My Favorite Movies

Along with Murnau's Sunrise, this is something of a cinematic miracle.

One of Ozu's very best films. The film shows the life of the Hirayamas, a middle-class family that is adjusting to the changes in society. It has an unusually large cast for an Ozu film, and he juggles these disparate characters effortlessly. The film is mostly concerned with the older generation dealing with the present while cherishing the past as embodied by Ryu's character. That ending is an incredibly moving ode to life and the passage of time.

An absolutely mind-blowing film, easily the best I've seen from Alain Robbe-Grillet. Intoxicatingly erotic, the film follows a group of post 1968 Parisian hedonistic youths who act out perverse, sado-erotic fantasies in a cafe which the film is named after. The arrival of a stranger who introduces several new games to them triggers a hallucinogenic, baffling chain of events that takes them to an exotic locale in Tunisia, where the earlier role-playing skits enacted by the students take on the most dangerous forms of torture chambers where beautiful young women are chained and crucified. Where these images are hallucinations is not clear, the narrative is so abstract and rarified that it remains a unsolvable puzzle in the same sense as Grillet's first work - the equally dazzling and mind-boggling Last Year at Marienbad.

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.

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

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.

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.

Awesome! Greatest chick flick ever!

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.

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

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

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.

Easily one of the most beautiful documentaries I've seen, if you can call it that. It's more like a great poem of a piece of music as the images of Armenian people herding sheep and cows tuned to the music of Vivaldi's Four Seasons is transformed into a spiritual allegory achieved through a strange montage style that defies what montage supposedly does. No wonder Parajanov's a big fan, this achieves what Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors tries to do even more successfully.

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.

Anger's fascination with rituals is manifested in the motorcycle gangs. His innovative use of music with montage basically invented the music video and influenced many directors such as Scorsese.

Anger claimed on the commentary that David Lynch stole the idea of using the song "Blue Velvet" from this film.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My first experience with Ophüls convinces me that he is a master of the long fluid take aesthetic as much as Sternberg and Mizoguchi. The film travels back and forth between Lola's memories of episodes of her past life and her present as a gaudy circus show attraction which ironically is a caricaturisation of her life and quite a fitting metaphorical, self-reflexive depiction of her rise and fall, as well as serving to call into question the truthfulness of Lola's portrayal of herself. The dual narratives allows Ophuls to compress what could easily been a 3 hour epic into under 2 hours while satirizing celebrity culture (Andrew Sarris calls Sarah Palin the new Lola) as Lola's sexual conquests are exploited mercilessly by the circus. In a way this film is a bit overwhelming to digest, as the dense compositions and gorgeous camera movements are hard to be savored in such a fast paced film.

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

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.

easily the most electrifying and intense film I've seen. It reuses footage from the film The Entity, in which Barbara Hershey is assaulted and raped by invisible ghosts. Not for epileptics.

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.

The most beautiful avant garde film ever. Terry Riley's experiental music is amazing too.

Two writers take on a job to write a script based on a recent event where a man claimed that his niece shot him with his army rifle, while she says that he shot himself while cleaning it. One writes the story based on imagination while the other does it through personal investigation. The film drifts into a character study of the impulsive nonconformist woman, played by Bulle Ogier, who drifts from one menial job to another. The lackadaisical pacing and playfulness of the film is very enjoyable. It's shot in a verite style, at times it feels like a Hong Sang Soo film, at times a Rivette minus the surreal/crazy parts.

Edward Yang's Antonioni-esque masterpiece. A much darker and enigmatic film than Yang's Yi Yi, this has been compared favorably with Antonioni's Blow-Up.

To me there is no single greatest film from Yasujiro Ozu but a whole filmography of masterpieces that spans human life from youth to old age, a chronicler of contemporary family life. Whereas Tokyo Story is mostly concerned with the generational divide between mid aged and elderly generations, a film like Good Morning focuses on children, or a film like An Autumn Afternoon is about old age. Ozu was influenced by Hollywood directors, and he created his own narrative system and aesthetics by modifying the classical Hollywood continuity system into his own unique, experimental style using 360 degree space, static geometrical compositions, and elliptical editing. Ozu gradually refined his already distinctive style through his films in the 30's and 40's, removing camera movement and transition effects, all with the effect of placing more focus to the characters. Ozu was essentially a director who made comedies to mainstream audiences in his time, and often employed bathroom humor and fart jokes while dealing with timeless themes of human relationships with subtlety and restraint.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Pride and Prejudice


While this statement is not relevant to any leading man in the story of Late Spring, Austen's famous line does underline the irony in the beliefs of the relatives and friends of Noriko, the main character in the film. Almost past the prime age for marrying, Noriko is pressured by her relatives and friends to a traditional arranged marriage. Yet, she is perfectly content with her life with her widowed father, with who shares a close relationship unlike that of a traditional father and daughter. She argues with her father, who unselfishly wants to see her married, who will take care of him once she's living with her husband? Her father tells her that will solved by him remarrying, a concept that she opposes. Throughout the film we never see the groom, not even a photo of him. Likewise we never seen the wedding take place. Why? Because they are useless to the film. Ozu uses ellipses to skip these scenes which a typical movie would normally highlight, instead he focuses on the small, private moments of life that says the most about the characters and their emotions. Late Spring is quintessential Ozu, and his most perfect and thematically focused film. The emotional intensity it achieves will never be matched.

