Pitch black melodrama (with a script by Roald Dahl) as a kind of neo-Gothic study of crippling loneliness and sexual frustration. Unmarried and on the wrong side of youth, Maura’s long and lonely days tending to her ailing mother in their falling down house get a jolt of relief when the hunky young stranger shows up offering to do gardening work (the camera unsettlingly infusing his motorcycle with an erotically charged frisson of thrill and danger); a merry roundelay of displacement and projection as he settles in and the two women respectively decide how to feel about the newfound company. “It’s time I stopped caring what mother thinks!” How much can be said about a person’s emotional landscape with a mere close-up of the accumulation of wrinkles around an eye, as if they might offer some small clue to unravel all manner of reckless behavior. If the film grows a bit less special the more perverse it becomes, the stranger’s nighttime outings pinioning his character to the stuff of clinical diagnosis, Maura’s own psychology remains so thrillingly sad and strange right to the end.

“Reality is too stupid to cry over. And that’s that.” Four kids learning how to stare into the abyss and finding something like solidarity in the process; when the world just keeps on taking (whether the whims of fate taking away their parents or the corporatized entertainment industrial complex coopting their talent), just trying to make something meaningful in the wreckage. A film of almost excessive stylistic exuberance, even as the video game aesthetics exquisitely capture how these children have learned to actually engage with the world around them; every setback the start of the journey to the next level, every experience wrapped up in digital manipulation, every adult a potentially malevolent hostile threat. “Life is like The Castle,” one of them remarks regarding Kafka. “I don’t have a good feeling about it.” “Relax. No one does.” A kind of coming-of-age that wonderfully resists tidy epiphanies and moral growth; when just finding a way to want to keep on going is sometimes meaningful enough. “Despair is uncool.”

Filmmaking that admirably leans in to its own loopy excesses – its portrait of high school social hierarchies so ludicrously exaggerated, its gender politics that much more free-floatingly chaotic, people’s latent tendency toward casual cruelty sort of affectionately drawn up to the surface (“Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principal’s office?”), its dissection of so many superficially hallowed zoomer virtues that much more withering (“That’s my favorite way to be an ally. You just say you’re doing something, and then you don’t do any of those things”). A horny teenaged sex comedy that just happens to be bound for Sarah Lawrence, even if it ultimately can’t escape some of its own inherently juvenile limitations.

Hochhäusler brings so many elegant stylistic flourishes to the proceedings, the film frequently looks like gorgeously moody post-millennial neo-noir; but with such a trite and lifeless script, as psychologically inexplicable as it is narratively inert, all his energy gets expended into a void. Both an archly self-aware trans love story and an underworld potboiler, managing the curious feat of being remarkably clumsy at trying to do both things.

Anthony Chen’s debut evokes something of Edward Yang’s vision, panoramic even when it’s at the most intimate; seeing all our personal relations as the by-products and shadows of even the present’s largely unseen vast historical forces (until, that is, we’re sometimes forced to see their effects all too closely, a salaryman at the end of his tether crashing to the ground beyond our shoulder). Looking back to his own family’s near-implosion during the 1997 financial crisis, foregrounding the way that not even any of them at their worst can be judged too harshly, each just trying their best within the limits they’ve been given. If their new maid from the Philippines exposes fault lines that have already been waiting to be exposed – a mother’s worry she’s never able to do the right thing, a son’s fear that he’s going to have to learn how to live life alone – it’s always with the sense that she’s caught in the same tides; just different kinds of precarity, when the disquieting relation between class and desperation remains the same.

A slight letdown after the entrancing melancholy of Murmur of Youth, Lin Cheng-sheng here getting a little too lost in his own Tsai reference points. From the nearly omnipresent rainfall on the soundtrack and wordless stretches of malaise, all the way to the friendship casually struck up over a stolen phone, the film aches with a distinct kind of late-modern urban exhaustion, even if it never quite raises to the occasion of approaching its material free from Tsai’s weight. An estranged brother and sister caught up in a depressed tangled network of relations both new and old, all orbiting around a secret the film waits until its final act to reveal. The film’s at its best when it finally, patiently attends to its characters grappling with the burden of that secret, culminating with a shocking (and tremendously designed) moment of raw human need and hurt; fitting, then, that it’s a moment that makes nothing happen, just sending everyone back deeper into themselves and their own heavy hearts.

