MY 101 FAVOURITE FILMS

By: Kenji

Sansho the Bailiff

The greatest single work of art of the 20th century. A few ripples have far more impact than a Hollywood tidal wave.
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Mirror

The Green Ray

Delphine is feeling lonely and at a loose end for the summer holidays. She’s a romantic idealist. Not for her a quick fling when something greater is out there somewhere. Some find her neurotic and irritatingly over-sensitive. I admire her greatly. Had i met her by the sea as a young man maybe we’d have been kindred sprits. You may detect some influence of Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy on Rohmer’s work, the way feelings are expressed and helped along by surroundings. The casting here for the final scenes is perfect. My wife also loves this film, and together we saw the green ray for real at Aruba; it’s a rare and precious event (the setting sun’s emerald flash at sea), not one to come to command, supposedly helps you understand your feelings- perfect for sharing with the right person. In the film, there’s quite a bit of improvised dialogue, and as ever Rohmer’s sensitivity for little gestures works wonders. He is a visual director and cinematic, but his gossamer skill is undervalued because he is or was essentially modest. Sorely missed.
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Alice in the Cities

Young Alice is left at the airport, and a photojournalist returning from the US takes her under his initially reluctant wing, and back in Germany they set off together on a search for her gran’s house. This road movie even surpasses Paris Texas. What happened to Wenders? Here the trip unfolds without his later pretentions, the relationship between Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer develops without false sentiment, it’s natural and unforced, here we have a real girl, not some Hollywoood cutified version. Such plots have been done elsewhere- Eternity and a Day is great, Central Station worth watching- but this is the one. Robbie Muller has been one of the great cinematographers and i think somehow Wenders has missed him.
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Andrei Rublev

North by Northwest

Maborosi

The debut feature of Kore-eda (one-time documentarist and director of the widely admired Afterlife and Nobody Knows) is one of a small, precious number of films for which i have felt lovesick. Maborosi’s story is superficially simple: affected by the death of her grandmother and her husband’s inexplicable suicide, a young Osaka woman starts new married life, along with her son, in a remote seaside fishing village, but finds the past continues to trouble her. Eschewing close-ups,the narrative draws the viewer in gradually, so that, as Tony Rayns says, intimacy is earned, not frivolously given. It is haunted throughout by a dark, almost overwhelming sense of mystery. The film’s masterfully controlled mise-en-scene, contemplative pacing, ‘off-screen space’ and quiet investment of objects (a bike, a teapot, a wisp of steam…) with both beauty and meaning, all recall Ozu and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Its lighting is refined, at times, to the point of abstraction, while Nakabori’s photography is utterly, immeasurably exquisite. It is another treasure from the land of Mizoguchi, the isles of cinematic wonders. But Maborosi is not best served by hyperbole. It is an unassertive film, too shy, too pure and concentrated to seek the limelight. While compelled to tell of its elusive magic, I protectively fear its over-exposure. In publicising, am I breaking faith? It connects in secret. With the heart that is ready.
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Abraham Valley

Before seeing Abraham Valley i’d only a passing interest in things Portuguese.I’d been to Madeira and i’d picked up some basics of the language thru sponsoring a Brazilian boy. I rented the film from MovieMail largely enticed by the above picture, of Leonor Silveira. It’s a contemporary version of Madame Bovary. She marries a doctor and gets bored, has suitors.. The pace is languorous, the camera often static. Oliveira likes the camera to be respected. He was a mere stripling of 84 when he made it. But forget that; what bewitched me was the scenery and an elegant intangible sense of magic, a girl whose prettiness causes car crashes, a nocturnal scene to Debussy’s Clair de Lune as mysterious, beguiling and intimate as Spirit of the Beehive, an eye for composition, Oliveira’s beloved Douro, the warmth. My life would never be the same. Soon came fado and Amalia Rodrigues, and soon after, with the Oliveira film firmly in mind i upped sticks and off to the unknown North of Portugal. Dastardly fate stepped in, but I’m still expecting to live happily ever after. Patience.
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The Band Wagon

Rules of the Game

Sunrise

Paris Texas

Celine and Julie go Boating

2001: A Space Odyssey

Some Like it Hot

Bubbling under:

Sans Soleil, It Happened One Night, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, The Maltese Falcon, Sound of the Mountain, La Notte, The Long Goodbye, Stealing a Nation, Dr Strangelove, Crazed Fruit, Judex, Finye, Holiday, The Wild Bunch, The Hour of the Furnaces, The White Ribbon, Ornamental Hairpin, The Sheltering Sky, Once Upon a Time in America, El Sur, The Pumpkin Eater, Blue Velvet, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Battle of Algiers, Eureka (Aoyama), Boudu Saved from Drowning, The End of Summer, The Time to Live and the Time to Die, A Brighter Summer Day, A Short Film about Love, Subarnarekha, Yumurta, Day of Wrath, When the Tenth Month Comes, The World of Apu, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Rekava, Madchen in Uniform, Stone Wedding, Bringing up Baby, Mother Dao the Turtle-like, Ordet, The Passenger, The Innocents, A Valparaiso, Brick and Mirror, Contempt, The Attached Balloon, Gabbeh, Revolucion (Sanjines), Straits of Love and Hate

For a much longer list, see the list Kenji’s Canon