New Top 100

"Isn't life dissappointing?"
"Yes, it is."


Tokyo Story one of the most humane stories ever told on film. Every part of it is perfect - the performances, the tatami shots, the use of 360 degrees of space, the subtleties of the characters. The story is about an old couple visiting their children in Tokyo. Upon arriving, they are treated by their them like burdens instead of beloved guests. The only person who treats them well is their daughter in law, who is a widow. However, the film doesn't simply villanize the couple's children, but portrays them as responsible adults with their own families to take care of. The story may sound mundane but there is tremendous depths to it. There might never be another filmmaker like Ozu, one that derives such powerful and profound themes from the subtleties of everyday life.

In a small village in Spain after the Spanish Civil War, a young girl sees the 1931 film Frankenstein for the first time. After beeing told by her mischevious older sister that the monster is a spirit that inhabits near their village. Her fascination with the monster's actions causes her to seek out the spirit. Since the story is told mostly from the perspective of the girl, the viewer is forced to see the world through the eyes of a child. The film is rich with oblique symbolism. It is both a study of childhood innocence and fascination with death and a subtle allegory of the devastating effects of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist fascist regime. Ana Torrent give the best performance I've ever seen by a child. It's impossible to tell that she was acting at all. There is minimal dialogue in a story told most through images. I like how one critic describes this film as more of a painting than a motion picture. They are incredibly beautiful and haunting paintings. The tiny figures of our protagonists amid the golden, empty plains make up some of the most unforgettable images in cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive is a film that haunts you long after you see it.

The greatest silent film I have ever seen. Such poetic and dreamy images, graceful camera movements, and bold montages distill the film with its archetypal characters into a purely emotional experience. 3epkano's (Zerkalo in Russian) score adds an otherworldly aura to the film. It feels classical yet modern at the same time. Hands down the most amazing movie going experience I've ever had.

Simpy stunning technical achievement. It's less of a biography of the artist than a series of vital episodes in his life that portrays his spiritual malaise. The epic scope of the production is breathtaking and Tarkovsky's fluid long takes is up to the challenge of capturing every detail.

I watched this in the theater and given the huge production values and scope of the film I cannot imagine seeing it any other way. This film was made to be seen in the cinema.

A film composed almost entirely of still images? Surely not. A bold experiment that works brilliantly as a new form of storytelling. The story explores the themes of memory, fate, and obsession. It uses no dialogue but instead a voice over to tell its poetic and philosophical story. Marker has created one of the best and most influential science fiction films ever. Gilliam adapted this short into his full length film 12 Monkeys. It undoubtedly influenced films like Blade Runner, Dark City, and City of Lost Children which also deal with themes of memory and loss introduced in La Jetee. Marker pays homage to his favorite film Vertigo in one particular scene and in various elements of the story. A lot has been said about the still images, which I think precisely emulates what our memories are. We remember the past not as moving pictures, but ones that remain forever still.

La Jetee has one of the greatest moments in cinema, one that is very subtle and last only a couple of seconds. A moment that captures both the birth of cinema and the essence of love and memory.

La Jetee can be seen on youtube but is best appreciated on the big screen with English dub.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw0UIhLArTM

It's awfully hard to decide whether this film, or the Decalogue, or Red is Kieslowski's best work, but this is definitely his most mysterious and abstract film. In an otherworldly performance that earned her the Best Actress award at Cannes, Irene Jacob (who learned to speak Polish fluently just for this film) plays the dual role of a pair of doppelhangers, both of whom are gifted with beautiful voices. When one dies, the other senses it and avoids making the same mistake that led to the other's death, even though they have never known each other's existence. Kieslowski here is suggesting a mystical and spiritual connection between their souls. This is one of the most metaphysical films I've ever experienced. To say that it is a minimalistic film due to the lack of dialogue does not do the film justice. It is an unique visual and audio experience. The soul-shattering score is completely diegetic - its source is within the narrative. Likewise, the use of motifs such as reflections and strings suggests the character's duality and their connection. The Double Life of Veronique is a film that does not provide an explanination for anything, rather it's a film that make its audience ponder the mysteries of the human soul and its desire for connection.

ps. Amelie fans should will notice that Jeunet pays homage to the sequence involving Veronique and the audio cassette in Amelie, which pales in comparison to that of Veronique.

Absolutely amazing. Probably my favorite of the trilogy (slightly above L'Avventura) although I haven't seen La Notte yet. Such a beautiful film, every frame is like a modern art photograph. The ending is one of most amazing and haunting ever. Monica Vitti is a goddess.