Peckinpah’s final film unfolds a bit like a blackout bender, lurching around from one sequence to another, not much interested in explaining many of its most reckless gestures, prone to the frequent paranoid outburst. A Cold War thriller that turns into a kind of lazily horny variation on Big Chill and then back again, its action unfolding on so many screens surveilled by Hurt’s calculating ringleader (“It’s just another episode in this whole snuff soap opera we’re all in”); a film as furious about the rise of the surveillance state and the all-consuming grid of the entertainment industrial complex as it is too bored to say much of anything about any of it. Saving its biggest climactic fuck-you for its own audience’s complacency, just one last big bold boozy gesture before rolling over and passing out.

The most eviscerating indictment of Japanese gender relations I’ve seen yet from Higashi; an aging married poet’s love for his younger object of affection as such a cruelly possessive and tyrannical hunger, while she’s just stuck alone and bored whenever he’s off living his celebrated and socially acceptable life. A mood piece as much as an ultimately tender-hearted character portrait; her tentative bonding with the lonely salaryman who spends his long nights swinging in the playground outside her window, two gentle souls stuck in the muck of love, trying to make the best of the respective messes they’ve found themselves with. “Sleepless nights are endless!”

Modern urban Gothic in which Ripstein boldly proposes the endpoint of a certain kind of patriarchal machismo as a terrifying solipsism; an ordinary salesman turning his family into literal prisoners, his house into his own private kingdom. “But it’s bad to go outside, it’s terrible out there!” His attempts at education amounting to little more than paranoid rants about humanity’s fall into nigh apocalyptic meaninglessness, his idea of punishment a series of cages within cages; if his children grow ever more curious about the world outside their door, it’s with equal parts longing and fear (the way one bold escape amounts to just standing on the stoop and watching the street with vague disbelief [I had two cats who would do that]). A climactically cruel punchline to cap off an already very dark joke; people so beaten down into distrusting the world that their eventual liberation just takes the form of choosing their imprisonment themselves.

Makhmalbaf evidently felt he had pissed off the authorities too many times with his late-80s social realism, so he imagines literally giving the Iranian ruler the gift of cinema itself; a deliriously slapstick, breakneck tour through the history of Iranian cinema as a shape-shifting game between screen and audience, the two sides bleeding back and forth between one another in a constant dialogic interplay. It’s a lot, and though Makhmalbaf brings plenty of visual wit to the proceedings, this kind of humor gets fairly exhausting after a while. Films by Beyzai, Kimiavi, and Mehrjui all get lovingly extended riffs, and a climactic montage of the history of Iranian cinema fittingly ends with Kiarostami (which is actually quite touching, given the directors’ frequent real-life squabbles).

A melodramatic whirlwind so dense it ends up just becoming a kind of weepie sludge, one woman’s recovery from amnesia leading her to a series of revelations that turn her entire sense of self into something other than it was. Chang Youn-hyun does something really interesting regarding an extended narrative fake-out, tricking us into thinking the thicket of secrets is one thing before turning it into another, though it’s ultimately very difficult to understand what drew him to this material after twelve years away from making films.

A night on the town that begins with one woman’s single-minded sense of purpose (“How much do you drink?” “As much as is in front of me!”) turned into a deliriously shape-shifting, candy-colored portrait of aimless youth. Between the drinking challenges and the spicy hot pot dares, the guerilla student theatre troupe and the mad quest to find a cherished childhood book, it’s kind of overwhelmingly a lot for a relatively short film, but Yuasa maintains an intoxicating effervescence throughout. One long night when it seems like genuinely anything might happen (right down to the animation’s elastic dreaminess), even something like the clarity of love once all the booze has worn off.

As he did before with Tolstoy, Omirbaev both crystalizes Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to some brutally precise moral core and updates it to the harsh realities of post-Soviet Kazakhstan; a place where the oligarchs have definitively won and actual bonds between people have turned into transactions, where simply trying to do good is enough to leave you stranded. “Modern capitalism gives everyone a chance!” The nameless student, all nervous tension and inscrutable silent gazes, doesn’t even really want to do bad, he just seems to want to try out what both his cynical professors and ordinary experience in the streets have been seeming to teach him; nothing matters and it’s everyone for him and herself and life is cheap unless it's your own. An idea that’s ultimately both true and unthinkable; a climactic series of enigmatic cuts like a heart unthawing, opening itself up to yet more fundamental truths.

