Chungking Express is, for my money, unquestionably a masterpiece, but one of the most delightful things about it is that it's something of an accidental masterpiece. The film was conceived as a distraction for director Kar-Wai Wong, who at the time was embroiled in the editing of another film, Ashes of Time. The latter was a big-budget historical epic that he was struggling to shape in the editing room, so he took a break for a couple of months and made a small, scrappy contemporary film as a way of working through whatever creative issues he was dealing with at the time. Once Chungking Express was completed, he was able to return to Ashes of Time with renewed vigour and energy. In the process he had someone made not only his best film, but also one of the best films of the 1990s, without even meaning to. It's probably the best argument in favour of procrastination in the history of art.