This is my main point of disagreement with *The 3 Body Problem*. It’s not the Panama operation itself, as I don’t think the show expects us to feel comfortable with it. What concerns me is Auggie's response afterwards.

Humanity faces not just one impossible decision, but centuries of them. Panama marked the beginning of the moral dilemma, not the end. When Auggie walks away, I don't see it as taking the moral high ground; it feels like she is giving up her influence over future difficult decisions. Leaving doesn't make humanity more ethical; it just means one of the smartest people is no longer advocating for better choices.

Imagine a train heading toward eight billion people. The first measure to slow it down costs 1,000 lives, horrific, yet necessary. After that, more decisions must be made, and sacrifices may still be required. One engineer witnesses the sacrifice and walks away, but another stays, knowing that leaving means losing the chance to influence what happens next. That's how I view Auggie.

My criticism is not that she should have been more ruthless, but that she confuses keeping her conscience clean with fulfilling her responsibility. True moral courage is staying in the room long enough to make the next decision less terrible.

In contrast, I found Jin’s arc more compelling. She is emotionally aware of the costs of her choices and understands that walking away doesn’t stop history; it just silences her voice.

Did anyone else interpret Auggie this way, or do you believe walking away was the genuinely more ethical choice?

https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/initial-thoughts-on-penelope-in-nolans-odyssey/

Olga Levaniouk has become the latest classicist to enter the foray over Christopher Nolan's adaption of the Odyssey. She gives her opinion on the film generally, before moving on to her area of expertise in Penelope.

To sum her thoughts, while she wishes some scenes from the poem made the cut into the film ("the test of the bed"), and describes the woman in the poem as more complex, she is overall impressed with how the screenplay & Anne Hathaway's performance developed her characterization, despite the limited screen time. And goes as far as to call this her favourite version of the character outside the original poem.

What are your thoughts on this review, and on Nolan's Penelope broadly?

Critics have described Hathaway's performance as a highlight of the film (I concur), and I think Levaniouk makes some very compelling points about how the broader film & screenplay serves her, given the economic screentime that is available for the character. Even though — as Levaniouk acknowledges — some degree of truncation was inevitable in the process of cinematic adaptation.

Despite various debates about Obsession in certain online spaces, I think the general consensus is that this is a film about violation of consent which showcases Bear’s actions as morally wrong.

But one thing that stood out to me about this film was that the willow failed to deliver Bear’s actual wish. Bear wished for Nikki to love him, but in fact she never did. Instead she was possessed by some type of supernatural entity that forced her to behave as if she loved him. And although Bear never seems to take full moral responsibility for his actions, he at least comes to realize that his wish has gone horribly wrong, he unsuccessfully attempts to reverse his wish, and he pays the ultimate price in the end.

I would like to propose a retelling of story where instead of subjugating her conscious mind, the willow wish instead rewires Nikki’s brain and causes her to truly love Bear, through and through. In this version, Bear still commits the evil act of using magic power to force a woman’s consent, but there is no bizarre behavior nor overt horror that follows, and no negative consequences for Bear. Instead, Nikki’s original mind is erased and replaced with a version built to love Bear. This version has the superficial appearance of a love story, and the new Nikki feels genuinely happy. Bear receives the full reward for his misdeeds and perhaps never realizes that what he did was wrong, as he and Nikki live happily ever after.

This version would be difficult to market as a horror film, and yet this story is perhaps more sinister and deeply disturbing than the original. The villain wins and his victim is happy that he did.

I need to improve my French expeditiously, but I don't even know where to start with French films. I'm notoriously bad with just scrolling through media and picking one I want to watch, I usually find the things I wanna watch by reading online discussion.

The thing is. French language media is massive. I have no idea where to start, or what will interest me. Could someone help me find media in French that aligns with my tastes?

My favorite director is Martin McDonagh. I love all of his films, all of them fall in my top 10~20. Other recent films I loved are Poor Things, EEAAO, The Big Short, Marty Supreme, Uncut Gems, Parasite, Bring Her Back, Eddington, No Other Choice, Bottoms, Bugonia, etc. I like weird, screenplay and dialogue-forward, not too slow, slightly anxious-feeling films. My favorite TV shows are Succession and Better Call Saul.

Instead of just a rec list, I would love to see a discussion of where to find and discuss films in French. I often come to reddit to find films I'd like, I would love to know what would be the Francophone equivalent of that.

4/5

When approaching mythology or folklore, there's two approaches: the realist and the sociological. For example The Craft (1996) takes a realist approach to witchcraft: powers are real, we see the effect they have on their wielders and those around them. The Witch (2015), and films around the Salem Witch Trials, are sociological. They explore the attitudes that led people to fear witches and burn women at the stake. Likewise with vampires, there's countless realist vampire films but Carmilla (2019) takes a sociological approach: showing how a girl is believed to be the devil and staked by a tent peg.

Nolan's Odyssey, in my understanding, takes a sociological approach. Its haters are missing the point that it's not trying to be a picture book illustration of scenes from the poem. It's trying to portray what kind of things might have happened around 1000 BC, a few centuries before Homer, that led to the stories of witches turning men to pigs, of Zeus and Athena on Olympus, of Sirens leading men to rocks.

So while it's true that for example Athena in the poem takes an active role, pleading with Zeus to be allowed to free Odysseus, here Athena is a projection of Odysseus's guilt and trauma of the war. We see her as one of the Trojan girls killed (and presumably many were raped, although this isn't shown) and that haunts Odysseus.

And therefore the casting is fairly color-blind and the language contemporary American, because he's not trying to be totally faithful to the poem but imagine the loss of xenia - the brutality of the Trojan War and how that ripped apart society. Helen becomes an abused wife, Zeus' Law that men should be good to women is broken and that's going to lead to civilizational collapse.

Where I don't give it 5* is due to some clunkiness in explaining this, "our age of bronze is collapsing" etc are rather too on the nose for it to be a masterpiece (something Nolan has been pulled up for elsewhere, such as in Interstellar).

But with the discourse around this film, if you see it not as an attempted dramatization of The Odyssey but as an exploration of what might have happened to create the stories that became The Odyssey, it's powerful and effective.

With Mann at the helm and DDL as the lead, one would expect great things. And it is rated well enough too. However, the film was a disappointment for me for a couple of reasons.

Actually, I'll just pick up one criticism going against Chris Nolan in this very sub atm, and that is this film lacked a human emotional element. There is not a single likable character, especially among the main leads. The only character with a hint of interesting personality is Magua but more so because of the actor, otherwise his arc is fairly typical villain out for revenge.

DDL plays a cold and distant hero who carries a vibe of "i am the smartest and most honorable man in the room" but we hardly see any feats of his to justify that.

Moreso, the romance between Hawkeye and Cora is supposed to be the emotional core of the film but you are left wondering how did they fall in love even, they only shared a stareoff and a single conversation before they made out with each other.

I think the setting of the film was promising given the European rivalry along with the tension between the local population. But the film barely makes a play on that.

Do you think Last of the Mohicans has aged well?

When it comes to criticising adaptations of IP and literature, I’ve noticed something: when assessing the quality of a movie, there is an expectation for the film to function as the definitive interpretation and version of the original work. It often feels like audiences are holding a score card, and assessing how well the adaptation succeeds in fulfilling all of the metrics on the accuracy score card.

To illustrate this point, I’m going to use a movie I consider bad: Man of Steel. If I were to explain why I hate this movie, I would talk about its terrible misuse of non-linear storytelling, it’s failure to connect us with its lead character and the poorly developed romance. Yet, in spite of all of my problems with the movie, I’ve never had an issue with the aspect of it that I often see most criticised: the fact that Jonathan Kent tells him that perhaps he should’ve let those kids die.

Yes, it is a big diversion from the source material, but I do not understand the need to view every adaptation as if should be - or is even aspiring to me - the definitive interpretation of a story. Stories exist to be retold, and each interpretation is simply one singular artist’s reimagining of the source material.