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.

Jia Zhang Ke is one of the most talented young directors working today. This might be my favorite of his work, perhaps because I can relate to its characters the most. I love his gritty neorealist style that captures the lives and problems of people in a time and place that is undergoing huge social and economic changes. The story is about two teenage boys with no goals, directions, or future. They have no jobs and little money. They feed off of pop culture such as Pulp Fiction and Chinese pop songs, when their lives couldn't be farther away from these distractions. Jia's pacing and plotlessness might turn off some viewers, but his concern is realism, which he uses to capture the social-economic alienation and spiritual malaise of the one-child-per-family generation.

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.

This film has an utterly intoxicating atmosphere of 60's Hong Kong. Looking back at WKW's career, this is definitely his most important film. This is the film in which Wong Kar Wai became Wong Kar Wai. The cast is spetacular, especially the late Leslie Cheung, whose character has the magnetic charisma that emulates the likes of James Dean. The cinematography of Chris Doyle is not as mind blowing as his later collaborations with WKW, but it is more subtle. The washed out monochromatic filters, mirrors, and angled shots mixed with exotic rumba and hawaii guitar music creates a nostalgic feel of the 60's that not even its sequels - In the Mood for Love and 2046 can duplicate.

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.

A detective retires due to his acrophobia (fear of heights), but is called to do an unusual assignment for an old friend. He wants the detective to investigate the strange behavior of his wife, who appears to be possessed.

On the surface Vertigo appears to be another intriguing Hitchcock thriller. As one peers further into the film it becomes clear that it is a psychological drama, a study of a man's obsession for lost love. Another misconception is that the film should have ended sooner after the twist is revealed. The part after the twist is just as important as part before. Stewart, who plays a much darker role than usual. and Novak, who shows excellent range, are simply amazing. Hitchcock's imagery uses the swirling pattern of many things such as the staircase to symbolize the dizzying chaos of not only that of vertigo but also that which the protagonist find himself sinking deeper into. Even Bernard Herrmann's swirling score mirrors the protagonist's vertigo. Vertigo is Hitchcock's most disturbing, sexual, haunting, and deepest film.

Amazing

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.

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.

Chungking Express may be the reason I love movies in the first place. WKW has taken his themes of urban disconnection, identity, and memory and infused them with the Goddardian and MTV visual style. The result is one of the most energetic, exciting, and refreshing movies ever. Even so, I still believe this film is underrated because most viewers fail to pick up the dual layers of this film. WKW constantly plays with the theme of identity. The second story can be interpreted as two characters who constantly change each other's values and personal preferences which define who they are. Much of the casual dialog carries multiple meanings as well. The performances were all excellent, but Faye Wong, who in her debut role easily steals the show. Hearing California Dreaming will never be the same again. It will always take on the personality of the elfin-like Faye.

ps. Amelie fans should notice how Jeunet took some of the elements of Amelie from CE, yet CE is by superior and more sincere by far than that pretentious Tatou vehicle.

A melodramatic story of jealousy, lost innocence, and reconciliation between two orphaned sisters in the city gets the city symphony/The Man With the Movie Camera treatment. The whole "story" is told in montage instead of intertitles in periods of rapid cutting/dissolves and stillness. The jarring elliptical narrative and use of handheld camera are very impressive. The experimental score is bold as the visuals.

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.

"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.

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.

Excellent stuff. a very dreamy and intimate portrayal of adolescence. Didn't fall into any kind of cliche resolution I was expecting and the film is about much more than its central incident. Love the Nino Rota music and the Scorpio Rising-like 8 mm footage of the skateboarding subculture.

"Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hiroshima. That is your name."
"Yes, that is my name. Your name is Ne-vers. Nevers in France. "

More than a decade after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a visiting French woman has an affair with a Japanese architect. It is an impossible relationship since both are married. The two form an emotional connection that causes the woman to remember a traumatic prior relationship, which helps her to eventually purge herself of this anguish, but never the memories themselves. Hiroshima Mon Amour works as a documentary on memory. It is also one of the most influential works in film history. The use of seamless and analogous transitions between past and present, memory and reality creates the sense that time itself is shattered. Films such as Ashes of Time, 2046, and Memento owe much of their impact on this innovative editing.