“You ignited a spark in me. I burned down my entire life.” Emotional and physical hungers tangled up in whirlwind melodrama, all ultimately fading away in the face of more fundamental spiritual cravings. The agonies and hysterics of the central romance – from Rosie’s initial marital disenchantment, to Raju’s rejection of social decorum in saving her, to his ultimate envy of her success on stage – are all rendered strangely irrelevant by the climactic stretch in the desert; a man who never even wanted to be a saint, but rather just a humble tourist’s guide, finding himself suddenly in thrall to the sublime itself. Such small and prosaic goals nothing but the temporary collection of distractions on the inevitable path toward transcendence; a thoroughly earth-bound musical that suddenly turns into a sacred hymn.

A film that plays at a few different genres – gangland noir, family melodrama – before simply settling into this boozy air of regret and lost chances. Lupino could play world-weary disenchantment like few others, and as much as her jaded chanteuse holds her sprawling family together here, it’s her inability to hold on to her own happiness that gives the film its soul. “Music, bad liquor.” “It’s hard to break the habit.”

Sayles takes on young love in 1960s New Jersey in a film that consistently refuses to do a lot of the things it’s supposed to do; if Spano’s over-confident bruiser struts in from the wrong side of the tracks all swagger and bluster, Arquette from the start sees him for exactly what he is. Curiosity and suspicion where easier films would just head right for sparks, disappointment and regret when there ought to be just a few easy stumbling blocks on the way to bliss. “I love you.” “I know.” And by the time the film graduates from high school entirely and sends her off to her first year at Sarah Lawrence, it’s like one world’s tiny limits fully being recognized from the vantage point of some bigger (if not necessarily better) one. Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” by the end of it, imbued with such improbable and unlikely melancholy, the sound of something gone forever.

“It’s the course of nature. Does it make you sad?” “A bit. But it’s fine.” Post-war romance that both unusually ascends to something like a happy ending while wallowing in despair every step along the way toward getting there. The film looks back to Tokyo’s red-light district in the mid-50s as a place at best to get lost in, at worst as the place where you go to give up; two young souls who choose instead to find in one another the chance to be more than all their mutual baggage’s deadening weight. As tortured as each of their family histories are, finding that a little world made anew for two is still at least better than none at all.

Handsomely mounted folk horror from Harada; indeed, a film so in love with its densely wooded stretch of Shikoku Island and its dying paper-making traditions that it’s most fascinating as a kind of poetic ethnography that just happens to explode into bouts of incest and madness. A family whose women are haunted by the local spirits of wild dogs, just another variation on the stories men tell themselves in order to keep things going in the way that suits them best. A young outsider stumbling into the film’s cloistered world and proudly setting about smashing down its barriers and taboos; a film uneasily inhabiting the turn-of-the-millennium, seeing the past’s traditions as a collection of horrors and hauntings and the encroaching future on the horizon as equal parts liberation and doom.

A portrait of one man’s such ordinary evil disquietingly staged as a dirge for perestroika; the end of the Soviet era as some collective fall from grace, the unleashing of something terrible into the hearts and minds of the new Russia. In one dazzling sequence, the nighttime streets of Moscow are like a cacophonous Boschian nightmare; a fitting backdrop for the cruel machinations of Vitaly’s kidnapping and extortion plot in the foreground, as if he’s just taking advantage of a world in which it’s suddenly every man and woman for themselves. “Money, money, everywhere! God, please help me!” A thoroughly cold-blooded film, one in which nothing even shocks because suddenly everything’s possible.

This big-talking real estate agent might just be one of Jost’s most terrifying visions – all this bruised vitality and megalomaniacal Mormon fury – even if it consistently feels like the film is trying to find a rhythm adequate to contain him (it’s fascinating how Jost documents elsewhere just how much he ended up hating making this). Some of the most lyrical passages of Jost’s career running up against some of the most brutal; the terrifying ordinariness of a man who sees everything as transactional running up against the dying spirits of those left trapped in his calculations. “And then, I didn’t understand it, I cried.”

Payne used to have some real, lived-in bite to him, but this feels like it’s been beaten into submission by an MFA workshop; so much difficulty so tastefully reined in and packaged (damaged souls, but never offensively so, when even an anti-depressant medication gets treated like a cheap throwaway gag). So many little epiphanies whooshed away on their assembly line; personal growth unfolding with the logic of a simplistic math equation. In its one most substantive concession to its obvious New Hollywood inspirations, people of color get wielded like props on two white men’s path toward self-actualization (the really shitty one gets punished with sun burn, so we can feel comfortable knowing who's who in the film's very tidy and self-satisfied schematics).