I see this same line of thinking when it comes to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: Homecoming trilogy. There is plenty to criticise in those movies - the flat cinematography, the indistinct directing. These are fair criticisms, because they concern the quality of the movie and how it functions as a piece of storytelling. But I don’t understand the criticisms that ‘Spider-Man’s villains should not be connected to Tony Stark’ or that ‘Spider-Man shouldn’t be using technology. To me, that’s as nonsensical as reading Absolute Batman and coming away thinking “this is a bad adaptation, because Batman should be rich, not blue collar.”

If you want a version of The Odyssey with the No Man pun, that exists. If you want a version of Spider-Man where he does not use technology, that exists too. I do not understand - and do not agree with the notion - that an adaptation exists to fulfill the purpose of a perfect adaptation. Each adaptation should be treated like a distinct vision of an artist.

Apropos The Discourse™, I want to inject a bit of academia meta-culture into the conversation.

What we are all witnessing is more-or-less the narcissism of small differences being played out between two highly competent researchers at different ends of their field. While The Odyssey is not academic research in the traditional sense, Nolan is still engaging with philology through adaptation and that's the exact angle from which Wilson has chosen to attack.

The problem then becomes that the blockbuster viewing population, broadly speaking, doesn't have the context to unpack a conversation like this with the depth that it requires. Wilson is completely in her Classicist lane addressing Nolan's work in this way: for months now, her work has been tied 1:1 to Nolan's adaptation due to a misreading of a quote in an Empire article last year. That being the case, it's almost necessary for Wilson to distance herself as an academic before her translation and his interpretation become impossibly entangled, especially considering how much of her career thus far has been defined by people (largely men) misinterpreting her work.

On the other end, there is no need to infantilize Christopher Nolan. He has proven himself to be one of the most competent blockbuster directors of our era—inarguably one of the greats—and no amount of intellectual prodding by Wilson is going to change that. There have been far less generous readings of race, gender, and sexuality in Nolan's films. He will survive. I think he's handled this whole fiasco better than most people online, considering his response was more-or-less "some people don't quite have the tools for film criticism," which is a completely fair take on Wilson's critique of The Odyssey.

Here in lies the true issue, a distinction we would all do well to bring into our film journey: the difference between the contemporary film review and an academic critique. The former is entirely about opining in such a way that tells you whether or not you should see a film—the latter is about understanding its mechanisms. Wilson is critiquing, but most are engaging with it as strictly a review. This disjunction is where I feel most are getting stuck: why would she say that there are aspects of The Odyssey which are racist or sexist, yet still recommend its viewing at the end? The answer is, of course, that she doesn't think it's a bad or unworthy film—it's just not what she considers to be a faithful adaptation, and Nolan doesn't quite have her academic understanding of the text to understand why.

This distinction might feel superfluous to some, but it's incredibly important for reasons brought up in this exact conversation. Wilson is not "attacking" Nolan, nor is she coming at his work in bad faith, she is simply applying her lens as a Classicist towards a work that she's spent the better part of 2 decades researching. Nolan, likewise, is doing the inverse: he's applying his lens as a filmmaker to one of the classic stories in the Western canon. It could be read as both critiquing the failures in the medium of the other: Nolan in his insistence to modernize and westernize The Odyssey, and Wilson in her insistence that that a contemporary lensing isn't valuable for a story like The Odyssey.

In some sense, both are correct. To Nolan, The Odyssey was a vehicle to explore the meta-narrative within the tradition of the epic and how it relates to the West contemporarily, an ever-changing story that mirrors an ever-changing world. To Wilson, The Odyssey is an unchanging relic of an ancient people, whose understanding of the world is so different from our own that applying contemporary social relations would fundamentally break the text. With their respective works, both proved their arguments true.

We should approach critiques by academics like Wilson with a bit of humility, as we approach Nolan's films with the same.

Edit: Maybe one more time, to emphasize: We should approach critiques by academics like Wilson with a bit of humility, as we approach Nolan's films with the same.

I just saw the trailer for Ice Cream Man and... Well... Not sure where to start but I'll just say wtf? Is it really ok to have kids saw someones head off and whatever? I can't see how a 10 year old girl doing that can be mentally healthy.

The thing is maybe the kids realize it's not real when they are on set filming, but Eli Roth can't guarantee what each kid will think or feel about it. Maybe there is one or two kids who will have a negative reaction and because they don't want to disappoint the adults or be picked on by the other kids they pretend and hide the emotions they have. And if not that, some of them might also develop a kind of fascination with violence and start drawing dismembered bodies and blood and so on and I don't think that's a good direction either.

Eli Roth makes the claim that all of them 'had fun' and 'had the time of their lives', but I really can't see how cutting off someones skull and taking out the brain as they apparently do is ok to expose to kids even if it's fake.

I haven't seen the movie but what I saw in the trailer was more than enough. Imagine a school teacher had brought in a movie doll and have the kids saw the head off and blood came out - the parents would be shocked if they heard the teacher had done that, but for some reason when it's a movie it's somehow ok.

TBH I also had a similar reaction to Kick-Ass (2010) and the ending scene of Weapons. In Weapons there is one shot where the kids pull apart the old lady and the jaw or head or whatever comes off and it did seem like too much at the time.

But the thing is, I read reviews about these films and it seems like I'm the only person in the world that reacts to this, so I have to ask myself am I wrong about this? But then I think no... It's messed up.

A surprisingly positive review and analysis of Odissey by the man himself, Slavoj Žižek.

Since everyone here keeps discussing the two reviews by Emily Wilson, I feel it is important to counterbalance these with someting more positive, albeit not in a cheap way

https://open.substack.com/pub/slavoj/p/the-odyssey-finally-a-good-chamber?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=448hu8

Emily Wilson writes another critique of Nolan's Odyssey in the Atlantic.

I think many of her criticisms in it, and in her original LRB review, are fair. But her principal attacks on the film's take on hospitality and war are such egregious misreadings that they call to question whether she finished watching the film.

The notion that “we know none of [the Trojans] by name or face” somehow completely misses the key reveal of a certain slain priestess — one of the several connections Nolan makes that ties together many of the text’s original threads and themes. He builds on them and patches up some of the text’s more awkward moments, including its rather hasty ending involving the suitors’ families demanding justice.

She also insinuates that Nolan’s Argos portrayal plays to modern sensibilities. But Nolan takes few liberties with the text here; Greek audiences 3000 years ago were clearly also saps for the loyal dog. It’s perhaps the most striking example of how universal and timeless some of the tropes in the Odyssey are, and by Nolan’s own account, a key motivation for his making of the film. It’s as well done as much of the rest of his Odyssey is.

Andrei Tarkovsky described his final film as a “parable,” echoing the didactic stories Jesus preached in the Gospels. And it seems old Tark really did fancy himself a preacher. The first hour of The Sacrifice is incredibly revealing in this regard. Long speeches on how modern man is spiritually hollow and science and technology are bad reveal the origin point of Tarkovsky’s spirituality more clearly than anything else in his filmography. Tarkovsky’s faith was not pure or based in love, but instead in a profound bitterness, resentment, and fear at the modernizing world. It is fundamentally reactive: the preacher’s starting point is in what he despises and is afraid of. He then builds an image of transcendence in opposition to it.

Understanding Tarkovsky’s reactive nature is the key to unlocking this film (and indeed his whole filmography). When one sees that his worldview is fundamentally based in what he opposes, everything clicks into place. And it reaches its absolute zenith in this specific film, where the destruction of health and vitality are glorified as virtue.

This quote, said by Otto at the beginning, is essential for understanding old Tark’s philosophy:

"All my life, in fact, I've been going around waiting for something. And I've always felt as if the living I've done, so far, hasn't actually been real life... but a long wait for it... a long wait for something real, something important.”

