In "2046," a story of longing and loss, the passage of time is marked not by the hands of a clock, but by the women who pass through one man's life. The man in question, a newspaper hack, lives in a glorious ruin called the Oriental Hotel, where the thin walls shake violently from the sexual exertions of the clientele. A ladies' man given to vigorous wall-shaking, the writer turns a blind eye to the hotel's decrepitude even as he keeps its female guests fixed in his sights. In this ecstatically beautiful film, walls never tumble, only women do. Manohla Dargis reviews Wong Kar-wai's "2046" in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).