These are my favorites of the movies I watched from January to March of this year which I haven't already posted anything about, in alphabetical order. Some of these were films my friends and I watched in our efforts to explore underseen films. The image above is from Johnnie To's 2004 film Throw Down, which I watched as part of my quest to find every movie about judo. It's one of the purest judo movies I know if, and its characters love judo not for fighting but just because it feels good to move your body. I don't feel a need to say more than that about this movie, except that I hope that conveys just how good it is.
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
At the beginning of this year the only films directed by Robert Bresson I had seen were A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, and my friends encouraged me to watch more. Having done so, I noticed a divide between the films from the 1950s and later films, from Balthazar to Bresson's final film L'argent.
Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket all feature almost excessive narration, and each film focuses on a crisis of its narrator's personal moral beliefs. In the later films, there is no narration, and their events are so out of anyone's hands that personal character is of little relevance. The films also become more elliptical: just as character has become irrelevant, so has the need to know certain things.
The events surrounding Balthazar the donkey are complex, ranging from legal disputes over property titles and inheritance to conflicts of personal philosophy. But we never get to hear in full about any of them. Balthazar doesn't understand. He's there so we can look without judgment at how people live under an intractable complexity that drowns out the internal voice, the lack of "silence" Bresson would later speak of as an illness of the modern world.
Duel to the Death (1983)
Possibly my favorite film I've seen this year. It isn't too unorthodox for a wuxia movie, but its imagery is significantly more nightmarish, apocalyptic even, than I've seen in any other. People are suspended by wires in a seemingly infinite, pitch-black void. Ninjas seem to be everywhere at once and employ a suicidal fighting style. Sudden bursts of bloody dismemberment are common.
The two main characters are martial artists ordained to duel each other to show whether Chinese or Japanese martial arts are superior. Both show conviction in their respective philosophies of martial arts and their national identities. But the nightmare is the reality they awake to when they realize their principles are just tools of their nations for manipulating the flesh and blood this film splatters all over the place.
The final battle takes place on a cliff over the sea, with mist rising around the two warriors. The film's portrayal of the destructive power they unleash really sells you on the film's premise, that these are the most accomplished students of ancient traditions. But the ocean stretches out before them as the world's most indifferent audience.
Golden Eighties (1986)
This entire film except for the final shot takes place in a small arena. On opposite sides of a mall hallway, you have a hair salon and a clothing store, with a cafe between them. Among the owners and employees of these businesses, you have love quadrangles, the reunion of lovers who separated decades ago, and love letters exchanged between continents. Meanwhile, everyone outside these relationships comments on them in song.
Their romances are far from peaceful. Love is messy and violent and gets mixed up with other desires. Lovers will kiss and one will end up bleeding from a bit lip. But despite this, and despite its incompatibility with stable business, it's irresistible. The confinement to the workplace only makes it more so, only intensifies the desire to open up the world with love or gossip, regardless of the consequences.
Nargess (1992)
In Nargess, the title character's perspective doesn't become central until relatively late into the film. It starts with a thief named Adel falling in love with her and asking her to be his wife. To do this, however, Adel must cover up the life of crime he led with his first wife, Afagh. Though it pains her to do so, Afagh helps him. Afagh is older than Adel, and took him under her wing as a thief long ago after having found him by himself on the streets. We see her anxiety about whether she'll be able to continue having a role in Adel's life, and it's quite moving to see her efforts to adapt.
Adel isn't present for major portions of this film. Rather, it bounces between Afagh and Nargess, following them in their private moments. In scenes between Adel, Afagh, and their criminal social circle, it feels like a crime film, but there are times it completely departs from that. For instance, around the middle of the film, Adel disappears almost completely when he's arrested, and Nargess becomes the film's focus. We see how she lives as someone who never had anyone or anything.
Nightjohn (1996)
An adaptation for the Disney Channel of a young adult book popular in middle schools, which happens to have been directed by one of America's greatest filmmakers. Burnett contrasts the plantation setting with private meetings at night and locations in nature, which are represented with great beauty. Between this and the changes in Sarny's personality as she learns to read, the film displays the power of bringing distant things together, which is one role the written word plays in its story. This in turn highlights a sort of existentialist thread in the film, in which people begin to raise questions that cut to the core of how to live. John emphasizes that what he has, and what he is giving Sarny, cannot be taken away, and knowing this, he's unafraid to put his life on the line.
On-Gaku: Our Sound (2019)
There are several scenes in On-Gaku in which the main character announces he's about to say something, then takes a bit to say it. Whoever he's talking to reacts differently to the delay depending on how well they know him. People who don't know him well start to get confused after a few seconds, but his friends just wait for it. It's a nice touch to show how the members of this group of friends get each other. And this makes it all the more satisfying when it turns out they expand their circle, end up sharing camaraderie with another group that carries a totally different atmosphere. It's the ideal hang-out movie. That means it's pretty laid-back, but it somehow manages to be a tour de force in creative, virtuosic animation. That's saying something considering the piecemeal, hypereconomical way it was made.
Red Beard (1965)
This film is about doctors working at a clinic for the poor in 19th Century Japan. It's over three hours long. One reason it's so long is that it spends substantial portions of its first hour and 50 minutes on characters telling their life stories. The first time this happens, it comes from the daughter of a deceased patient. She tells the main character, Dr. Noboru Yasumoto, all about her father. Her father was introduced a while earlier in the film, but was too catatonic to speak for himself. At the end of the daughter's telling of his story, the film breaks spatiotemporal continuity to interpose a shot of this patient's face.
This is a turning point for Noboru, who had never treated a patient with such a background before. The film pays its respect to the patient by giving us another chance to look at him as a human being and not an inanimate object, even in a catatonic state. It's important to the people in this film to feel as though they have a positive effect on the lives of those around them. This shot doesn't just let us know it, it lets us directly experience it: it's incredibly moving to see this man's face in this context, for the film to turn its attention away from the scene just to acknowledge him.
And where the film goes from here builds on this. It comes up multiple times in this film that some high-class person suffers from marriage troubles, and Red Beard, the head doctor played by Toshiro Mifune, leverages this information to help keep the clinic afloat. Health is a condition of the community a person lives in as well as their body.
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