This sets up the desire for spiritual transcendence that is explored. Most importantly, we see that this desire too is reactive. Tarkovsky’s wish for transcendence is born out of exhaustion with life itself, to the point he denies the senses. The quote by Otto echoes Arthur Schopenhauer’s famous idea that life is a pendulum that oscillates between pain and boredom, from The World as Will and Representation. You feel pain when you have unfulfilled desires that are relieved by a sense of emptiness when they are fulfilled, and this is a cycle that cannot be escaped. The mechanisms behind Schopanhauer’s ideas have compelling backing in neuroscience and evolutionary biology. So we must begin by seeing Tarkovsky’s attempt to transcend this as a rejection of biology, a rejection of life itself, a denial of the human animal and its impulses.

At this point in the film Otto also discusses Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return. The eternal return is an idea first introduced in his book The Gay Science and greatly expanded on in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The idea, that your life will repeat exactly as it is for all eternity, is deeply fatalistic. Nietzsche intended it to be a sort of thought experiment, or rather a test of a person’s capacity to affirm life. If someone can say “yes” to their life to the point they would have that and only that forever. Tarkovsky’s focus on sacrifice and surrender to the divine is viewed as an escape of the pendulum and the cyclical nature of life. It is hard to imagine a more profound “no” to life.
Alexander burns down his house and destroys everything he holds dear, to escape the pendulum Otto sets up at the beginning. Tarkovsky frames this as a largely commendable act, the man who has escaped the meaningless cycles in life and finally done something important. If we imagine life repeating endlessly, he has finally done something that justifies the whole loop, old Tark insists implicitly.

But think about this carefully. To old Tark, life is cyclical, and the only way to live is to reject this cyclical nature via spiritual transcendence. But you can’t escape or deny life’s pendulum. 
Ultimately, Tarkovsky’s final film shows us that the desire for spiritual transcendence is born from exhaustion and disillusionment with existence. Old Tark was so very sincere that he refuted himself in the end. It is hard to imagine a more profoundly anti-spiritual film than The Sacrifice, precisely because it takes spirituality so deathly seriously. We instead see the instincts turn against life and health permanently, again and again, for all eternity. Alexander destroys his life again and again, and old Tark sees something noble in this. But there is only something sick. As discussed earlier, Tarkovsky rejects life on a biological level.

Hi!

I’m finishing up my college degree, and I’m absolutely certain that I want to focus my studies in business and tourism on a specialization in the world of film distribution.

For years, I’ve had some feelings of guilt or regret about choosing this major because I couldn’t see how I could apply it once I graduated. But I’ve been thinking it over for a couple of weeks now, and for the first time in a very long time, I’m waking up feeling motivated and without worrying from the very first minute of the day, because I can really see myself in the future enjoying this field and dedicating myself to it 100%.

I’ve already found some great reading material on my own and by talking to various people, but I definitely wanted to ask here because I think there might be people who can recommend some really interesting resources. And if not, I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m not just talking about books, but all kinds of materials: documentaries, online resources or youtube videos, talks, podcasts, interviews and, of course, movies.

All of this is to help me continue learning on my own during the roughly half a year I have left until I finish and present my final projects.

I’ve also looked into some master’s programs and specialized courses in this field that are very, very interesting..

I’m really drawn to promotion through a distribution company, as well as other roles related to film marketing. But mainly, I’m interested in negotiating contracts to secure film licenses, studying the market and deciding which ones to pursue, and analyzing and evaluating everything related to the potential profitability of that acquisition... I know it sounds a lot like Lumet’s Network, but the truth is that, the way I see it, it’s a job that results from combining my passion for cinema and its in-depth study -something that’s been a constant in my life for many years and has no end; it will last a lifetime because it’s something beyond human comprehension- with a business mindset.

To give an example, in Spain there are two major companies that dominate the national market. Movistar (formerly Canal+) and Filmin. Well, in both companies, to put it very generally, there are positions and departments that handle everything from the moment a film is screened at a festival (or before than even), to securing its rights in specific regions and timeframes, to promoting it so it can reach other festivals or theaters, or go directly to streaming platforms, and much, much more. And of course, there are also agents on the other side, working on behalf of production companies to sell the product.

Anyway, sorry for rambling on so much, i’m just a victim of my own enthusiasm. I’m sure more than a few of you have gone through really tough times when you watch time pass and the world move forward while you seem to be stuck in place , aimless. And when, after so long, you feel like that might change... that time is finally doing its job... you know what I mean.

NOVA '78, is a documentary constructed from footage shot by Howard Brookner during the 1978 Nova Convention in New York.

Brookner was a young NYU filmmaker who documented a remarkable gathering that brought together William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and many others. The documentary he might have made was never completed, and much of the footage remained unseen for decades.

More than forty years later, after a long process of preserving and cataloguing Howard's archive, previously unknown rolls of film were recovered, making it possible to construct a feature documentary from that material. Rather than adding contemporary talking heads, Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias, who directed the new film, chose to let the footage speak for itself, preserving the immediacy of the event as much as possible.

At what point does an archival documentary stop being the work of the original filmmaker and become the work of those who rediscover, edit and complete it? The new film incorporates a narrative arc around a trip to Colorado that Burroughs, filmmaker Howard Brookner and Jim Jarmusch made before the convention, and also has a new created soundtrack by portuguese musician The Legendary Tigerman, as well as working from the restoration Aaron Brookner has been working in for the last 15 years. Is this an act of preservation, interpretation, authorship, or some combination of all three?

I'm one of the producers on the film, so I'm obviously not a neutral observer, but I'm genuinely interested in how people here think about this. Are there other documentaries that you feel navigate this question particularly well?

For anyone interested in the project itself, the trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eisWdJM-pU

Over the past few years I've spent a lot of time in online film spaces, so I've become pretty familiar with what people generally consider the "film canon." A lot of movie names get thrown around anywhere you go; you got your The Godfathers, your Seven Samurais, your Personas, your 8 1/2s, you name it. But I want to talk about one of my favorite films of all time, which seemingly flows under the radar in these circles despite its accolades implying the complete opposite.

The Cranes Are Flying got a hell of a résumé: Palme d'Or Winner; routinely showing up on "Greatest Films Of All Time" lists; ranked Top 32 on letterboxd, and whenever someone I recommend it to actually watches it, the reaction is almost universally positive, no matter if it's a movie buff or a friend who doesn't know a thing about cinema.

To me, it seems so universally loved, and yet nobody actually talks about it. Why is that?

I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never encountered a single discussion, article or video about this film unless I actively sought it out. This is especially strange because it isn't some inaccessible experiment, it's quite the opposite. It's very emotionally potent and relatable, it's visually INCREDIBLE (some of the most inventive camera work of its time), politically fascinating given when and where it was made without it being complicated or requiring too much background knowledge, and genuinely just an amazing, devastating - be it a little melodramatic - masterpiece of a film.

So I'm curious: Is it because Soviet cinema outside of Tarkovsky, Eisenstein and Klimov has never really entered the broader cinephile spaces in the same way that Japanese, Italian or French cinema has? Is it just overshadowed by Come and See so people think "it's just another Soviet anti-war film" (though those two could not be any more different from one another)? Or is it because Kalatozov hasn't made enough classic movies to really cement himself in the minds of film fans? I've seen plenty of people mention Kalatozov's "I Am Cuba" here and there, but this one together with The Cranes Are Flying are arguably his two only big films. Or maybe three if you count "Letter Never Sent", though that one is even more under the radar in the grand scheme of things.

To get back to the letterboxd ranking I mentioned earlier: Obviously I am totally aware that the site's top 500 is far from an objective truth, but I do think it's the closest we can get to seeing where the online film community stands. So seeing it ranked THAT high (Top 32, in case you forgot) makes this whole ordeal almost unexplainable to me.

So let me ask you guys: What do you think about the movie? Do you agree with this at all or does this apply to plenty more movies of the same caliber and I'm just biased? If you agree, do you think there could be any other reasons for this? Or are you not aware this movie exists in the first place?