An incredible film about faith. While similar thematically to The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet offers a much broader and deeper scope than Dreyer's earlier masterpiece. In a rural and very religious town in the 1920's, the Borgens is a simple family of peasants. The proud patriarch of the family Morten Borgen lives with his three sons. The eldest son, Mikkel, is an agnostic whose wife Inger is pregnant. The 2nd son Johannes has gone mad from his relgious studies and now believes that he is Jesus. The youngest son Anders is in love with the daughter of a Christian fundamentalist who refuses to offer his daughter to Anders due to his disagreements with Morten on their approach to faith. Tragedy ensues as Inger dies from complication of giving birth, leading to an unforgettable ending. Dreyer pits the concept of religion against the concept of faith and spirituality. True faith as it turns out is in conflict with the beliefs of even the most religious people.

The Godfather of Taiwanese cinema. Hou Hsiao Hsien's masterpiece documents the political and social chaos during the birth of the nation through the Lin family, ran by the old patriarch and his three surviving sons. Hou's film builds an elaborate set of relationships between almost a dozen major characters grounded in a volatile social-political environment. Hou's trademark style uses detached long takes and oblique narrative ellipses to make transitions between cuts almost unnoticeable. The repetition of shots works to slowly build up a devastating emotional impact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Hq1AAkiVI

The most romantic film ever. Wong's most subtle, mature, complex, profound... I can go on and on... work. The film can be very disorientating as many of the scene plays with you expectations and assumptions. For example, subsequent shots of Leung and Cheung together in the same set seems to be parts of the same scene, until you realizes that Cheung is wearing a different dress. Even more important and interesting is the dialogue between the two cuckolded spouses as they pretend to be each other's spouse. This raises a lot of ambiguity in their words. This further raises the complex question regarding whether our own words are confined by our social environment, just like Leung and Cheung's characters are confined by theirs. Wong has perfected his eliptical narrative and introduced a new claustrophobic aesthetic that suits the film perfectly. One thing particularly was the blocking of film which gives the viewer a voyeuristic perspective of the characters. Also, the camera often stays on a character's torso or back instead of the face, and often lingers on a single character during a dialogue. Both are used so that the viewer never gets to see the cheating spouses' faces. The ending elevates the film to a level of profoundity above all of his other films. It's almost like Wong took a page out of Antonioni's book. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the film is the last intertitle of the film, which offers a new interpretation of the whole film:

He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane,
the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees it blurred and indistinct.

The film tells two parallel stories of two people searching for their families in the vicinity of the presently-completed Three Gorges Dam project- a massive hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River that submerged entire towns and displaced 1 million people, just another cost in the modernization of a nation. However, the loss of their people's homes serves as a background. The film charts the tolls of modernization on the family structure of the protagonists. One woman looks for her husband who she hasn't seen or talked to for 2 years because he was sent to manage the project. The film looks great, as Jia uses the grand vistas of the Three Gorges to full effect. Like his other films he uses mostly nonprofessional actors for realism. There are some curiously surreal moments which I'm not sure how they fit into the film.

Dong

The companion piece to Still Life is even more bizarre. It's a documentary that when seen with Still Life mocks the barrier between fiction and documentary. Jia's films always had a edgy documentary feel to them, and this complements those films perfectly.

Brutal and cynical, Buñuel's film proves that he's equally adept at neorealism as surrealism. The surrealist parts of the film doesn't undermine but complements the main neorealism approach. Not many film made even today has as much balls to portray such a subject without such detachment and relentless honesty, not to mention the insight and maturity with which it is imbued. A very powerful film with a dose of black humor.

An unbelievably beautiful and poetic film that moves at a perfect meditative pace. Every impressionistic shot seems like it's from a museum painting or from a dream. The visual style was inspired by the paintings Caspar David Friedrich. One of the pillow-shot-like scenes showing a ship on the ocean fooled me as a real painting at first. I loved Sokurov's handling of the soundtrack of the film, and like the flattened images it seems as if the film is the subjective consciousness of the son. Especially in one scene where he walks through the woods, collapses, yet the sound of the footsteps is still heard. A sublime experience.

I don't know what to say, I mean, what is there to say about a classic so universally enjoyable, so perfect. I could say that Giulietta Masina's performance here is one of the greatest ever, but that's meaningless because words simply cannot do full justice to it. Oh yeah, the ending is absolutely haunting and unforgettable.

This is Krzysztof Kieslowski's magnum opus. A series of ten episodes, each loosely associated with one of the Ten Commandments, each filled with complex moral dilemmas.

The one's I've seen so far:


Decalogue I - 5/5
Decalogue II - 5/5
Decalogue III - 4/5
Decalogue IV - 4.5/5
Decalogue V - 5/5
Decalogue VI - 5/5
Decalogue VII - 3/5
Decalogue VIII - 4.5/5
Decalogue IX - 5/5
Decalogue X - 5/5

The quinessential Tsai Ming Liang film. An affecting portrait of modern alienation in Taipei. Three lonely people unknowingly share a luxury apartment for sale. This idea came from the fact that the real estate industry boom in the 80's left Taiwan with the highest rate of unoccupied homes in the world. The film is very Antonioni-esque but with an extra dose of minimalism and deadpan humor and without the brilliant visual compositions of L' Avventura or L'Eclisse. This being his second film, Tsai hasn't yet perfected his visual style.

