A pivotal figure of Hong Kong cinema, Wong is considered a contemporary auteur, and ranks third on Sight & Sound's 2002 poll of the greatest filmmakers of the previous 25 years.

While As Tears Go By was fairly successful in Hong Kong, Wong moved away from the contemporary trend of crime and action movies to embark on more personal filmmaking styles.

Although it was initially tepidly received by critics, Fallen Angels has since come to be considered a cult classic of the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema, being especially representative of Wong's style.

[7] At school he was studying graphic design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic in 1980, but later dropped out of college after being accepted to a training course with the TVB television network, where he learned the processes of media production.

[11] While it was a conventional crime film,[14] critic David Bordwell said that Wong "[stood] out from his peers by abandoning the kinetics of comedies and action movies in favour of more liquid atmospherics.

[26] In need of further backing, Wong accepted a studio's offer that he make a wuxia (ancient martial arts) film based on the popular novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong.

[29] Filming began with another all-star cast: Leslie, Maggie, and Jacky Cheung returned alongside Brigitte Lin, Carina Lau, Charlie Young, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai − the latter of which became one of Wong's key collaborators.

[4][40] Chungking Express is split into two distinct parts – both set in contemporary Hong Kong and focusing on lonely policemen (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu-wai) who each fall for a woman (Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong).

[16] Stephen Schneider includes it in his book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die with the summary: "While other films by Wong may pack more emotional resonance, Chungking Express gets off on sheer innocence, exuberance, and cinematic freedom, a striking triumph of style over substance".

"[7] Fallen Angels is broadly considered a crime thriller, and contains scenes of extreme violence, but is atypical of the genre and heavily infused with Wong's fragmented, experimental style.

[7] Teo, Brunette, and Jeremy Tambling all see Happy Together as a marked change from his earlier work: the story is more linear and understandable, there are only three characters (with no women at all), and while it still has Doyle's "exuberant" photography, it is more stylistically restrained.

[57] It competed for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where Wong became Hong Kong's first winner of the Best Director Award[58] (an achievement he downplayed: "it makes no difference, it's just something you can put on an ad.

")[7] In his 2005 monograph, Brunette opines that Happy Together marked "a new stage in [Wong's] artistic development", and along with its successor – In the Mood for Love (2000) – showcases the director at "the zenith of his cinematic art.

Several different titles and projects were planned by Wong before they evolved into the final result: a romantic melodrama[60] set in 1960s Hong Kong that is seen as an unofficial sequel to Days of Being Wild.

[63][64] Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai play the lead characters, who move into an apartment building on the same day in 1962 and discover that their spouses are having an affair; over the next four years they develop a strong attraction.

Teo writes that the film is a study of "typical Chinese reserve and repressed desire",[65] while Schneider describes how the "strange relationship" is choreographed with "the grace and rhythm of a waltz" and depicted in "a dreamlike haze by an eavesdropping camera".

[83] Ty Burr of The Boston Globe praised it as an "enigmatic, rapturously beautiful meditation on romance and remembrance",[84] while Steve Erikson of Los Angeles Magazine called it Wong's masterpiece.

"[4] In November 2016, he was announced as taking over an upcoming film about the murder of Maurizio Gucci from previous director Ridley Scott,[108] but commented in October 2017 that he was no longer involved in the project.

That is the reason why her name is always the first to appear onscreen in all of my films.”[117] In 2009, Wong signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski following his arrest in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges after being detained while traveling to a film festival, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects.

[121] Art professor Giorgio Biancorosso commented that Wong's international influences include Martin Scorsese, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alfred Hitchcock, and Bernardo Bertolucci.

He has a particular affinity for Latin American writers, and the fragmentary nature of his films came primarily from the "scrapbook structures" of novels by Manuel Puig, Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, which he attempted to emulate.

[76] Tony Leung has commented that this approach is "taxing on the actors", but Stokes & Hoover speculate that Wong's collaborators endure it because "[the] results are always unexpected, invigorating, and interesting.

[136] Critics have commented on the lack of plot in his films,[137] such as Burr who says: "The director doesn't build linear story lines so much as concentric rings of narrative and poetic meaning that continually revolve around each other".

"[11] Other features of the Wong aesthetic include slow motion,[93] off-centre framing,[140] the obscuring of faces,[141] rack focus,[142] filming in the dark or rain,[143] and elliptical editing.

[8] Academic Curtis K. Tsui argues that style is the substance in Wong's film, while Brunette believes that his "form remains resolutely in the service of character, theme, and emotion rather than indulged in for its own sake".

In In the Mood for Love, the recurring use of Yumeji's Theme made by Umebayashi Shigeru is more than just a background score; it becomes a symbol of the unspoken desires, loneliness, and restrained emotions between the protagonists.

[157] With the subsequent release of Happy Together and In the Mood for Love, Wong's international standing grew further,[158] and in 2002 voters for the British Film Institute named him the third greatest director of the previous quarter-century.

[160] The East Asian scholar Daniel Martin describes Wong's output as "among the most internationally accessible and critically acclaimed Hong Kong films of all time".

[166] "Wong stands as the leading heir to the great directors of post-WWII Europe: His work combines the playfulness and disenchantment of Godard, the visual fantasias of Fellini, the chic existentialism of Antonioni, and Bergman's brooding uncertainties."

[172] Wong's influence has impacted contemporary directors including Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Lee Myung-se, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Tom Tykwer, The Daniels, Zhang Yuan, Tsui Hark,[173] and Barry Jenkins.