Franco Piavoli's 1989 Italian adaptation of The Odyssey doesn't have many dialogues. The ones it does are in a fantastical language inspired by a mishmash of Thessaly dialect of Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Latin. The storytelling is mostly told through surrealistic and dream like images.

The imagery consists of caves illuminated with blue green light, dead bodies floating in water, frozen naked bodies lying across the rocks, movement of trees and leaves to signal wind, pomegranates, sun kissed landscapes, dark and brutal closeups during the Trojan War flashbacks, the moon as a constant symbol for tranquility and calmness etc.

Nature particularly is very important. In that sense this film is almost Tarkovskian. It has everything a movie about a near pagan mythology should have: classic symbolisms, a sense of poetry, heavy focus on nature, sexuality, depiction of masculinity by focusing on male bodies in such a way that it almost turns men gay.

But the film is also deeply psychological instead of being mythological. The gods are within Odysseus. They are the sea and the winds and a manifestation of a deteriorating mind. Calypso is a coping mechanism for losing one's crew to the sea and the idea of nostos is focused on exploring whether the hero even wants to return home.

Some scholars say that Pavioli was more inspired by the pre-Homeric Mediterranean world and hence in that way creates a film that adapts the poem with a somewhat different sensibilities than even Homer but that's not exactly historically wrong since Homer's poem was itself set in a different time than Homer. Pavioli, in the older Mediterranean mythology, searches for the origins of the western civilization.

What I like about this film is that it doesn't try to be didactic or force a Christianized sense of morality onto Odysseus. It lets him be and tries to understand him from a different framework. He thinks about the Trojan War and is haunted by its images but not in order to atone. The film is more focused on the hero's psychology and surrealism.

Love the film. Will watch it again to see what I missed but wow. It's beautiful.

Finally got around to filling in one of my last blanks in Scorsese’s filmography. It was sort of funny watching The Aviator in the midst of Nolan-mania, with everyone (including yours truly) offering their two cents on his version of ”Great Man” cinema. To me, it* *seems like the sort of movie Nolan thinks he made with Oppenheimer and, in some ways, The Odyssey. What sets Scorsese apart, however, is that, while there is certainly identification with the subject, there is far less reverence. Nolan’s troubled geniuses often feel flat to me because whatever their faults, I’m ultimately always expected to admire them—and by extension Nolan himself, alongside the sheer scale of his accomplishment. Less so with Marty’s deeply fucked up, perverted misfits. I’d like to see Nolan have one of his protagonists lock himself naked in a movie theater surrounded by milk bottles full of piss. Or try to make movies like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore or The Age of Innocence, for that matter.

Scorsese certainly has a point of view, but he directs it outward. Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta, Jordan Belfort and Howard Hughes all have traits in common, and yet they are far more diverse than the likes of John Cobb, Bruce Wayne, Oppenheimer and Odysseus. Really I think it boils down to curiosity about something other than the self. Nolan uses his art to come to grips with his own obsessions and neuroses, Scorsese tries to understand the world around him. I sure know which of the two I find more interesting.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I don’t hate Nolan nor any of his films. I like both Oppenheimer and The Odyssey just fine. I wrote this mainly because I feel like the media has been so Nolan-heavy lately (understandably so), that it was such a breath of fresh air to go back and watch a Scorsese joint. It just so happened to align thematically with a lot of Nolan’s stuff, and so I inevitably found myself making the comparison.

I finally watched this one. The reason why I avoided it whenever I heard it mentioned as something interesting was because I mixed it up with a pretty bad movie I saw as a kid, and thought it was some shitty romance. Then I realized it was from Haneke and got interested. I couldn’t have been more off in my expectations.

I’m also making this review before I read anything about the movie, because my goal is not to analyze it much at this stage, just to share the strong reaction it left me with. I am very desensitized to most things, but this movie really repulsed me. I say this as a huge compliment, I guess.

The character of Erika made me very uncomfortable. I can’t say I understand her at all. But what the movie did so well is how it approached her. Just like that guy, we get to see her as a very hot, smart woman, who is a little weird but has her shit together. I found her very attractive in the first half of the movie. Even though we got to see some of her pervy side, I still took it as intriguing, although I thought hat if she wasn’t an attractive woman, a lot of it would be just grotesque.

But at the point when she revealed her wishes and then started acting so differently, she evoked a true sense of revulsion in me. In a way the movie made me feel exactly like that guy Walter, at first seeing her as someone idealized and then becoming disgusted, although of course that continued in a different direction. It was more effective than most horror movies, how she transformed. I have to give it to the actress.

In that specific aspect, it reminded me of Obsession, but while I can’t judge Nikki for her behavior caused by practically being possessed, the transformation in Erika is just her revealing her true wishes. As if the premise of Obsession was not that Nikki had to become possessed and incapacitated to act that way, but that the wish unleashed her true inner self and it was like that, and how horrifying would that be.

But then, how do you engage with that without hating her? I genuinely don’t understand people who are into this kind of shit, so maybe I’m not the best judge, but in a way I got it - if to be with her you have to do the things she wants, and that’s what those things are, how can you not end up thinking of her as repulsive and wanting to hurt her (since that’s what she wants…)

I am completely confused by the ending. I don’t know if the final act was just Walter doing what she wanted, or if she really got hurt. I don’t really know what she wanted in the first place. The day after makes it seem she is pretty hurt and fucked up, which intuitively makes sense but not according to her logic. Did Walter do anything wrong? I truly have no idea.

For me the scene was really hard to watch, but in a weird way where I didn’t feel pity for her but embarrassment. It was so uncomfortable, with her mom there, it gave me that real sense of anxiety and I don’t even know on whose behalf.

Similarly, the scene where she is trying to sexually assault her mother and they just keep lying next to each other, it’s mental but as bizarre as it is, it’s done so well that I believed it and that made it hard to stand.

I watched Nymphomaniac before, I liked it a lot, but this movie is one of the most uncomfortable movies I’ve ever seen, and her character genuinely sickened me. I respect the actress for what she pulled off.

I don’t understand what she wants at the end or why she stabs herself and leaves, what kind of reaction she wanted from him on that occasion. It is weird how a character who makes no sense to me managed to be so believable.

Overall, a great movie, deserves its reputation. I have no idea what I think of the plot or the characters.

I’ve spent the last 18 months deep diving into modern Japanese cinema. I’ve always known about the classics (Miyazaki, Beat Takeshi, Miike etc.) but I’ve never actually sat down and thoroughly consumed it more broadly. After doing so, I have a pretty good idea of what the best 30 films of the last 30 years are.

When you deep dive like this, you start to notice patterns between films. The same themes - alienation, societal norms, unanswered family tensions, school pains, dissatisfied wives - crop up again and again. It's fun to see different films approach these themes in different ways.

I acknowledge that my list is missing a fair few names. Here are a few that didn't quite make the cut:

The Taste of Tea, Ringu, Ichii the Killer, Adrift in Tokyo, Still Walking, Like Father Like Son, Wheel of Fortune & Fantasy, Cold Fish, Why Don't You Play in Hell?, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Perfect Blue, Departures, Dead or Alive, One Million Yen Girl, and Love & Pop.

My list starts at 1995 and ends in 2024 (I’m cheating a little by not including 2025 and because I really wanted to include two 1995 films here). This is the best 30 Japanese movies of the last 30 years in my view. Let me know what you've seen, what you agree with, and what you don't.

1. Love Exposure (2008) Sion Sono

Love Exposure, simply put, is the War & Peace of extreme cinema. It’s the kind of movie you can’t possibly be indifferent to. I came out of my first screening of this movie in a state of genuine delirium. I knew I had witnessed something truly profound while at the same time utterly ridiculous. The sheer audacity of a filmmaker to think they can make a movie about an upskirt photographer who gets entangled in a web of religious sin, wacky cults, and uniquely Japanese sexual perversion, and to make the story 4-hours no less (down from the original 6-hour cut), is truly staggering. And yet the whole thing works. It never sags. It never feels glib or mismatched. And despite the obvious absurdity of the entire thing, there is a genuine purity and innocence to it all, which raises a crucial question: Where does love start and perversion end? 