Wow what an ending. In many ways this is similar to Floating Clouds except that Takamine sort of plays Mori's part. Economic changes in the form of large, more competitive supermarkets will force her away from the small shop owned by her dead husband's family which she has built up by herself from ruins since the war. In addition Naruse contrasts her traditional values with that of her westernized peers in the form of her sisters in law. It's this refusal to change that dooms her and the unfulfilled romance that the film shifts to in the second half. Takamine is excellent here though I found Kayama's acting a bit on the stiff side. Also this is the most gorgeous looking film by Naruse I've seen.

My second Cassavetes, it's definitely superior to Shadows. Like his first film it has a very raw, edgy feel with great performances by all the actors. John Cassavetes lends such great depths to all of them as we see how emotionally dissatisfied they are beneath their hollow laughter and content facades.

One of the most powerful essay films ever created and a landmark film in the Iranian New Wave. The great Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad directed her only film as a documentary on a leper colony. She instills a dignified sense of humanity and perseverance in these people through her poetry and inventive montage editing.

The greatest prison film ever, Shawshank ain't got nothing on this:



and this:



or this:



watch it on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnhLtB3n25c

To me this film is the logical progression of Italian neorealism. Olmi's attention to the fine details and rhythms of everyday life is accentuated by his editing that takes the viewer further into the subjective consciousness of the protagonist. The editing often reminds me of that of Aimless Walk and The Man With A Movie Camera, while at times reminscent of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. The high contrast photography is gorgeous, and Olmi makes evocative images out off many mundane daily events.

Stranger - We met a year ago.


Woman - No, we didn't.


Stranger - Yes we did.


Woman - Go Away, you're insane.


The End


On a more serious note, this may be the most bizarre yet poetic and hypnotic movie I've ever seen. Resnais takes the seamless transitions between past, present, and future he introduced in Hiroshima Mon Amour to a whole new level. In this film temporal and spacial relationships are completely shattered. There is no sense of which scenes are set in the present and which are set in another time. As a result the film feels like a dream, or rather a nightmare. This has some of the most interesting cinematography I've ever seen. There is this one shot where there are people in this garden.


The people cast shadows, but the triangular trees that align the garden have none. I have no idea how Resnais shot this. The plot is simple: A man meets a woman in a salon and claims that they had a romantic affair a year ago. The woman denies that they have ever met. The man tries to convince her that they did by recalling his memories/imagination of their encounter. I can't say I understood this film and I don't think that there is a solution to this puzzle.

Basically a Carpathian Romeo & Juliet in which Romeo lives on after his lover's death, mixed with sorcery and folklore. The film captures some of the most stunning images I've seen in its own incredibly raw and dizzying ways. The camerawork is so dazzling and outlandish that it's as if Parajanov taught the camera how to fly. The beautiful landscapes of the Carpathian mountains are used to full effect. Some sections of the film can even be described as avant garde. The film portrays the colorful Hutsul culture with its observations on Carpathian everyday life, cultural rituals, and its abundant use of folk music.

An unrelentingly bleak film about how a patriarchal, class based society destroys an innocent woman. The narrative moves economically from various humiliating episodes of her life, each exposing the hypocrisy, greed, and prejudices that dehumanize her existence. Oharu's descent into prostitution is the result of her refusal to play by society's rules. Surprisingly for such an uncompromising film it is less melodramatic than the other Mizoguchi's I've seen (most of the melodrama is at the beginning). Technically one have to try really hard to find any fault with the aesthetics of the film. While there are some pretty funny moments in the her, the movie is so depressing that I would not ever want to watch it again.

You know it's going to be a great film when you have Watkins applying the montage editing that has served his provocative war films so well to a vast biopic. The film mixes biography to improvised fiction. In addition the soundtrack is much more intricately designed than the earlier films in that several tracks would be playing at the same time, often they are partially divorced from the images, but they work in the same way as his montage editing. All the elements of the narrative mesh so well within editing style to present vividly the artist, his world, and the artistic process.

Both of Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur emanate a strangely oppressive and contemplative sense of mystery and isolation. The environment in both films suggests the interior moods of its characters. Erice's keen sense of observation and his use of dissolves highlight the subtle changes in time and in his characters. Much of the story is left to the imagination of the viewer, perhaps more so in El Sur because the real ending of the film was never completed. It's a shame, because some aspects of the film are a step up from Spirit, but the lack of a true ending obscures the central figure of the father too much, leaving the film without a true sense of closure. The film's themes of experience, self discovery, and time are reminiscent of that of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

The film is balls-to-the-fucking-walls-insane! Isabelle Adjani's performance outdoes even the best of Klaus Kinski in terms of pure psychosis. She attempted suicide after seeing herself in the film.