A rural cop loses his gun after a bender and finds himself falling headlong into a dizzying confrontation with power and authority in the new China. It’s all fascinatingly Kafkaesque for a while – the limits of the state against the rise of the new industrialist hoodlums – until it settles into the more rote stuff of simply solving its central mystery. Most fascinating perhaps, at least from the shores of this gun-plagued country, as a glimpse into a society that finds a gun’s existence in the hands of the general populace as unthinkable and abhorrent as it ought to be.

As if needing to blow off some steam after the brutal intensity of Get Carter, Hodges and Caine head to the Mediterranean for a cheerfully vulgar and blithely convoluted potboiler; a film “like a pornographic photograph, difficult to make out who was doing what and to whom.” Frequently parodic on the surface, though only barely masking some deep sadness running through its depths; the more the jaded posturing gives in to conspiratorial thinking, the more some terrible portrait of fascist power protecting itself emerges beneath all the sun-drenched prankster pulp. “I was killed in over eighty movies, wasn’t I?”

A film that begins with pages from a bible falling from the sky and ends with a woman waiting for a reunion that will never come; two ways of looking at the cruel failures of France’s colonial project in Vietnam. “He says he’s selling something.” “Is it dangerous?” The elegance of the film’s bifurcated structure is like a sad, sorrowful game of telephone; one long terrifying night in the midst of wartime and years of melancholy drift toward Paris and back again in the aftermath, both of them united by a captured soldier’s message to his wife, the weight of history accumulating as it finds itself doomed to never reach its destination.

Haneke’s first film for German television as a predictably dour and contemptuous diagnosis of post-War bourgeois complacency and solipsism; a series of repetitive tableaux in which the central couple talk around, at, over one another (anything but genuinely talk with one another, until it’s too late). “That’s not communication, that’s ping pong!” On screen citations by the likes of Adorno, McLuhan, Warhol, Wittgenstein, and The Beatles do the heavy lifting, while the couple repeatedly get into passive-aggressive arguments about who’s going to eat the last apple (neither one, evidently, capable of popping out to the store for more). “But if we split it, we’d have nothing to argue about.”

Hochhäusler’s early portrait of suburban malaise as an echt-Berlin School study in privileging mood over plot; less a series of narrative developments than the simmering tensions of an unsatisfied and alienated headspace. Looking out at the promising world his parents cheerfully offer up to him – another application to fill for the local outfit of the interchangeable conglomerate, another interview to practice for – Armin seems to feel little more than a little bit dead inside. Daring to imagine instead other ways of feeling important, whether it’s a feverish fantasia of sucking off a leather-clad biker gang or impressing the girl of his dreams (the distinction hardly seems to matter). Like a post-millennial Werther, that great crushed romantic, yearning for a world that must be more than all this cozy smallness; when even literal chains would simply feel more than whatever looser and more comfortable shackles everyone else seems to have grown used to wearing.

This review may contain spoilers.

A film like a giant concrete slab dropped in the middle of an empty landscape, a monument to nothing more than itself and its own ambitions. So insistent on existing in defiance of “everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid, but most importantly ugly,” that it becomes little more than an especially nice-looking kind of Oscar film, with a few lyrical flourishes and some aggressive horns on the soundtrack to signify its own presumptions of specialness. Complicated men and the women stuck loving them (because, of course, film history has given us so few monuments to this); a film with so much on its mind – art’s relationship to commerce, architecture’s relationship to tortured memories, the American dream’s relationship to xenophobia, Zionism’s relationship to the cruel tides of history – that it needs not one, but two rapes to make its points with such ludicrous, ultimately baffling crudeness.

“Resist the temptation of falling for the memory. Respond to each note you make with your whole being.” Trying to pull out real feeling as opposed to the empty chatter of inherited sentiment, finding in other people’s lives some small relief from the burden of being yourself, even as being yourself is the only way you can really know how to be (“One should always have a style”). In-guk’s climactic argument with his mother, in which the latter tries to uncover the real motives of this mysterious older woman who’s infiltrated her son’s life, stages the questions that have been haunting Hong his entire career; the stories we manufacture about a person versus the thing itself, the ideas and concepts we insist on imposing on other people instead of just letting ourselves see them as they are. For all the lightness of touch, a film that positively aches with the sheer difficulty of getting through another day; knowing too just how much an unexpected encounter with a poem can help, or rinsing off our feet in a stream, a drink or two, another person to tell us we have a place to feel at home. “Do you still love me as a friend?” “Of course.”