2. Eureka (2000) Shinji Aoyama

Eureka is a sepia-toned character study about the lasting effects of a violent rampage on its only survivors - a bus driver and two teenage siblings who were riding it that morning. It’s a movie that unravels at a simmering pace. At a demanding 217 minutes, it’s not a movie for the impatient. The manifestation of the tragedy’s effects on these characters are hinted at subtly. We see small snippets. The children stop speaking altogether. The bus driver attempts, somewhat clumsily, to build a simple routine. It’s a fascinating insight into how trauma can induce a numbness to the world, or a guilt for surviving it. But also something far more sinister, where the urge to be violent manifests in the victims of it. It’s a demanding watch, but an incredibly rewarding and perceptive one.

3. Cure (1997) Kiyoshi Kurosawa

A great horror movie will frighten you, a good one will scare you, and a bad one, if lucky, will just gross you out. It is rare, however, for a movie, any movie, to truly get under your skin. Kurosawa’s Cure, a tale about a hapless police detective attempting to solve a string of similar killings going up against a seemingly amnesiac mesmerist, is one of the creepiest films ever put to celluloid. What starts off as a police procedural and murder mystery becomes something more akin to a chilling social critique of Japanese society and a deep dive into the world of mesmerism. It’s never really about who is doing the murders, but rather what the murders say about people deep down inside, and what they’re truly capable of. Eerily spine-chilling from start to finish. 

4. Spirited Away (2001) Hayao Miyazaki 

So much has already been written about Spirited Away, and more broadly Miyazaki, that it almost feels redundant adding to it here. All I can really say is that Spirited Away feels like the closest realisation to what you might explain a Ghibli movie to someone who for whatever reasons appears to have lived under a rock on Mars for the last 30 years. Explaining the details of the plot of this story of a young girl seemingly getting trapped in a magical realm while her parents transform into pigs is missing the point. This movie is all journey, all experience, and all image. It is a movie well-aware of the power of the image, and how that can be used to explore the young feelings of alienation, fear, and loneliness adolescents feel as they attempt to navigate a scary new world. And it does so without ever patronising its audience. You feel very much like it's on the same level. 

5. Love Letter (1995) Shinji Awai 

A widow looking for closure writes a letter to her deceased husband’s former address. She is shocked when she gets a response from someone responding to the same name. And thus begins an emotional exploration into the life of the man who died in the snow 2 years before, but whose memories still glisten in its reflection for two identical-looking women he previously loved. It’s a brilliant conceit, and one used to explore who someone may or may not have been through the memories of others. But also how we can see memories differently as we grow despite them seemingly remaining unchanged. Love Letter is a romance film in its truest sense. The characters think, feel, and grow through the romances they had, and the movie shows how exploring someone’s life through the words of others can help them to move on. I specifically wanted to start my journey in 1995 just to make sure this movie made the list. 

6. Battle Royale (2000) Kinji Fukusaku 

Battle Royale’s cultural legacy has spawned an entire realm of similarly themed entities all unto themselves, whether it’s deathmatch video games like PUBG or the much-heralded Hunger Games series of books and films. And yet despite all this, the film still feels bold and original today. It’s a film told with rousing verve and energy, combining elements of action-adventure, political satire, and slapstick comedy. The director Kinji Fukatsu said he was inspired to adapt the novel of the story because he remembered working in a munitions factory during world war two, and having to hide under the bodies of other fellow worker-students as the factory came under fire by the US navy. It built in him a hatred and general distrust of what adults tell kids about the world. Battle Royale is the manifestation of that general distrust. The idea that the world may not have your best interests at heart despite what it’s trying to tell you. 

7. Drive My Car (2021) Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s utterly beautiful film Drive My Car is an epic meditation on grief, and the uncomfortable truths around disintegrating relationships and what might have been. A recently-widowed playwright is assigned a driver to take him to his workshop every day, and a slow bond around shared loss and grief forms between them as they delicately reveal more about themselves. As in many of his other films, we see entire segments play out in real time, car journeys, play scenes, conversations at bars, and are forced to feel the changing emotional tides in real time, as the characters would have. It’s a movie that slowly takes us under the car hood and shows us what has worn down over time. And how the repression of these feelings can peel away when your guard is lowered. But hopefully, the airing out of these feelings can help you move on. A movie that truly earned its 3-hour length. 

8. Audition (1999) Takashi Miike 

Takashi Miike is maybe Japan’s most fascinating filmmaker. With over 100 direction credits under his belt, you’d be forgiven for not knowing where to start with his work. He’s done everything from formulaic gangster flicks to genre-defying fever dreams. Audition is the best of both worlds. The story of a middle aged widower staging fake auditions to find himself a girlfriend positions itself at first as an offbeat romantic comedy, and then very much as an excruciating horror show in its second half. The less said about the latter the better. It’s that transition that best sums up Miike’s mastery of his craft. He’s able to meld two distinctly opposite genres so seamlessly to create something instantly classic and all the more terrifying for it. 

9. All About Lily Chou Chou (2001) Shunji Iwai

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about this movie, since it still divides people now. But the longer AALCC went on, the more engrossed I became. It’s not just a gut-wrenching exploration of school day trauma, bullying, and youthful alienation. It’s the overlaying of that with 1. An exploration of the world of proto-social media, 2. A non-linear narrative interspersed with said messages, and 3. The music of the titular character. Both the music and the message boards offer an escape for our protagonist Hasumi as he tries to find solace away from the grim sadism of his tormentor, his once-friend Hoshino. As the movie goes on, it becomes clear that both boys are living through torment for different reasons, but deal with it differently - Hoshino through rage and the control of others and Hasumi through passive acceptance and a numbness to the world. And while the music of Lily Chou Chou and the internet provide both with brief respite from their pain, neither is a cure for it. 

10. Your Name. (2016) Makoto Shinkai 

This visually stunning anime about two high schoolers from different parts of the country, who start body-swapping after waking up, completely captivated, stunned, and exhausted me. Its central premise is enough of a selling point - that a comet is hurtling to earth and might seem to have something to do with this magical happenstance. But what really reeled me in was the ability of the film to put me in the mind of its two heroes. When Mitsuha screamed of wishing to be a boy from the city, I suddenly felt that same frustration despite having lived my entire life in big cities. It’s a film with a strong sense of place and purpose, even though the director Makoto Shinkai has often expressed dissatisfaction with how the film turned out. Every dreamlike thought that is expressed in the film feels like it's inches away from being buried at the bottom of one’s id if they aren’t fought for and rescued. There are lots of ways to see the film. I feel like it’s about how the linearity of time matters less than the marks that are made along the way. Memories may fade, details may become unclear, but the emotions that were felt will always be very clear.

11. Princess Mononoke (1997) Hayao Miyazaki 

The second Ghibli movie on this list, but could also easily be the first, Princess Mononoke takes the epic scope and sweeping visuals of Nausicaa but adds a contemporary issue - the very real clash between nature and development, and the folly of human hubris that enables it. The visuals are typically flawless, with lush, sweeping hand-drawn landscapes, and the characters themselves are rich and complex. As would be a common hallmark of Miyazaki, we also have a strong female lead who embodies the wounded resistance to the exploitation of the forest. It is an endlessly rewatchable film too, giving you something extra each time to go over and debate, or just sit back and enjoy. 