"Are you living to shovel, or shoveling to live?"

An entomologist from Tokyo travels to a remote desert to study insect in hope of getting his recognized for the discovery of a new species of insect. A one night stay in a young widow's house in a deep sandpit turns out to be a trap that forces him to adopt the woman's way of life: shoveling sand out of the sandpit everyday to prevent the house from being submerged. His new life thus begins . The endless cycle of mundane everyday activities of eating, sleeping, sex, and shoveling sand out of the inescapable pit, very much like the Greek tale of Sisyphus. It serves as a bizarre allegory on the meaning of life, as the man is forced to question his own identity and purpose in life. How is his new repetitive way of life any different from his old repetitive city life? The man is a highly rational, logical kind of person who is contrasted by the irrational and earthly wisdom of the woman. Teshigahara's camera captures the shifting sands and the landscapes in sharp deep focus and superimposes images of extreme close ups with these landscapes. Tôru Takemitsu's jarring and abstract soundtrack complements the vivid images perfectly.

a one and a two... Not your typical dysfunctional family story. In fact this is a very honest portrayal of modern taiwanese middle-class family life. The characters all feel real and complex. There is no unnesessary melodrama that plague movies like American Beauty. Yet it manages to encompass every aspect and emotion of life.

This is Kenneth Anger's masterpiece. Some of his best use of montage is in here. Anger's grasp of avant garde techniques and editing is more restrained and refined than in his earlier films like Inauguration of Pleasure Dome and Invocation of My Demon Brother. The soundtrack is one of the best to grace any film, and like Anger's other films it suits the images amazingly well.

This is definitely the most melodramatic Naruse I've seen thus far. That aside, the two protagonists here are arguable the most complex and nuanced. Naruse presents them as very flawed individuals who despite their feelings toward each other, constantly put each other down while harming the people around them. This is very much a self destructive romance between a weak willed and selfish man and a strong woman who cannot abandon her love for him. It's interesting Masayuki Mori plays the man in that he comes to the same realization of how he took his wife for granted in here as in the character he played in Ugetsu. Props to Hideko Takamine for a terrific performance.

This is probably the most harrowing war film ever. The amount of insanity in it makes Aguirre or Apocalypse Now feel like a walk in the park and the atrocities in Schindler's List look like a calm dinner party. The closest film that I can compare it with is Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, but a million time more horrifying and surreal. A brutal masterpiece.

One of the great classic love stories. Very subversive in its simple plot and filled with an erotic tension that borders on sadomasochism. It's impressive how all the scenes were shot on location for a film of this age. Not surprisingly The French New Wave was very much influenced by it. The film also features some great crosscutting between the couple as they are separated. Michel Simon is fabulous as the old garrulous sea dog. He and Dita Parlo carry this film.

Rosetta is a riveting look into the everyday existence of a strong willed teenage girl living in poverty with her alcoholic mother. To escape her dire economic situation she will do anything to get a job. Her basic desire is for a "normal life", which she equates with employment. The films is probably entirely shot with a hand held camera that at times can be disorientating, but it gives a documentary feel to the film and helps portray the desperation of the protagonist. While the film focuses on Rosetta's struggle for everyday survival, her problem is spiritual as well as economic. Her dire living conditions have stunted her emotional growth and ingrained into her psyche the belief that finding a job will solve her problems and allow her to live a normal life. Emilie Dequenne is nothing less than convincing as the determined teen. Her character is not likable nor is the audience asked to sympathize with her. It's an extremely bleak film that never strives for sentimentality.

A self conscious, postmodern film on growing up during the Cultural Revolution. The story is told from the perspective of a young man too young to be sent to the distant provinces to work and as result live without the supervision of adults. It's fascinating to see the way kids live in such a unique social environment. The closest comparison I can make is The 400 Blows with the thematic sensibilities of Blade Runner. The lead performances are excellent. When I first saw this years ago I made the mistake of turning it off when the credits started to roll and missed that WTF moment at the end. For fans of Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine or Zhang Yimou's To Live, this is a unique perspective of this time period. Jiang is a like a missing link between the 5th and 6th Generation.

Worth seeing just to see Jean Renoir in a bear suit.

Jean-Pierre Melville's opus about French Resistance fighters of WWII is his most personal film. It is stylish, grim and so meticulously perfect. This is even better than Le Samourai. Melville draws on his own experiences as a Resistance fighter and combines them with his own meticulous attention to detail to give his film unparalleled authenticity. Not a single shot is wasted. The cast's performances are just as restrained as the film itself. Melville gives touches of his gangster films to this film as well as a fatalistic and existential feel to the story. There is no sentimentalism in this masterpiece, just hard hitting realism and an insightful look at heroism and patriotism.