“Did you ever fall into a pit? I have. A huge one.” Kazama emerged around the turn-of-the-millennium with her own singular brand of the micro-budget Japanese slacker comedy, and it’s a shame that she didn’t go on to have the career of someone like Yamashita. Like The Mars Canon before it, here she’s contemplating a handful of aimless urbanites who seem just on the verge of falling into whatever their adult life might actually have in store for them – when a gig becomes a career, when another person turns into the cohabitant of a relationship with a name and a shape – even if they’re hopelessly unready for whatever they’re going to find there. “Become a pro? The human race will annihilate itself by then!” A laidback kind of fluidity dominates, as the relations between the central quartet gradually shift over time, as jobs come and go, when the potential messiness of some morning after turns into just another day of life; when settling into anything feels like the end of a particular kind of world, hoping to keep the world you do know how to live in spinning for as long as you can.

“There must be a correct way to live in this world!” A fascinating document in the history of the yakuza film; looking back to the pre-War thirties at a group caught between old codes of honor inherited from the samurai and very new ways of doing business (the fact that the film is set in Manchuria, with the gangs doing the government’s bidding, adds a further layer of pointed critique). A son who’s been given the gift of his father’s blessing to make of his life whatever he wants, running up against the inescapable weight of family honor social responsibility once a rival gang takes his father out. With some high melodramatic flourishes along the way, a tortured family tree paralleling the splintered social fabric, Matsuo builds to a ferociously bloody crescendo; left pondering the sad way that killing in the moment seems the only way to keep the peace in the long run. “What fools men are!”

Borzagean ideas of transcendent love taken so literally that they just sort of become conventional Christianity. The corporeal body as a temporary cage, the better world as a vaster and truer one on the other side of this one’s cruel limits, the interior castle as a place you see with something other than eyes; simplistic sermons rendered as high-Gothic melodrama, the stagey woodenness of it all seeming almost like some kind of ascetic purity (almost, but not really). “Don’t you understand? We’re dreaming together?” The quasi-mystical bonds of childhood proposed as something that can triumph over all the more cruel and petty ways adults manage to be with one another; a film that opens with a China doll’s smashed face and waits until the feverish poetry of its final stretch to send her to something like heaven. “There’s no one here but you and me.”

Ghatak with a feverish bit of utopic thinking; imagining political awakening as a kind of spiritual fervor, as Lenin’s ideas ignite a collective fire “in this broken village in this broken Bengal.” From village to city and back again, so many ways of awakening to the fact that our lives have been stolen from us; so many people joining the fight to take back what’s theirs. Like a postcard from a better world that never ended up happening, a sad reminder that we’re all just stuck living in the cynical fallout of history. “Our children will fight even better than us!”

“Have you ever met a certain boy, and then kept thinking about him?” Yonfan’s feature debut looks appropriately gorgeous, his background in fashion photography evident in so many individual frames like shots out of a glossy magazine spread; as faithful as the film is to the feminine specificity of its protagonists’ messy wanderings into the stuff of young love, it’s equally in thrall to capturing its male side characters in so many statuesque poses in their bathing suits. Learning as everyone eventually does that people’s hearts come and go no matter how much we’d like them to stand still, deciding instead that one perfect moment can sometimes be enough for a romance to last us long enough. It all unfolds as a kind of gauzy teenaged daydream, and then suddenly waking up and realizing this is all real and it’s actually happening. “I don’t think there’s any wrong or right way to be in love.”

A meandering, pleasantly shapeless portrait of one boy’s especially difficult way of growing up in a forgotten corner of the Taiwanese countryside. If the rural setting self-consciously evokes the spirit of early Hou, Chung at least remains committed to poring over his character’s specific collection of ghosts and inheritances; the way his Mainland mother so carefully counts up her own collection of disappointments and hardships, coming so far for a better a life and ending up with so little for her efforts. When learning how to be yourself at least partially entails learning how to live with everything and everyone that’s been lost; looking carefully in the mirror and trying to draw everything you see.