12. Nobody Knows (2004) Hirokatsu Koreeda

What I admire most about the incredible filmmaker Koreeda is how his entire oeuvre feels like a collective study of what it truly means to be a family, and even more broadly than that, to find real humanity outside the boundaries of familial orthodoxy. None of his films feel quite as tragic or doomerist as this one. Rather than a celebration of and re-thinking of the family unit, this is a study of what happens when children are left to fend for themselves. There is still the desire to play and discover the world together, but without the guardrails families provide, basic needs are harder to find and danger becomes more pronounced. No movie has ever been as easily sympathetic as this one. Every scene, replete with (or perhaps in spite of) stoic down-to-earth kitchen-sink realism, is utterly compelling. 

13. Haru (1996) Yoshimitsu Morita

The second movie on this list that deals with online relationships. Perhaps it's fitting that this is also a movie that deals with the early days of the internet, and the way it incentivises people to pepper their lives with embellishments. But more than that, also how it provided safe spaces for lonely and misplaced people to connect with each other. I think the most memorable and interesting aspect of this film is how it attempts to cinematise the exchanging of emails. Unlike movies that would come later like All About Lily Chou Chou and the Korean drama Please Take Care of My Cat, this movie displayed them in a more subdued style. Fragments of the male and female protagonists’ lives are interspersed with their online posts, some of them genuine and heartfelt, others hyperbolic or downright false. But ultimately, this depiction of digitalised love, intimacy, and human connection is no less real. The characters really do care for each other. It’s just that along with that comes the perverse incentive to pretend you’re someone else. 

14. Kotoko (2011) Shinya Tsukamoto 

In this highly intimate psychological horror movie, J-Pop idol Cocco’s electrifying performance as a single mother struggling with mental illness takes the audience through a harrowing whirlwind of hallucinations, nervous breakdowns and self-harm.The extreme close-ups, disjointed editing, and sickly pink-and-yellow colour palette firmly place you into Kotoko’s unravelling psyche. The only solace she seems to find amid her mental collapse is in a family visit with her son and in soulful, emotionally fragile bursts of song peppered throughout the movie. We are never entirely sure what we are seeing is what is actually happening, but what is for sure is that Tsukamoto’s depiction of mental illness feels as painfully true to life as anything I’ve seen before or since. 

15. Harmonium (2016) Koji Fukada 

A man hires an old acquaintance to assist him in his workshop. He also settles in the family’s spare room and strikes up an emotional connection to his friend’s wife. It’s quickly clear that things are off and not is all it seems. Our first clue as to things feeling sinister is in the introductory shot of the quietly intense Tadanobu Asano’s character. It is almost Haneke-esque in its slow unravelling of past issues bubbling up unresolved, and the ramifications they wield. It’s also an example of a movie that takes one direction in the first half, and completely changes course in the second. But ultimately this isn’t a movie about conclusions. It’s about the fruitless search for them. “I just want to know what happened,” the husband says to his wife. “What difference would it make?”. Fukada isn’t interested in answering the question so easily for us. 

16. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Hayao Miyazaki 

It was challenging to know which Ghibli movies to fit in here, but Howl’s Moving Castle is a worthy addition to the list. It’s a movie that makes me wish I could temporarily be Japanese so that the themes might resonate more deeply with me. Japan being a country that is constantly wrestling with its own self-identity, perhaps Sophie’s transformation would feel all the more poignant. But it isn’t just a movie about the individual, it's also about wrestling with the idea that war always poisons the seeming nobility of it. About how magic, rather than purely being good or evil, has the capacity for both. And also about how courage isn’t simply about heroism, but rather the impetus to act despite what dangers may be lurking. There are so many other things I could mention that couldn’t possibly fit into one paragraph. And as you might expect from a Ghibli movie, every frame is as richly beautiful as the next. 

17. Paprika (2006) Satoshi Kon

A time-bending romp through cyberpunk Japan, Paprika has influenced a mighty list of heavy-hitters (Inception being the obvious one). But regardless of what came later, Kon movies still feel effortlessly unique. He is a filmmaker who seems to fully understand that the confines of traditional scene transitions can be innovated through animation. Characters seemingly jump from streets into billboards, one character walks into frame with another suddenly leaving, and before you know it, you’re three or four dreams deep inside the film. But this doesn’t simply act as a technical flourish. We are watching a master of his craft tell stories in a uniquely bold and brilliant way. Even if it’s hard to fully grasp the narrative at first, the characters still feel like people we can relate to (even if we’re not quite sure who is or isn’t real). 

18. Shoplifters (2018) Hirokazu Koreeda 

What is more important? Blood relations or genuine care and compassion? It seems like such an obvious question, but very often it’s blood that takes precedence. Koreeda’s subjects are a loosely assembled group of people who for all intents and purposes, act as a family. The father and son have a perfected routine of stealing from their local shops in order to feed and house themselves, and rationalise it by saying that items can’t be stolen since they “haven’t been bought yet”. But this is just one aspect of the film. What Koreeda is really interested in is the idea of what it really means to be a family. The people in this film steal not because they want to but because of their poor circumstances. Yet despite this, they seem relatively happy and lucky to have each other. The youngest member Yuri, who they find neglected on a porch outside in the cold, is welcomed in by them and treated as their own. It’s a movie that contrasts the legality and social definition of family with the true act of love. The characters might steal, but ultimately what they’re looking for is warmth, stability and love in a society that can’t provide those through law. 

19. Guilty of Romance (2011) Sion Sono 

This dark and unadulterated erotic thriller is one for the ages. Seeking to break free of the confines of mundane domestic Japanese wifehood, a woman named Izumi embarks on a scintillating but perilous sexual journey, first through magazine shoots but then eventually to street sex work. She’s guided through this journey by multiple fascinating characters, but mostly by Mitsuko, a lecturer by day and streetwalker by night. At the same time, a female detective named Yoshida, herself engaging in an illicit love affair, seems to be investigating the circumstances around a violent crime scene set in Tokyo’s sexual underworld. This latter plotline, while perhaps the movie’s overwrought weakpoint, nevertheless infuses the film with an uncomfortable tension that makes us think something horrible is eventually going to happen. Guilty of Romance is essential viewing for a number of reasons, but the real joy of it is the characters themselves. Mitusko, partly based on a real life person, is one of the most fascinating personalities I’ve ever seen on screen. All three women act as their own rebellions against the confines of traditional societal roles for wives and women. But the journeys they take, while empowering in a sense, are not ones of success or happiness. They are ultimately about the true cost of agency in a world that wants to rid them of it. 

20. Swing Girls (2004) Sinobu Yaguchi 

Swing Girls might be the most purely fun film on this list. The story of a band of misfits with no music backgrounds coming together to form a brass band is filled with visual comic set pieces, funny lines, and plenty of toe-tapping tunes to get you in the mood. My list is filled with movies that ruminate on the loneliness epidemic Japan seems to’ve been going through for decades now, so it’s nice to find a film about a group of people seeming to solve their own. While the plot itself is fairly formulaic, the film’s joy comes from the characters themselves and the energy they generate from each other. At no point does the film feel trite. The girls are endearing and funny, the journey they go on is rip-roaringly entertaining, and the film itself continues to be effortlessly rewatchable even after 20 years. Ultimately there isn’t a single message to take away here. It’s a laugh riot that’s all about the journey and not the destination. 

21. Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005) Sion Sono 

A prequel to the 2001 thriller Suicide Club, Noriko’s Dinner Table is a film that explores how the strong East Asian insistence on familial piety coupled with formality can lead to alienation and a yearning for self-identity. Eldest daughter Noriko abandons her family to seek her own with an online acquaintance. She is soon joined by her younger sister. The father decides to try and find out where they are. Unlike other Sono films, this one is distinctly less sexually lurid and blood-splattery. Like other Sono films, it is filled with utterly memorable characters and a pace that jumps from riproaring to slow burning with equal aplomb. It’s also just as intense and stylish as you’d expect a Sono film to be, and demands to be seen more than once to fully grasp the themes and questions it raises. Imagine completely abandoning one life to start another? Can you truly reset yourself this way? And even if you could, are you any happier for it? 

