Who It Is

HYPE WILLIAMS

In years to come, his admittedly flawed feature debut, Belly, not only will be more positively re-evaluated, but will be highly influential on other young directors. Having honed his skills on black-music videos, Williams brought hip-hop’s promiscuity with genre to his big-screen work, displaying both playfulness and a willingness to fuck with black representation like no one in recent memory. (Check out the way he highlighted Taral Hicks‘ beauty by darkening her skin -- thereby flying in the face of recent, retro trends fetishizing light skin -- and then coated her in a dark blue light. Or the way he dressed an inner-city thug in a Marlo Thomas That Girl wig and Coke-bottle glasses.) He does what so many hip-hop artists labor in vain to pull off: straddles pop and underground sensibilities while creating something that is both new and completely his own. If given the chance, he will continue to push the edge of the envelope, bringing hip-hop irreverence and a smart eye to the future of cinematic blackness. --E.H.

TSAI MING-LIANG

Never one to spill a drop when a gallon’s handy, Taiwanese writer-director Tsai Ming-liang is more than just a master of the modern weepie: He‘s melodrama’s Noah, riding out the typhoon of teardrops at the end of the century. Director of Taiwan‘s first AIDS-activist documentary and a former theatrical innovator, the 43-year-old Tsai makes films so refreshingly free of cynicism that their big-heartedness seems like some sort of special effect. Each one -- Rebels of the Neon God, Vive L’Amour, The River and The Hole -- centers around sexually ambiguous actor Lee Kang-sheng, a presence constantly yet calmly on the move between polymorphous extremes, yet there‘s never a moment in Tsai’s filmmaking when those extremes seem vulgar or strained. Maybe it‘s the startlingly lucid way Tsai balances sexual maturity and emotional accessibility that persuaded Strand Releasing to pick up Vive L’Amour for U.S. distribution a couple of years back, a gesture so bold as to suggest that Ang Lee might not be the only Taiwanese director worth an American dollar. Or maybe it was just that the male leads were both so hot. Either way, Tsai Ming-liang‘s films are forward-thinking models for independent filmmakers still to come: funny, sad, sexually open, audience-friendly and impossible to forget. --C.S.

WONG KAR-WAI

One of the handful of essential filmmakers to emerge in the 1990s, the Hong Kong native is one of the few directors alive who makes films, not just words into pictures. As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, Happy Together, Fallen Angels -- each of Wong’s films is a bliss-out of sight and sound, a collision of time, space and desire. Even if you‘ve never experienced one of his voluptuous features -- and you can no longer count yourself a true movie-lover if you haven’t -- you‘ve seen a film by someone else who has. In the last few years, the ripple effect of his modestly revolutionary aesthetic has enlivened movies as different as Go, Run Lola Run, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, even Liberty Heights, the last two shot by Wong‘s longtime cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. This is the future of film, if we’re lucky. --M.D.