“I wish to make one more film about the end of the world and then I am done with making films.”

The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr‘s last film, is perhaps his most radical and challenging work, even more arduous than sitting through the seven-plus hours of Satantango. I remembered watching it the first time under a big screen in a theater back in 2011, it’s my first experience with Tarr, and I recalled vividly how sleepy I was throughout the…

Added to: Béla Tarr, Ranked

Damnation is the beginning of the true artistic phase of Béla Tarr, it separates from his early ‘loquacious’ pseudo-documentary social realism by being a moody, atmospheric piece of art. Frankly, the plot is fundamentally a crime/noir story about betrayal, but it really doesn’t matter at all since it’s the slow camera movement, often static or moving independently of the characters, that really draws us into the immersive space Tarr created. By collaborating with novelist László…

Added to: Sight and Sound Greatest Films
Added to: My 100 All Time Favorite Films

The Rearward View of Life

Near the end of the film Yi Yi, there is a funeral, the little boy Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) reads out the letter he wrote for his deceased grandma (Ruyun Tang), saying he would like to be a person of showing stuff others don't see, and now when he sees his baby cousin, he would feel old too. Every time when…

Added to “2018, Ranked” & “Palme d’Or Winners, Ranked”

A summation of Koreeda’s works. Abandoned children in Nobody Knows (2004); slice of family life in Still Walking (2008) and Our Little Sister (2015); parenthood without blood ties in Like Father, Like Son (2013); the dissolution of traditional family relationship, from society detachment in Distance (2001) to failure of fatherhood in After the Storm (2016); and the crime of the marginalized people in The Third Murder (2017), all interwoven into Shoplifters. It…