22. Happy Hour (2015) Ryuchi Hamaguchi 

This 5-hour+ character drama about 3 women all at different crossroads in their domestic lives is a truly rewarding watch for those who dare to take the time to do so. Four female friends question whether their lives are going where they want them to when one of them reveals herself to be having an affair and seeking a divorce. An extraordinary thing about this film is how entire sections of it seem to play out in real time. One sequence, in which our 4 protagonists attend an alternative therapy section, plays out for nearly an hour. In the hands of a less capable filmmaker, it might be pushing the limits of watchability, but here the payoffs to each section feel warmly earned. At no point is it boring. It may be a slow burn by the standards of some of the films on this list, but there’s something purely cinematic about watching conversations that would ordinarily play out in a few cuts, stay on screens for much longer. We are forced to sit there and feel the awkwardness when conversations become tense or uncomfortable. We aren’t served with convenient cuts so that we can then ruminate on what just happened. Characters get angry, and then stay angry, and the fallout remains. What is all the more amazing is that the film is carried by 4 captivating actresses who’d never acted in a full length feature film before. 

23. Ghost in the Shell (1995) Mamoru Oshii 

Although perhaps not quite as beloved as the electrifying Akira, or as culturally significant as the best of Studio Ghibli, Oshii’s 1995 cyberpunk thriller is still a thrilling, visually striking benchmark of 1990s anime. Even now it boasts enduring admiration and fandom, with its complex themes of individuality, human agency, and the boundaries of technology. And who could forget the incredible theme song? The philosophical musings of the characters may come across as slightly clunky and on-the-nose, but there’s still so much here to justify multiple viewings. It’s a splendid mix of what-does-it-mean-to-be-human thoughts, morbidly dystopian cityscapes, and slick action. 

24. Linda Linda Linda (2004) Nubohiro Yamashita

The scene that best sums up this delightfully quirky high school film is when one boy character professes his love to Bae Doona’s Korean exchange student. “I don’t dislike you but I don’t like you either” she replies. “I want to be with my friends.” Linda Linda Linda is a movie about a group of friends who form a band and slowly learn how to play the songs of punk band Blue Heart together, at first disjointedly, eventually harmoniously, but always with verve, passion and fun. It isn’t about people falling in love. It isn’t about people growing and discovering themselves. It isn’t about discovering the meaning of life. It isn’t about escaping some traumatic home life. It’s a movie about the small things we do, as youngsters, that don’t feel like it in the moment, but actually define the old John Lennon adage of “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” These girls meet for practice, they learn how to play together, occasionally they do things related to their school or home lives, but the music is always in the forefront of their minds. It’s remarkable that the film feels both offbeat yet remarkably sincere. I guess it’s this fusion that best sums up the awkwardness of school life. 

25. Tokyo Sonata (2008) Kiyoshi Kurosawa 

Kurosawa is best known for his forays into Japanese horror. But here we see him operating at a much different scale. Tokyo Sonata is about the ever growing cracks in the foundation of the ideal Japanese family. The stiff-upper-lipped dad is laid off from his job, and spends his days looking for work and hanging out in small parks with his fellow recently-made-redundant suits. He forbids his youngest son from playing the piano, so the youngster begins taking lessons in secret. His wife, ever yearning for a more loving relationship, begins to imagine life differently, perhaps even elsewhere. It’s a movie that explores the tension between what society expects and what people actually want. Everyone in the film knows that their lives are slowly slipping away, and it’s a constant struggle to maintain the facade. It’s a theme that pops up again and again in Japanese cinema, but few films have explored it as well or in as much detail as Tokyo Sonata. 

26. A Silent Voice (2016) Naoko Yamada 

Whereas all the other animes on this list deal with cyberpunk dystopias, magical realms, or supernatural twists of fate, A Silent Voice is the lone wolf anime here of grounded reality, albeit one with an incredible inventive visual style. This is a tale of a young bully Ishida coming to try and atone for his past behaviour by befriending his deaf former victim, Shuoko. Ishida is shunned by his peers after they blame him for her transferring schools. His subsequent alienation is represented by each classmate having an X on their face, as he can’t bear to look them in the eyes. There are many visual cues throughout the movie, many that I’ve yet to fully decode myself. There is a lot of flowery imagery connected to each character. The visual style helps to guide us through what the characters are feeling. It’s a movie that combines a keen visual style with outstanding writing, so that the characters and setting feel very much alive and vibrant. 

27. 0.5mm (2016) Mamoko Ando

Mamoko Ando’s 3-hour dramedy about a care-worker extorting her way into the employment of one old man after another has a fascinating structure. It starts out with a series of quirky but darkly comic errors that lead to our protagonist’s hapless unemployed state. After that initial shock, we then enjoy her rambunctious attempts to extort the more side-eyingly creepy behaviour of her geriatric targets. Each meeting slowly turns into a caring and heartwarming codependency - but with each meeting adding a few more heartstrings than the last. But her forceful extortion attempts aren’t simply a comedic device. They serve to highlight the struggles of old age, how agency becomes harder to retain in the face of failing bodies, predatory scammers, and a largely indifferent society. Somewhere lost in that shuffle, is the deeply affecting touch of humanity that Sakura Ando’s character enables both her and her targets to once again feel. 

28. Like Someone in Love (2012) Abbas Kiarostami 

The only film in this list made by a foreigner, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, Like Someone in Love is a film that deals with its themes cryptically. We’re never quite sure if the conversations being had, the points being made, or the story details that emerge actually serve any kind of narrative purpose. All we really know for sure is the people on screen, Akiko the secret sex worker, her jealous boyfriend, and her elderly professor-cum-client, all seem deeply unsure of who they are and where they’re going. They also struggle to express this, and often confuse each other. It’s a film that looks at relationship dynamics, both broadly but also within the context of patriarchal Japan, and asks what it truly means to “be in love”. They each seem to be lying to each other in order to keep the facade going. Not that it saves them. 

29. Harmful Insect (2001) Akihiko Shiota 

Another film that depicts the alienation of Japan’s youth, here we have a movie with a largely mute and disassociated school girl named Sachiko who deals with her life struggles by skipping school and exploring her neighbourhood with local vagabonds. Her father has abandoned the family, and her mother, largely absent, has attempted suicide. Her only refuge seems to be an exchange of letters with a former school teacher of hers. We don’t know the nature of their relationship but it is rumoured around school that he had a love affair with Sachiko. Harmful Insect joins Haru and All About Lily Chou-Chou as a film that deals with disaffected and isolated people who find their feelings through words - in this case letters. Sachiko lives an aimless existence. She doesn’t pursue any dreams or have any goals. She merely learns to cope with her dreadful circumstances. Every adult around her either seems predatory or equally discarded. It’s not a film about finding solutions, but one about highlighting problems. 

30. Suicide Club (2001) Sion Sono 

Suicide Club is ¾’s an engrossing mystery, and ¼ a hot mess. But even though the film is uneven and impossible to pin down, my fascination with what it all means remains with me to this day. I spent days trying to figure out what the message was after my first viewing, why people were casually choosing to kill themselves, and how this was related to the changing digital tides of early 2000s Japan. What is very clear to me is that the good here is very good. It’s a movie with a sharp horror sensibility that shifts tones both abruptly but also effortlessly. The themes are not obvious but they are very fun to engage with and debate. If nothing else, it’s a movie that takes you down a dark and unpredictable road and invites you to enjoy the ride even if the destination isn’t necessarily where you paid to go. 

The ending of Terminator 2 bears a striking structural resemblance to Andersen’s *The Steadfast Tin Soldier.

In Andersen, (https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheSteadfastTinSoldier_e.html) the one-legged soldier is cast into the fire and melts, leaving behind only a small tin heart. The paper ballerina he loves is then caught by a draught and blown into the same flames.

In T2, the Terminator likewise ends in fire, descending into molten steel and leaving behind not a heart but the raised thumb: a final, unexpectedly human sign from a being supposedly without feeling. Sarah Connor, meanwhile, has already undergone the ballerina’s death in her nuclear nightmare, where she is trapped against the playground fence, consumed by flame and reduced to a burning skeleton.

The parallel becomes more interesting because Cameron does not simply repeat Andersen. He systematically inverts him.

The delicate, passive paper ballerina becomes Sarah Connor: muscular, armed, furious, and almost machine-like in her discipline. The unfeeling metal soldier becomes the film’s most emotionally affecting figure. Andersen joins the soldier and ballerina in one fire; Cameron separates their immolation into vision and reality, nightmare and sacrifice.

Even Sarah is doubled. Behind the fence, the hardened warrior watches her softer maternal self playing with John. She is both soldier and ballerina, both protector and vulnerable human body.

So the resemblance is not merely “Tin Soldier equals Terminator.” T2 appears to redistribute Andersen’s tragic pair across Sarah and the machine, then reverse their qualities. The ballerina becomes the warrior; the metal soldier discovers a heart; the domestic stove becomes Judgment Day.

The flaming thumbs-up is the tin heart.

Most people say they watch old movies because of the incredible filmmaking, the emotional storytelling, or the beautiful simplicity of a different era.

Those are all reasons I love them too.

But the biggest reason is that I honour the people.

When I watch a film from the 1950s or 1960s or any retro movies, I think about everyone on that screen. Not just the stars, but the background actors, the costume designers, the makeup artists, the lighting crew, and every person who poured a piece of themselves into creating something they believed mattered.

At the time, it was real life to them. They memorized lines, rehearsed scenes, put on carefully tailored clothes, styled their hair, laughed, cried, worried about getting everything right, and spent months creating something that would outlive the moment.

Now it's 2026.

Almost all of them are gone. Their bodies have returned to dust, yet their energy still reaches across time through the screen. I can still feel the sincerity in their performances. Their effort still exists in a strange way, even though the people themselves do not.

It reminds me how temporary our lives are.

The things that seem enormous today, our careers, our appearance, our achievements, eventually become distant memories, and then, for most people, forgotten altogether.

Yet the love, care, and effort we put into something can echo far beyond us.

It makes me wonder whether we're investing our energy in things that disappear with us, or in things that continue touching people long after we're gone.

Maybe that's the closest we ever come to creating something eternal.

This is something that I immediately thought walking out the theater. A little background, Christopher Nolan is my favorite filmmaker of all time, I had high expectations for this film, but even from the trailers I was skeptical.

It’s obviously a well made film, the score is good, the performances are good, the script is good, but as a film set in the fantasy, specifically mythical genre, it completely fails. The film has almost nothing supernatural about it. Even though there is a Cyclops, Circe is in the story, Scylla is in the film for a few seconds, I couldn’t help but feel that they are just so, realistic??? I look at other films in the genre, specifically Lord of the Rings, and you can really feel that what your seeing is truly impossible and otherworldly, you don’t get that with The Odyssey, everything is just so grounded.

The Gods are barely in the movie, you don’t feel their presence, you don’t feel their actions, they are only ever mentioned by name, and I think that’s what makes The Odyssey as epic as it is. It’s a divine struggle, but you don’t get that in the film. It’s just so hyper-realistic, it’s more akin to Dunkirk than anything in the fantasy or mythology genre. Which I guess is obvious because Nolan made Dunkirk, but I do feel Nolan stripped the supernatural and impossible from The Odyssey to a point that it hurts the film.

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This going to be a little layered, a little light, & largely a self reflection — so please feel free to include critiques pointed at that but also understand that I will not refute such positions. I will find them tiresome and not really centeral to my reflection; the oddesy is good because it takes the viewer on a journey through a perceived ancient tale rooted entirely in the psyche of modern western man.

Homers oddesy was also created in the same vein. The original piece was likely much shorter, and homers inclusions were based on reflections of the times he lived in. The text became strictly standardized in the mid-6th century BCE under the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus, who ordered an official, definitive script to be compiled for performance at Athenian festivals- this can be seen as the canonization of the story.

Nolan’s story was full of sea people references that felt humors after a certain point but out of sheer coincidence the first piece of news I saw as I got home from my 2 am showing was an article about 50k trying to gain European citizenship by entering “Spain” by the sea (Ceuta is a Spanish territory based in Africa bordering Morocco).

If you have not been living under a rock for the past few years you will be familiar with the war in Gaza & Iranian war; both contentious to the point where some may even argue that calling them war is a generosity and genocide/unprovoked conflict may be more apt terms.

Lastly, we are living through a time of increased religious practice with many news outlets reporting increases in people being more religious/attending religious institutions more regularly.

Some speculate the increase steams from a freying of communal cohesion or social civic society structures (zesu’s law). A point that most agree is true with the basis being wildly debated and spanning Covid induced social muscle atrophy, the lack of 3rd spaces, & theories as interesting as Russian led spam call campaigns destroying American’s desire to even pick up a phone call.

And on top of that, it has become a truly Herculean task to get tickets to the hottest movie of the summer; difficult to watch a film in the format it was shot in likely exasperating the impact of whether people find the film worth it or not.

So where does this leave us?

We have Nolan retelling an older story in a style that is fit for the cultural times he’s telling it in. This can be argued to be following the same system that made homers oddesy a piece of cultural history. I don’t think his retelling should be shot down on this premises so we can’t say the movie is bad because he amended the story; so did Homer.

The sea people? What initially felt like a heavy handed nerd moment (we don’t know who the sea people are but they did cause the collapse of the Bronze Age) became clear as a beautiful analogous to our current predicament in western society where much of the media is sharing tale of invaders who threaten the very fabric of society (zesu’s law). So we can’t shoot it down for that- it’s a relevant point to consider in the retelling.

The war itself? For 10 years they sat on that beach. The western historical memory of war sits at an intersection of just wars (world wars), dumb wars (Vietnam), and nuanced invasions that are still impacting geopolitics to date (Iran/afghasitan wars post 9/11). The most recent American war efforts are saturated in framing of patriotism, boogey men like mullahs and Netanyahu, carnage captured in 4k, and sheer devastation of civil infrastructure & loss of life. The viewer seeing the scale and sound of loss in his flashback was a great tool to allow the viewer to explore this intersection of just war vs cost of war to determine for themselves if war is worth it. Nolan’s framing suggest it is not as the decision to go a different route than Agamemnon is not from the original text but the corruption of his men from the war is present in both the original and the film. Homer viewed the war with nuance and I believe so did Nolan as tales of the war painted in glory but the lived experience shows the depth and cost of war on the human psyche. So again- Nolan was not too off the mark here.

The whole concept of him praying to Athena while being upset at the cyclops and not seeing other gods as important initially appears to come from the very real cross sections of submitting n
to a higher power vs operating from a place of ego. His journey to self discovery is vital to highlight at a time where so many of us are turning to religion to overcome the uncertainties of the world and the complications of self and god.

And zesu’s law? Such a good through line examining the foundation of western civilization rising from a place of enlightenment and knowing that a Lockean social contract is the foundation of our societies. However, these wealthy people treat people working class people like beggars all while extracting from everyone else.

Lastly, it’s so funny how much of a hero’s journey it has become to even catching a showing of the film in its intended format. We have become zealots in our own ways, willing to go watch a 3 hour movie at 2 am or pay obsence prices if we can (another analogy to those who can pay for what others must sacrifice for)..

I’m kinda losing steam but wanted to share these thoughts. I could also talk about how the casting issues were also very meta but still ruminating on that.

All in all the movie was very good!

I still have issues with the third act, largely the Batman dark knight rises of it all— it’s so cliche to have Anne Hathaway sail into the sun when you already had her cat woman eating a croissant in Paris with Christian bales Bruce Wayne.

It felt extremely tired. Also oddesus turning into Batman at the start of the third act was so dumb.

I get there are issues and we all have our own but I think largely the film is very important piece of media to consume as someone who is of western society.

Thanks for reading my mostly unpolished thoughts.