The bittersweet pangs of impossible love—conveyed in a fleeting gesture or glance that says more than words ever could—are given swooning expression in this double bill of yearning romantic masterpieces. Set to the immortal strains of Rachmaninoff, David Lean’s BRIEF ENCOUNTER aches with unspoken longing as Celia Johnson’s prim and proper housewife and Trevor Howard’s married doctor are drawn to the edge of an illicit affair amid the suburban railway stations and tearooms of postwar Britain. Halfway across the world, in a lushly stylized evocation of 1960s Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai maps the heart-racing, will-they-won’t-they tension that simmers between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung as neighbors who discover that their own spouses are having an affair in the intoxicating IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE.