SRC='http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site297/20040628_075455_2half.gif'>

Ashes of Time Redux

Opens today at the Tower Theatre; rated PG for some mild crude humor; in Mandarin and Cantonese with subtitles; 93 minutes.

Director Wong Kar-Wai has always married gorgeous images, moody heartbreak and convoluted storytelling -- and this new re-editing of his 1994 martial-arts melodrama has all that in spades. The story centers on an assassin-for-hire (played by the late Leslie Cheung) living alone in the desert and nursing a broken heart for the woman (Maggie Cheung) who spurned him. The scene then shifts to the assassin's annual visitor, a romantic swordsman (Tony Leung Kai Fai), who later encounters a blind swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai). Wong's martial-arts scenes are abstract and sumptuous (as photographed by the great Christopher Doyle), but the story moves like a bucking bronco that dares the audience to hang on for the ride.

SRC='http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site297/20040628_075835_3st

ar.gif'>

Roman de Gare

Opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; R for brief language and sexual references; in French with subtitles; 106 minutes.

Veteran French director Claude Lelouch ("A Man and a Woman") generates some mild surprises in this twisty thriller. Novelist Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is questioned by the police about the disappearance of her ghost writer -- at the same time a schoolteacher is reported missing and a serial killer escapes from a Paris prison. Then we see a short, rumpled man ("Delicatessen's" Dominique Pinon) offering a ride to a woman (Audrey Dana) abandoned at a truck stop. Is he the ghost writer, the teacher or the serial killer? Lelouch plays with our expectations in ways that sometimes infuriate, but he finds in the potato-like face of Pinon a charmingly unlikely leading man.

SRC='http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site297/20040628_075835_3st

ar.gif'>

Flow: For Love of Water

Opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; not rated, but probably PG-13 for disturbing images and some language; 84 minutes.

Director Irena Salina surveys the threats to the world's water supply: pollution, dams, the World Bank, the Bush administration's ravaged EPA, and rapacious corporations that would put a price tag on what should be a God-given resource. (In India, where the Ganges is sacred, they believe the water is given by God.) Salina's film travels to South Africa, Lesotho, India, Bolivia and Michigan, places where citizen power has mobilized to stop corporate attacks on the water supply. The movie floods us with information, but Salina meanders too much into strident activism at the price of storytelling.

movies@sltrib.com