“Could you tell me what’s wrong with this society?” The film that turned Ying Liang into a permanent exile; fittingly a disquieting study of the Chinese state’s Kafkaesque assertion of power against one already powerless individual. With documentary footage covering the known facts of a cruel story of police overreach – a young man who violently reached his breaking point, his mother inexplicably institutionalized and left only with more questions than answers, her son’s execution – Ying uses the film’s central stretch to try to stage something of what it all must have actually felt like for her. Returning home to her Shanghai apartment and knowing it’s forever going to feel larger and emptier than it used to; his Robocop 3 poster on the wall like some cruel monument to the fact of how suddenly and totally everything can be taken away. “They didn’t even let me hug him!”

Chang Young-hyun made both one of the most important films of the Korean New Wave and one of the great early internet films, though the turn-of-the-century-blockbusterfication of the Korean film industry seems to have left him cast mostly adrift. A sprawling, strangely constructed thriller far more interested in its main characters than it is in its plot’s actual mechanics; a central conceit involving one plucky traffic reporter’s bouts of déjà vu that’s just sort of inexplicably there, neither explained nor ultimately mattering that much. “Have we ever met before?” “Try looking in your diary.” Consistently fascinating as human material, even if its byzantine collision of so many cop-film and gangland cliches never amounts to much more than an elaborate game of telephone.

A puerile, empty-heated slog through the Montréal criminal underworld; a film that wants both its garish cinema-du-luck transgressions and its treacly sentimental schmaltz, the same way it manages to be both defiantly queer and offensively homophobic in many of the same gestures. Amid the roundelay of sodomizations and assassinations, Lauzon somehow saves his most ludicrous image for last; a bit of father-son bonding as an erotically Catholic dying embrace. “Whoever heard of a zoo with a moose!” I remember in my youth being tricked by Ebert’s rave review into seeking out Lauzon’s Léolo, a film that – even at the time – I found a profoundly vulgar misuse of its own creative energies (as well as a film that taught me a lot about how Ebert thinks, for better or worse). I don’t know why I’d expect anything more from his Genie-award-sweeping debut, but here we are.

On the vast private worlds each of us carries within ourselves, no matter what a consistently disappointing and disappointed life might turn us into on the outside. “So I guess that makes me a spinster or something.” In Rozema’s fidelity to those who live with “acute awareness,” so quietly but still so recklessly, there’s a real passion coursing through the film’s veins, even if I found Polly’s particular brand of whimsy mostly annoying (the way the film uncritically portrays even her creepier tendencies as just awkward art-girl cluelessness). Something of Leigh in its confronting this difficult terrain of how a person starts reconciling oneself to one’s own mediocrity, even if Polly remains one of those people convinced that’s a thing she never really has to do.

Konwicki trades the poetic realism of his earliest films for an oneiric absurdism; a film whose shape-shifting surfaces are as fleet-footed and jazzy as its allegorical depths remain perpetually withheld. “Life is a difficult art. Try to live beautifully!” A man whose past keeps on changing depending on the conversation, a town whose inhabitants can’t seem to remember exactly who they are, a place whose recent history seems like a collection of crimes too shameful to face. If it is probing some kind of post-War Polish collective amnesia, so many demons so hastily stashed away, then a climactic ritualistic dance seems to conjure only the palest, most oblique ghost of whatever reconciliation might be.

Sweaty, claustrophobic noir that increasingly plays out like a kind of elegy for those who don’t know how to fit into these tidy, cozy notions of domestic conformity. If Garfield’s frenzied, mercurial cop-killer initially keeps the wholesome family hostage out of desperation, his strange admixture of loathing and tenderness comes to be that of a man stuck pondering all he’s never going to have. “You hold me so tight, I can hardly breathe.” “Well, that’s the way I dance.” Force-feeding them an elaborate turkey dinner like he’s play-acting some kind of dimly understood notion of some familial plenitude; the tortured wish he might ascend from his own tough-guy lovelessness sending him crash landing all the way to the gutter.

