saturated colours, weird cuts and impossible angles flogging jeans soon enough, but it won't be his fault. The visual effect is hallucinatory, the emotional one is almost classical. These are pictures about people, or, more specifically, about people who don't connect; love is thwarted.

In his film's scattergun styles, Kar-Wai finds poetry, using the fractured narrative (he seldom lingers on anything for long) to mirror the isolation of his characters he dumps in the heart of this most overcrowded of cities. They smoke constantly (the product, he says, of nerves and inexperience), talk smart but never smug, and stare into the middle distance while a jukebox (as ubiquitous as in early Wim Wenders) drones hypnotically in the background. Or occasionally swamps the foreground -- witness the elegiac use of Laurie Anderson and Cantonese trip-hop in this picture.

Unfortunately this most involving of directors looses his nerve at the last and runs to something like a half dozen climaxes -- the result of too much activity? -- that serve to undercut the power so fondly teased-up elsewhere. A rare mistake. As with the period Days of Being Wild and the razor-sharp Chungking Express, this is electrifying, intelligent and hip film-making that manages to look extraordinary while remaining about something. Listening, Mr. Tarantino?