Happy Together is powerful film about the process of letting go of a doomed relationship as well as loniness and dislocation. The way Wong portrays the deterioriating relationship between the male leads allows their relationship to transcend all gender. This isn't a "gay movie" as people tend to label such movies dealing with such subjects often tend to, but simply a film about the relationship between two individuals who happen to be gay. This is how such subject matters should be portrayed, not like some lame coming out story or in anyway that focuses on the sexuality instead of the relationship itself. Stylistically it is close to that of CE and FA but also hints at his later films. Chris Doyle's experimental cinematography uses black and white film stock, oversaturation of color, wide angle lenses incredibly to make one of the most visually stunning pictures ever. The lighting and editing are so impressive. The eclectic soundtrack mixes music from il maestro Astor Piazzolla, Caetano Veloso, and Frank Zappa to generate such a haunting mood. Tony Leung's performance might be his best that I've seen of him, and that really says a lot about such a world class actor. When I first saw it, I liked it but felt it was not among his best works, recently I realized how honestly and sincerely it portrays a deteriorating relationship. This is Wong's most mature film, yet it is able to retain the brashness and youth of his earlier films, something that In the Mood for Love does not have.

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.

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

Probably the most beautiful compositions I've ever seen. The incredible landscapes convey the emotions and interiors of the characters. The film is similar to that of La Dolce Vita in its portrayal of the amoral upper class. Antonioni, like all of the other masters of Italian neorealism, moves into his own niche of internal realism.

Francois Truffaut's semi-autobiographical debut feature is one of the best films about the pains and anxieties of childhood. It tells the story of a neglected and misunderstood boy who lashes back in rebellion by running away, skipping school, and committing petty crimes until his parents are forced to institutionalize him. Jean-Pierre Leaud gives an unflinching performance as Truffaunt's alterego. I'd say it rank amongst the finest child performances ever. In the scene with the psychologist, Leaud's response to the psychologist's questions are said with such honesty and naturalism. The ending of the film is absolutely breathtaking. My jaws dropped at its sheer beauty and pathos.

HAHAHAHA!!! This film is so weird, I can't count how many time I was like WTF is going on. It's ultraviolent, kinky, and totally incomprehensible! I really can't blame the studio for firing Suzuki after he made this film.

Wow! I didn't know that cannibal chickens existed!! We have midgets imprisioning their fellow midget warden in his building, burning trees and houseplants, throw food fights, and more madness and destruction. There's even a monkey that gets crucified and paraded around!! (not harmed of course) Utterly insane and hilarious. Great stuff!

"Without mercy, man is not a human being."



This is another haunting classic by Mizoguchi and one of the most powerful stories captured on film. Several years after an humanistic governor is exiled for disobeying orders, his wife and children are kidnapped and sold to slavery on their way to see him. What follows is both a physical and spiritual journey for the children to reunite with their parents. The last scene is one of the most devastating scenes I've ever seen.

Another great film by the master of family drama. The dissolution of the family is once again a major theme. Like in Late Spring, the great Setsuko Hara plays a single woman in her late twenties who is pressured by her family into marriage. Unlike Late Spring, Hara's character is a modern, more rebellious type of woman, or so it initially seems. Is she driven to her actions by her selfish and independent lifestyle, or are her actions driven by something else? The outcome however is the same. The motif of trains and tracks symbolizes the increasing distance between the different generations, both physical and emotional. Ozu's films are never heavily driven by plot, but by a sense of the realism of casual everyday life in order to capture those small pleasures and disappointment that life comprises of. Despite their surface simplicity, they are rich and sincere. This film can be considered the second part of the Noriko trilogy, bookended by Late Spring and Tokyo Story. It's the most lighthearted and comic one but no less poignant.

No. of camera movements: 7 (gasp! Too many for an Ozu film!)

Tsai's ode to the death of the old movie theaters in our times of televisions, DVDs and huge multiplexes. The most minimalistic film I've seen. I counted only 10 short lines of dialogue in the entire film, with the first line 44 minutes into the film. Tsai uses extremely long static takes to capture the main character in the film - a run down movie theater screening its final movie - the King Hu martial arts classic Dragon Inn. Among the people in the theater are a young gay Japanese man looking for intimacy or sex, a crippled woman who runs and cleans the decrepit theater, a young projectionist whom she pines for, and two "ghosts" that haunt the theater. The glacial pace of the film will no doubt alienate most viewers. For those who can stay awake during the film, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a very rewarding experience. Think of it as a minimalist silent Cinema Paradiso.

OMFG, I'm absolutely speechless. Picture the first scene: It starts with an empty crisscrossing hallway where a woman in a nurse's uniform walks past another woman. That shot is followed by the nurse on a bed, legs spread wide, with half a watermelon between her crotch. A guy enters the screen and starts having sex with the watermelon while the woman moans in ecstasy. All this is cross cut with the other main character of the film sitting idly in the same position as the porn star while watching the news on TV of a watermelon eating contest.

As it turns out Taiwan is suffering from a massive drought which forces people to turn to alternative sources of water such as watermelons. And the only thing more outrageous than the first few minutes of this film is the last 100 minutes, which culminates in a profoundly disturbing and beautiful ending. No, it's not a porno, rather it's a condemnation of how pornography make commodities of human connection and sexual desire. The sex in the film is portrayed as entirely mechanical, soulless, and unerotic. It also happens to be a bizarre musical, complete with colorful Umbrellas of Cherbourg-like musical numbers and giant penises. The sequel to What Time is it There? and The Skywalk is Gone, though those are not mandatory to understanding the plot. This is the funniest and most disturbing film by Tsai that I've seen so far.

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.

This film is like La Strada mixed with Bonnie and Clyde without the romanticism of neither. It's quite admirable that there is no effort to dramatize any of the actions or characters. Yet the characters are fascinating because of how naturally the film flows without any contrivances of plot or message. The gritty 16mm photography and naturalistic sound make the improvised scenes all the more realistic. It's a shame that Loden never made another film. It's also unfortunate that this gem is pretty much unrecognized and forgotten.

An incredible metaphysical and religious sci-fi masterpiece. One of the most visually stunning films, right up there with The Conformist and Days of Heaven in the use of color and nature.

One of the greatest films of this decade.

My first Naruse. Hara gives another impressive performance as a frustrated housewife who leaves her husband for Tokyo in an attempt to break free of her boring life and think about her future. The film explores the lack of opportunities for women in the rebuilding postwar Japan. Economic conditions play a large part in the film, as the couple struggle to make ends meet. Naruse's style is a bit similar to Ozu in that he mostly uses static shots, though he doesn't strive as much for composition. He also uses a lot of dissolves instead of direct cuts.

Hilarious and razor sharp satire on organized religion. Pretty much a perfect film if not for the somewhat abrupt ending. Who would have though that hell is danceclub in NYC?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8891541945399209661

A faux documentary on the aftermath of a nuclear attack on a city in Britain. Watkins's use of montage editing with his multi-perspective narrative is extremely effective and powerful. The film is very well researched and enacted, and become even more horrifying because everything depicted in the film has happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is within the realm of possibility, even for today. The film is very powerful even today, and it seems no surprise that it was banned from TV for 20 years during the Cold War. (so much for BBC's independence from the government)

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.

Beautifully shot western with excellent performances by Fonda and Mature. Ford's version of the story is a very romantic interpretation. He also gives a sense of the everyday life on the frontiers. The vagueness of Doc's past hurts his characterization.

Pretty entertaining and atypical western with some very over the top acting and surface level cool dialogue. It's basically a feminist western where the two strongest characters are women. The color photography was very soothing on the eyes. Mercedes McCambridge plays the most annoying bitch ever. The ending is pretty conventional in which everything falls into order.

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.

Stylistically this is Tsai's most conventional film, though it has all of his obsessions and themes with water, sex, the fractured nuclear family, and loneliness that he would present in later works. An atmosphere of melancholy and social disconnection constantly pervades the film. The omnipresence of water creates a sense of decay. Tsai presents a society where the youths communicate with arcade machines more than with each other. Another worthy note is that there's a pretty catchy synth score.

The greatest parody ever, as well a brilliant satire on big business.

Another masterpiece by Peter Watkins. Culloden is a detailed re-creation of the last and likely the most lopsided battle in Britain and its aftermath between the outequipped, disorganized, and poorly fed Highland Scottish rebels and the larger well-equipped and trained English army. Watkins depicts the battle in a personal way by interviewing the various common soldiers, leaders, and observers in the battle. Through this we get a slew of at times conflicting perspectives, from which forms a more complete, truthful picture of history. Much of the film focuses on the common people who fought in the battle, this works perfectly in showing that it is always those people who suffer while the leaders benefit.

Weird film. It starts as a mythical story. (The opening titles is a scroll painting that explains the myth) A third of the way through it reveals itself as a Japanese noh play. The rest of film is a mixture of melodrama and noh performance, with some animation and nifty special effects. Uchida uses a lot of long takes to complement the highly theatrical acting and dialogue. Normally I don't like this kind of acting but here it works even though this leads to some campy moments. Most of the film was shot on sets, with the noh parts in highly colorful and stylized , transforming sets similar to that of The Archers' films. I liked how the film basically drops the first story arc and goes completely in a another direction in the second half, in a similar way as Vertigo.

The images flow and repeat like the music on the soundtrack. I was completely hypnotized during the 2nd half.

This is no doubt my favorite modern HHH film. It's a beautiful slice of life in Paris as seen through the eyes of a foreigner, or perhaps from the viewpoint of the red balloon which seems to symbolize the wonder and curiosity of childhood. Of course Hou integrates his theme of history's impact on the present gracefully into the spontaneous, free-flowing narrative. Also similar to Cafe Lumiere the film depicts the interpretation of a foreign culture from one's own, as in how the character played by Binoche runs a chinese-inspired puppet show (a reference to The Puppetmaster) and how the Chinese film student is trying to film a homage to The Red Balloon. The composition and inventive use of reflections make this IMO the most visually accomplished film among his post 2000 films. Binoche does a great job here as well. In one of my favorite scenes a class of schoolchildren goes to a museum with their teacher to see Félix Vallotton's painting "The Balloon." When they are asked whether the painting is happy or sad, one child says that since part of the painting is dark and part of it is light, the painting is both happy and sad. The description sums up the mood of the film.

A very charming and humorous tour of 60's Paris as we follow Cleo, a spoiled pop star as she anxiously wait for her medical test result, from going to a fortuneteller to meetings with her boyfriend and composers, to running an errand for a friend. The film has some of the same kind of spirit as Breathless, only it's far more enjoyable and interesting. It also doesn't hurt that Corinne Marchand is very easy on the eyes.

Ozu's first talkie is a bittersweet precursor to Tokyo Story. In it a windowed mother gives up everything she has for her son's education. When she visits him 13 Years later in Tokyo, she discovers that he has not become the successful man he wanted to be but is instead a poor night school teacher. Gradually they each have to come to terms with life's disappointments as well as redefine their concept of success. The silence and the mundane conversations as well as a scene at a movie theater highlight the generational distance between the mother and the son. The film is much more sober and less talky compared to Ozu's later films while the acting is more expressive. Another noteworthy aspect of the film is that the pillow shots are unusually lengthy. A devastating masterpiece.

Highly impressive. Uchida has to be one of the most imaginative and versatile Japanese directors of his time. The narrative is brilliantly split into 3 parts. The feverish first part takes place in immediate postwar Japan where a criminal is on the run from a heinous murder with a large sum of cash. The second part shifts completely to another character and the film takes on a new direction as it explores the underbelly of postwar urban life. The third part becomes a fascinating character study as the narrative converges again. The camerawork is very stylish and Uchida uses the same long fluid take aesthetic as he used in The Mad Fox. The technical aspects of the film are undeniably impressive. The film does have some flaws like the occasional unnecessary exposition, an abrupt ending, and I thought the psychological trauma of the main character feels underwritten. The film is more similar to the more modern Japanese films of Imamura than the earlier style of Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji. A good comparison can be made between this and Imamura's Vengeance is Mine.

An offshoot of Ozu's earlier silent crime drama That Night's Wife, in which a man commits a crime to save another's life. Here the film follows an unemployed and homeless man trying to find a job to support his two sons. The characters are significantly more fleshed out, resulting in a much more powerful outcome. Other than the intertitles, most of the narrative and aesthetic conventions of Ozu's later films are existent.

Hou perhaps reached his aesthetic extreme with the one take per scene approach here, which I loved. The opening scene is simply breathtaking. The film almost feels like a play with the entire running time taking place inside. Almost all the major action in the film takes place offscreen such as when a character is merely discussed in one scene but revealed much later in the film to have died. The film is almost too subtle in that every fade in/out carries some meaning and what happened between is oblique, so I probably missed some important details. All the actors were great, especially the arrogant Michelle Monique Reis, who only adds to the film's beautiful sets and sepia colored cinematography.

simply one of the greatest films ever made.

Beautiful low key, poetic road film with a hint of Antonioni. Warren Oates was gr8. Really captures that loneliness of living on the road. My satisfaction after seeing this film is permanent.

Absolutely absurd. It's like My Winnipeg in some of the similar autobiographical content with the hockey and hair salons, except it's all done for a pure dreamlike nonsense of a story, which concerns Guy as the star of the Winnipeg Maroons hockey team, his pregnant girlfriend who he sends to a hair salon/brothel/abortion clinlic for an abortion while he runs off with the daughter of the hair salon boss..., and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The editing here is almost as hyperactive as The Heart of the World. It's divided into 10 chapters like a Feuillade serial and originally meant to been seen through 10 peepholes in an art exhibit.

This is essentially Keaton doing a chase film, probably the most inventive I've seen. The film ends in a war scene impressive in scope. There is generally more suspense and action than comedy.

Oooo snap! Easily the funniest Naruse I've seen so far and one of the strangest ones as well in that its main heroine is the feistiest and independent of all Naruse heroines. While she does face numerous hardships the other ones endure, she doesn't let others push her around. She beats them up instead. The men are pretty much a collection of familiar male archetypes from other Naruse films from The Sound of the Mountain to When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. The no-nonsense way which she deals of her incompetent husbands is as if Naruse took a page out of Samuel Fuller. It was quite surreal.

The greatest coming of age film ever. So incredibly evocative and resonant. Even though this is usually considered Hou's first mature work, a lot of his later contemporary films such as Millennium Mambo are clearly rooted in this.

Wiseman aims to be objective as possible as he take the viewer inside a mental institution in Massachusetts. The film goes on without any narration or text to let the images and editing tell their own story. It was incredibly unsettling to see how people are treated as animals, locked up naked in empty cells while taunted by the guards, who don't even seem to care that their behavior is captured on film. The camera often follows several patients and institution workers, one of them appear perfectly logical as he complains that the institution is making him worse instead of better while the psychiatrists describes him as suffering from severe paranoia. It's hard not to take the patient's point of view. The possible problem with that is that Wiseman seems to be sacrificing objectivity by favoring the patients more than the workers, which is especially apparent in the single most obvious edit in the film about the fate of the patient who is force fed from a tube. Other than that it's one of the more uncomfortable movies I had to sit through. There were also some weird scenes of patients hanging around in the courtyard that reminds me of Gummo.

Very similar to Marienbad conceptually, though not quite as formally mesmerizing. A French man meets a mysterious woman in Istanbul and they start an affair. She tells him that the city is all fake. Her eventual disappearance haunts him and he goes looking for her, but finds that it's as if she never existed. Whereas Marienbad accentuates interior architecture of a mansion, L'Immortelle is shot in the ancient exotic Byzantine ruins and temples of Istanbul. It's like a cross between Marienbad and L'Avventura.

This film really captures a romanticized version of Manhattan, which is not a bad thing at all. Gondon Willis's stunning cinematography captures the city in its full glory, and the Gershwin score works perfectly. I also enjoyed the many of those funny and awkward moments along with its candid portrayal of neurotic relationships.

New favorite Kurosawa

A good bridge between Passion and Ordet, as elements from both can be seen here. Sexual freedom is perceived as witchcraft, though the film leaves as possible a supernatural interpretation. One of the reason this and Ordet work so well is that both can be interpreted in many ways.

Yummy! Thatsa alot of beef! This makes me hungry for meat. I need to go grab a nice piece of steak.

The last of the Cinemascope trilogy, again using footage from The Entity.

I'll never eat vegetables again.

Conner takes footage from the Zaptruder film and other footage of JFK on the day of his death and adds to the soundtrack of radio announcers covering the event. The most powerful part of the film was when we hear the few minutes after the assassination has taken place the screen become a flicking black and white flickering strobe, as the shocked and confused voice of the newscaster is all we are given as to what is happening.

Emil Jannings won his the first ever Oscar for best actor in his role as a former Russian general reduced to a struggling extra in Hollywood. The director who casts him has personal score to settle with him. Like The Scarlet Empress Sternberg devotes half of the film on a revolution in which the general is overthrown and humiliated by an anarchist mob of Bolsheviks. Sternberg doesn't sympathize with neither the czar's or the Bolshevik side, but his portrayal of the latter is a lot harsher. The camerawork and visual motifs link the revolution with the film crew and set, where the film's magnificent ending takes place.

A haunting masterpiece, A train ride becomes an allegory for the transience of life. Tthe ending leaves me stunned every time.

This film documents a leper colony on the island of Spinalonga off the coast of Crete, where during the beginning 20th century Greece imprisoned their infected to prevent the disease's spread. When modern medicine allowed them to be released a half century later those deformed men and women could not be accepted back into society even when the disease was not contagious. In a way this is the angrier sister documentary to The House is Black. The cinematography ranks among the most beautiful I've seen. A lot of the formal devices here were quite strange such as the bizarre camerawork scanning the walls and streets of the ruins on the island. At times film would would suddenly pause, shift into black and white or color, and resume. The narration consist of disembodied voiceovers of lepers victims in addition to an interview with the fascinating leader of the colony, Raimondakis, who bitterly condemns us for our lack of compassion and humanity. He understands the film's potential for spectacle and questions the nature of the role of the camera/director/viewer.

Resnais pushes his fragmentary editing and framing to the extreme, shattering spacial and temporal continuity in an essentially linear story in order to convey the characters' emotional turmoil. Rapid jump cuts between characters occupying different frames and setting along with the overlapping dialogue over these montages convey the character's psychological disconnection to the present. There are no establishing shots and the 180 degree rule is thrown out the window. It is essentially a character study of the two characters, one haunted by his experiences in the Algerian War, one obsessed by a past love. Sacha Vierny creates some gorgeous Antonioni-like shots of landscapes and architecture. The ending is comparable to that of L'Eclisse.

Simply one of the most visually stunning silents ever. Unlike the other Sternbergs I've seen this one often goes for a more of gritty, realistic aesthetic instead of the heavily stylized sets in The Scarlet Empress. The beginning of the film was so gorgeous and evocative (has there ever been a more poetic suicide scene?) that the more character and story focused parts after that failed to live up to the towering expectations the beginning set up. It doesn't mean that those parts were bad in anyway, in fact the characters and their relationships are quite affecting and well handled, I just wished that more of that smoky atmospheric night scenes where Sternberg can show off his brilliant lighting techniques.

A landmark in the history of cinema. One of the most fascinating documentaries ever made. Rouch and Morin's sociological experiment follows a group of Parisians from various walks of life during the Algerian War. Like Man With a Movie Camera, this is a fully self reflexive documentary. The filmmakers do not seek to be invisible like the American direct cinema of Pennebaker, Maysles, Leacock, etc. but actively appear on camera to interact with the subjects of the film, even bringing many of these people together to socialize and reveal things about their lives (there's even a Jean Pierre Leaud lookalike). This gives the film a very intimate and warm atmosphere. One of the goals of the experiment as said by the filmmakers in the beginning was to see if people behaved differently in the presence of a camera, whether people behave normally or act. In the penultimate scene where the people watch scenes of themselves in the film, argumnents arise over whether the subjects were acting or exposed themselves too much to the camera, even the ones who are filmed are not sure if they were acting or not. The films leaves many unanswered questions of the ability for a film to represent a person truthfully, to capture reality.

Fantastic! Rivettian conspiracy + musical numbers+ Secret Society + expressive colors + long takes = badass

P.S: Anna Karina, how far thou hath fallen. O_O

A sensual, minimalist film about voyeurism. The film makes great use of depth of focus and reflective surfaces and also benefits from an excellent sound design. Guerín's film depicts the tranquil city atmosphere of Strasbourg, where an unnamed man (the romantic dreamer type) sits at an outdoor cafe and watches the beautiful women setting there and sketches their gestures in his notebook, trying to construct a person scribed as "Sylvie". He stalks one of the woman whom he believes is this Sylvie. For such a simple setup this film was really engrossing and in the end it captured the essence of the main character's longing and romantic fantasy (ala Vertigo). Comparing it to Vertigo may be misleading since this is not a mystery nor does it have much of a plot. It's mostly just shots of the man watching and sketching.

A fascinating exploration of the history of the Soviet Union and early Soviet cinema through the figure of a repressed and forgotten filmmaker. Structured as a series of video letters addressed to his friend Alexander Medvedkin, a Soviet filmmaker who lived through the birth and chaos of the Soviet Union and whose films were banned before release, Marker's film traces the history of Soviet cinema through Medvedkin and his contemporaries Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko, and novelist Isaac Babelthis. I've already seen The Train Marches On, Marker's previous film on Medvedkin and his agitprop trains, and Marker incorporates some of it into this film. Continuing his obsession of the nature of images his so illustrated in Sans Soleil, Marker explores how fictional cinematic images, like that of the famous Odessa stairs sequence in Battleship Potempkin, become accepted as historical truth. Although I haven't seen any early Soviet films other than Potempkin and MWtMC, and can't tell the difference between a gulag and a kulak, I was completely captivated by Marker's insightful essay, which creates so many clever insights through his esoteric connections between fact and fiction, history and film.

The most brilliant compilation documentary since A Movie?

The the mis en scene here has to be the most sophisticated I've ever seen. Just layers and layers of the image stuffed with action and creative gags, not to mention the incredible use of depth and reflective surfaces. Saw a 70mm print of this without subtitles, which didn't matter because it doesn't rely on dialogue and a lot of it is in English.

Poetic, evocative and enormously affecting, Davies's autobiographical film is one of the most formally fascinating films I've seen. The atemporal narrative is reminiscent of The Mirror and the shots of empty hallways as well as the shot-reverse-shot sequences of characters looking directly at the camera evokes Ozu. The ghostly voiceovers recalls Duras' India Song.

"The Old Man, the hero of this tale, was born at the end of the last century, in a country where man has always striven to tame the sea and harness the wind. Camera in hand, he has traversed the 20th century in the midst of the stormy history of our time. In the evening of his life, at age 90, having survived the various wars and struggles that he filmed, the old filmmaker sets off for China. He has embarked on a mad project: to capture the invisible image of the wind."

Awesome hybrid of documentary and fiction about Joris Ivens' travels in China were he attempts to fulfill his childhood dream. It works as an elegy to Ivens' career and impending death. It's also a throwback to the earliest days of documentary as most of the scenes are blatantly staged. I was impressed by the playful, lyrical fantasies it veers into, how they both pay homage to Ivens' work from the earliest days of Melies to his previous film in China, and how they incorporate Chinese culture and myths. I haven't even mentioned how much beautifully it frames the landscapes of the Gobi desert.

This is some rigorous shit. It's basically 3+ hours of Delphine Seyrig doing housework composed of perfectly framed static shots that often lasts for many minutes each. (Although never once does she irons any clothes) There are several long scenes in which Seyrig just sits there doing nothing. However Akerman manages to capture something quite mysterious about her daily rituals, as virtually nothing is revealed about her inner thoughts or emotions. The details of these ritualized household chores and the subtle variations that occur from day to day (plus a few expositional dialogue) give the only clues to her character. To top it Seyrig gives another one of her fantastic zombie-like performances.

A hilarious film about a 40 year old painter who leaves his wife for Paris after being sought by the police for smoking pot. Wracked by unemployment, loneliness, and idleness, he occupies his time with chasing after local Korean women.

Hong's known for his critical portrayal of male egos and narcissism. Some have aptly described Hong's films as being about "drunk Korean douchebags" and "people getting drunk and looking stupid trying to fuck each other". Here the main character Sung-nam is an awkward, indecisive, and impulsive lump of a man. One particularly hilarious episode in the film illustrates his qualities beautifully. Sung-nam invites his old flame to a hotel to have sex, but at the last second changes his mind and reads to his nearly naked partner a passage from the Bible about how sinners must gauges out their eyes before succumbing to their lust. Later that day he calls his wife and asks her to masturbate to him over the phone. The women lack no human fallacies of their own. During a road trip, the two roommates react bitterly over their competition for Sung-nam, using petty complaints like refusing to pay for the gas as excuses for their jealous behavior. The humor in general works extremely well because it is rooted in stuff like petty jealousies that are completely believable and relatable, even if they can be awkward to watch. To his credit Hong handles all the human relationships with subtlety and in an understated manner.

Since the narrative takes place over several months, Hong adopts a anecdotal, diary-like structure, with title cards marking the progression of dates. Hong's treatment of the Parisian setting with all its daily ambiance of the city reminds me of Rivette, not to mention the Rivette-like length of the film. What's particularly interesting is that the film takes a page out of Luis Buñuel in its deceptive and hilariously surreal dream sequences. There's even a toe-sucking scene inspired by L'Age D'Or. The Buñuel tribute makes sense since both directors were interested in exploring human desire and how social norms clashes with base human instincts.

This was totally great. It's achieves the perfect balance between creepy psychosexual tension and absurd humor. The cinema verite style camerawork is awesome and having Can on the soundtrack doesn't hurt neither. Jane Asher really gives a fantastic performance as the flirty and cruel object of desire for the naive and inexperienced main character. I also loved the sleazy setting and atmosphere of it all.

This was unbelievably good. The film follows a young university student who has withdrawn from society and live in isolation in his cramped room in Paris. This thing is so perfectly shot and symmetrically structured. It's like stylistically the best parts of Marienbad and those nouveau roman films wedded to the alienation and existentialist narratives like Woman in the Dunes and I Stand Alone. The editing is unlike anything I've ever seen, different from any of Resnais or Robbe-Grillet films. The sense of time and linearity is completely abolished through its use of repetition. There is no dialogue, only a constant voiceover addressed in the 2nd person. My only quibble is that I watched it with the French narration, and like any voiceover heavy film it takes focus away from the images.

One of Ozu's funniest and most subversive films. Anyone who thinks that Ozu's characters are "too polite" and "too nice" should see this since it addresses that aspect of Japanese culture directly in addition to criticizing corporate culture and westernization . One of my favorite moments was when the English teacher and the boys' aunt whom he has a crush on exchanges nothing but pleasantries about the weather. I don't know what happened when he switched to color, but the music in these films are much better. And god bless Ozu's scatological humor and fart jokes.

While the premise is about the director recording a series of encounters with various women in the South in search of romantic relationships, what's really interesting was the slew of characters he meets during his journey along Sherman's path and their life, dreams, and their views on topics such as the Civil War and threat of nuclear war. These are made possible through McElwee's use of camera as a solicitor, a key into their more private life. This is very much like the cinema verite technique used by Rouch and Morin in Chronicle of a Summer. In the end the film is very much about Sherman and his march, except it is filtered through McElwee's parallel journey for love, all the while being an ethographic study of Southern identity. And yes it's hilarious as well.

mind = blown

...This is the story of a man marked by an image of a woman, the fleeting image of a woman glimpsed in the subway...

...he remembers the month of July in Strasbourg, or rather he remembers the images he filmed of the month of July in Strasbourg...

Awesome blend of retro, avant garde, and camp. Although this recycles a lot of imagery and ideas from Cowards Bend the Knees and is not as complexly edited as that, it feels more personal due to the point of view being that of Guy's memories. I love how it's mostly silly kitsch but sustains the kind of atmosphere in many of the silents I love. The mother character is adorable with her complaints like "Nobody Loves Me!" and "Dirt is Wrong!"

Surreal and beautiful. Really impressed by how Denis is able to get a feel of her characters through evocative images and their actions. The focus on the hands is quite Bressionian.

Brilliant. Narratively it's very similar to Los Muertos, though here Alfonso seems to be less interested in giving the film a mythological dimension and a lurking sense of violence, instead he opts to capture a sense of wandering and loneliness. The plot about a sailor who visits his mother after a long exile sounds like a clichéd ready-made drama, but it is anything but that. The characters starts out as blank slates and throughout the film every gesture become equally significant, and though bits and pieces of details are revealed they remain as mysterious and fascinating as ever.

What a fucking brutal (and delicious) film. This is sort of a domestic noir filled with greed, meanness, and lust. The story is not too different from what happens if the film within a film in Celine and Julie Go Boating, imposed on a bourgeois Korean family. It's a pretty overwrought melodrama but also quite funny in way that makes it all perfectly suited. Even the weird and didactic framing device is kind of unsettling. The score is pretty dated.

One of the most formally and aesthetically audacious films of this decade.

Nic Cage gives the greatest performance I've ever seen.

Excellent, one of the best autobiographical essay films that I've seen (not that I've seen many). The film is organized into 26 parts corresponding to the letter of the alphabet in reverse order. In each section Friedrich relates episodes of her family history especially the troubled relationship between her and her abusive father through a third person story narrated by a young girl. This creates a distance between the text and the narrative that only increases the potency of the narration. The effect is comparable to that of Sans Soleil, except in reverse fashion. The images and section title cards interact in subtle and direct ways, sometimes serving as ironic contrast and sometimes suggest a narrative of their own.