Brutally minimalist and ruthlessly efficient pulp poetry; Arslan returning to the Berlin underworld of In the Shadows while remaining almost perversely uninterested in his protagonist’s backstory or psychology (“They no longer exist or have been burnt,” is all Trojan his to say of his old contacts). Less a proper sequel than another way of considering a certain kind of professionalism, a man just trying to perform his job in a world with neither honor nor camaraderie (a nocturne dominated by so many security lights’ sickly greens like the color of a certain world-weary state of mind). A museum heist gone disastrously bad, not from any lack of planning or err in judgment but from the sheer rotten ruthlessness of the game; the handlers may have gone sleekly corporate, but it’s still a den of thieves after all, each out only for themselves. An ultimately apocalyptic kind of vision (if it’s true that Arslan is among the great twenty-first-century Bressonians, then this is L’Argent); so many illusions of order and control, even the very idea of value itself, all gone up in flames.

There’s no real reason this had to be a Christmas movie – unless, that is, you’d like a couple nice Wham! needle drops with your Bubble-era-fallout yuppie girlboss time-traveling wish fulfillment. Morita stages it all so sincerely that it plays out a bit like some kind of deeply silly Kieslowski (not necessarily a bad thing); two women who only seem like they have it all, stumbling upon the chance to keep on going back to 1981 until they learn how to get the decade before the crash just right. “So life is something we can change in this world!” The life lessons may be a bit maudlin – finding success your own way rather than by stealing someone else’s voice, not giving up on the idea of love – but most of us could still probably use a bit of those if we’re being honest with ourselves.

The post-Ozu shomin-geki transformed into a leisurely sort of hang-out film; a film so casually in love with how so strange any one of us really is, how much oddness there is to be found in all this human material, hiding right here in plain sight. “They’re like perverted aliens from some unknown world!” None of the family’s six members ever really goes anywhere or triumphs over much of anything (the mother screening her lovingly hand-made animated film for a group of enthusiastic well-wishers is about the biggest narrative event we get, or maybe the young daughter mastering the parallel bars); but when each of them gets to ponder the grandfather’s hand-crafted flip books he’s left behind for them, there’s an overwhelming sense that seemingly pointless drift is more than enough. Just so many discrete images coming one after another, turning into something like a meaningful story if we look at them in just the right way. Each of them frequently lost in the enormity of the private worlds that exist in their heads for each of them alone, and yet still all here together enjoying the feeling of the same sun. “It’s more cool than weird, and it stays in your head.”

Denis Côté’s feature debut as a pensive, slow-burn portrait of a man who, with one recklessly made decision, chooses to live outside the law and inherited morality (and it’s a film that remarkably anticipates the conversations regarding assisted dying dominating Canada twenty years later). A lonely trip all the way to what feels like the edge of what he can bear (“Isolated road for next 375 kms,” the highway sign reads), the film also fascinates as an ethnographic study of one of the most isolated towns in the world. Interviews with local students interrupt the narrative proceedings like reminders that there are a lot of different ways of learning how to live on the outside. “How did you end up here, in the back of beyond?” “That’s personal.” A cruel and ruthlessly timed final shot, however, suggests that maybe at this late stage, there’s no real outside even left to run to anymore.

After constructing one of his most blistering, nerve-rattling visions in Sorcerer, Friedkin turns backward to the heist of the century and inexplicably turns it into so many tastefully dressed old-timey shenanigans. Casting Falk as the criminal mastermind putting together his ragtag team of seasoned tough-guy character actors makes the whole film feel like it’s constantly winking at its audience without actually being very funny; as if asking us to find it funny while it actually can’t be bothered to do much aside from going through its own workmanlike motions. Once the Feds close in, the script ultimately gets to something about the American popular imagination’s confused yearning for anti-capitalist folk heroes without having much to say about it.

A few years before his New Wave nightmare, Yim Ho pokes some gentle fun at the anything-goes Hong Kong film industry. Whether being lectured to about the hierarchical differences between a “bit part” and an extra, or literally putting his life on the line so a director can save a few bucks (“A stuntman costs the same as four extras!”), no indignity is too much to stifle Hakky’s sheer love of his craft. Madcap comedy generally triumphs over introspection, when even the power dynamics of a love triangle are cheerfully seen as simply another hurdle rather than a stark reminder of the ritualized humiliation of the film industry’s working-class dispossessed. An incredibly staged climax hints at some life-threatening proto-Jackie Chan theatrics, even if it all ends up being props and no one really has to get hurt too badly. “Well, that’s showbiz!”

Like a jittery, gutter-punk Tarr prowling through the streets of post-Unification Berlin, the end of history staged as one long night’s boozy wasteland and the bleary-eyed pointlessness of the morning after. “Maybe I’ll remember this day for the rest of my life!” The handful of characters from both East and West don’t really collide so much as they ruin one another by the sheer entropic force of being caught in the same space in the same time in the same way; the opening round of one man inviting a street musician home only to humiliate and debase him setting off a kind of pre-apocalyptic La Ronde-style chain of feel-bad and feeling-worse encounters.

“You believe in retribution?” “Yes, otherwise life would be easy.” Ann Hui’s serpentine policier (and her first film shot on the Mainland) turns from urban comedy of manners to rural thriller as various points of view and memories pile up on one another, the more a slick Beijing playboy learns about the troubled past of the object of his affection. The things we can find it in ourselves to forgive and the things we can’t, when the latter end up mostly being our own terrible mistakes and lapses in judgment; some hope that someone, somewhere, might be able to forgive us for the things we could never pardon ourselves for. “The goddess of mercy was imagined by people in trouble. She probably doesn’t really exist.” It all crescendos with one of the most tragic visions Hui’s ever conceived, an excessive bit of gangland Grand Guignol that ruthlessly eliminates the narrative’s entire tortured mess until there’s nothing left but one heavy heart hoping for someplace better.

“That’s life. You better get used to impermanence.” A miniature masterpiece of a city symphony, a polyphonic, multi-lingual tapestry of Mumbai’s dispossessed and disappointed. And if the film positively aches with the weight of all these people who went to the city finding one thing and only ended up with so many broken shards of something else, I can’t help but wish Kapadia had stayed there a little bit longer; a place and a country and a global diaspora and all its hopes and failures condensed into the unforgettable image of Prabha tenderly caressing a rice cooker. If the three women’s trip to the seaside offers something like relief (and communion and spectral catharsis and a somewhat overly precious snack-shop tableau beneath a vast starry sky), it’s staged like a pocket of freedom, some kind of Woolfian eternal moment against an urban life that only “takes time away from you,” that seems instantly outdated in its pastoral longing (as opposed to someone like Tsai, for instance, who would have imagined how they might find whatever it is they do right where they’re stuck standing, even if it still hurts in the long run).

Admirably old-fashioned in both its brute materiality and its fuck-the-bosses working-class spirit, even if something of the aw-shucks populism reeks of a weird sort of pandering to the very end-of-history American false consciousness that’s crushing that spirit outside the film’s feel-good vacuum (cue the crowd at Hooters cheering along as they follow the proceedings on Fox News with bated breath). An out-of-control juggernaut iron giant plowing its way through another forgotten stretch of the Rust Belt, waiting for just the right renegades to wrest it back into corporate control; all shot with so much hyperkinetic shock-and-awe bluster like it’s sincerely convinced it’s a monument to something or other.

• Among Grey Stones
• And Then
• Autumn, Autumn
• Bang
• The Beast to Die
• Bloody Kids
• Broken Highway
• Bye Bye Blue Bird
• Camel(s)
• The Case is Closed

...plus 103 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• And the Little Prince Said
• Bitter and Sweet
• A City Is Blackmailed
• Crossroads
• Félicité
• The Gamblers
• Hotte in Paradise
• The Invincibles
• The Invisible Girl
• Manhunt: Escape to the Carpathians

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

150 films (updated March 2024) that at some point just became part of my DNA. Filled with regret for a lot of what's not here, though it's always going to continue to evolve. Alphabetized, sometimes incorrectly I'm sure, and regretfully according to the title as it's known in English.

• The 39 Steps
• The 400 Blows
• 7th Heaven
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
• Andrei Rublev
• Au Hasard Balthazar
• The Awful Truth
• Barry Lyndon
• Beau Travail
• Before Sunset

...plus 140 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The paired literary texts are a suite of works by Annie Ernaux (A Woman's Story, A Man's Place, Happening), Teju Cole's Open City, Zadie Smith's NW, Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement, and Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You

• Margaret
• Certain Women
• Close-Up
• The Watermelon Woman
• The Other Side of Hope
• Do the Right Thing
• The Virgin Suicides
• Slacker
• Pulse
• Handsworth Songs

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My heart mourns for everything that's not here, but I tried my best.

• In the Mood for Love
• Millennium Mambo
• Pulse
• Take Care of My Cat
• Oldboy
• The Host
• The Day He Arrives
• A Simple Life
• Life Without Principle
• Don't Go Breaking My Heart

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.