Fav First-Time Watches: January 2026 A Performance of Hamlet in the Village of Mrdusa Donja (Papić, 1973) A Fidai Film (Aljafari, 2024) The Hidden Trail of the Beasts (Murakawa, 1981) Paruthiveeran (Ameer, 2007) A Tale of Filipino Violence (Diaz, 2022) The Four Days of Naples (Loy, 1962)

Anatomia Extinction (Nishimura, 1995) The forgotten lovechild of Tetsuo and the 80s SOV horror. Immensely visceral filmmaking, lots of contrasting textures - from fleshy to early CGI. Full of feeling that would mostly vanish from Nishimura's later work.

Deewaar (Chopra, 1975) One of the best examples of a kind of career restart. Chopra's known extravagances toned down for a film who's pleasures are about contrasts. There's a directness here that only reinforces the seething discontent of within each image.

Christopher Columbus, The Enigma (Oliveira, 2007) Rewatched last night and was just charmed how the second half plays not just as a love letter to history but to Oliveira's own wife. The two of them just wandering around looking at artefacts and statues and photos is very sweet.

Since I didn't watch that many films from this year, here are my 25 fav records from this year

Anari (Mukherjee, 1959) Kapoor acts as the conduit for Mukherjee's more melancholic side. It's perhaps the best example of this quality in its most uncut and unfiltered, with even the comedic qualities here coming across as mere masks against the intensity of emotions.

Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944) A Christmas classic (even if only the final third really takes place during Christmas). Just some of the most quintessentially cinematic moments ever created. What can only be put forward through the medium. Beautiful.

Wrote something a bit different this time for anyone interested. open.substack.com/pub/nnmore/p...

RIP Tatsuya Nakadai nnmore.substack.com/p/its-all-in...

Publishing something I wrote like 2 years ago because why not: open.substack.com/pub/nnmore/p...

Here Is a Spring (Imai, 1955) Some of the best work of Imai's career here. Beautifully blending its social realist elements with more melodramatic sentimentality. I was reminded of the work of Gosho at times. Some utterly inspired close-ups.

Current ranking of Alan Clarke - some of the best stuff I've seen this year.

Far from Manhattan (Biette, 1982) Working through meanings of creation. Breaking down the form to essential frames - each one, not a painting, but a discussion. In dialogue with itself and that which it is interrogating.

The Trace of Your Lips (Hernández, 2023) One of the most talented working filmmakers plays the hits in such fine succession. The formal acumen on display throughout is simply magical but it's the desperate longing, the agonizing horniness, that makes this one sing.

Top First Time Watches: May 2025 Psy-Warriors (Clarke, 1981) Minamata Revolt: A People's Quest for Life (Tsuchimoto, 1973) Treasure Island (Brac, 2018) One Night Stand (Rissient, 1976) The Romantic Exiles (Trueba, 2015) End of Desire (Astruc, 1958) Coconut Head Generation (Kassanda, 2023)

The Box Man (Ishii, 2024) Very Aster-coded. Tired, exhausting, Ishii's adaptation strips away a lot of the horror in favor of inconsistent comedic beats and not particularly interesting phycological examinations. Disappointing. Could potentially be a career low for him.

Psy-Warriors (Clarke, 1981) One of the best things I've seen this year.

Beloved Infidel (King, 1959) A dying star of a romance. Collapsing from the moment the two first meet. Perhaps King's most cynical work, there's little room for hope or romanticism as everything was always bound to end in tragedy anyway. So much for the American Dream.

Jesse James (King, 1939) In which myth, the idea of a man, is more important that history - but the myth exists. As form which mutates and expands and contracts along with and alongside of history. The natural world contains it. What is captured is both - history and myth.

Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing (King, 1955) The impossibility of connection. The American desire for conquest can never fully comprehend the complexities of the world around it. All the desire, passion, and love cannot bridge what can and cannot be bridged.

The Sparrow in the Chimney (Zürcher, 2024) Far funnier than I've seen most mention. The first half's bitterness is so close to fracturing the whole piece yet remains in tact thanks to such precise control. The final act's embrace of the ecstatic is maybe a bit extended for my taste but still good.

The Gunfighter (King, 1950) An eternal quest. A land in search of redemption. A legacy carried from one man to the next, from a father to a son, from one lover to the other. What's in a name? A majestic work who's power only grows with time.

The Flame of Devotion (Kurahara, 1964) Dramatically not of particular note - Kurahara's attempts at channeling Naruse and Kinoshita here fall flat. The locking into Asaoka's psycho-sexual psychosis are the most interesting parts, which they would expand upon in their next collab.

All Hands on Deck! (Brac, 2020) One summer - the gentle ebb and flow of love and passion, heartbreak and dismay. The memory could be but a night but linger for an eternity. Brac's tonal control is masterful.

Top First Watches March 2025: A Tale of a Naughty Girl Scum Breathe In, Breathe Out Eureka A New Old Play The August Virgin Dooratwa To Encourage the Others Youth (Hard Times) Kaito Ruby

Himiko (Shinoda, 1974) RIP to a master. The elemental and the artificial, the mythic and ordinary. The world as creator and creation.

Eureka (Alonso, 2023) A culmination, but also just another work in textural accumulation. Returning, somehow, to where it all began close to 2 decades ago. A summary, but also a reiteration, with a voice that's aged, and the tale itself has changed as well.

Fragile as the World (Gomes, 2001) Ghosts rise up from the earth to find each other only to fade away and return from whence they were birthed. The modern world, too cold & cruel. Gomes' at her most transcendent & spiritual. Perhaps never to be evoked again, it stands triumphant.

Danilo Treles (Tornes, 1986) A film about the land and the virtues and joys that spring forth from it. A bountiful display of curiosities and absurdities (recalling Pasolini at times) that ebb and flow with the rising and setting of the sun.

A New Old Play (Qiu, 2021) Feels like a new version of an old kind of film. I was reminded of Angelopoulos & his way of using the camera to traverse through time while negotiating actual histories. In some ways this kind of film seems like a lost art. Didn't love this am excited to see Qiu's next.

The Warped Ones (Kurahara, 1960) My Breathless. A work so inspired and driven by anger and sensation. A character who cannot conceive of what drives him to act the ways in which he does beyond the immediate feeling. Kurahara's work is so tactile and immediate here, inspiring.

Cats on Park Avenue (Nakada, 1989) Ridiculous but also so imaginative and consistently exciting on a moment-to-moment basis that its eccentricities overwhelm all standard narrative conventions. Very fun but I can only imagine the animal rights issues that happened on set.

A Tale of a Naughty Girl (Dasgupta, 2002) The body defines the space and the space defines the body. Shots of planes of movement against histories that can be spoken of, inferred, discussed, known, felt, but never seen. The experience weighs down both the structures and those who inhabit them.

Decided to ramble about Kitano open.substack.com/pub/nnmore/p...

Broken Rage (Kitano, 2024) I was moved to tears. Whether this is the last film he makes or not, this is the kind of work that feels like a career capper. One of the best things I've seen in a very long time. So small but carries the weight of decades. Bless Beat Takeshi.

The Order (Kurzel, 2024) Solid all around. Kurzel asserts himself as a journeyman supreme. Would happily take more films in this vein from him. Good work from Law and Hoult.

All Ears (Jiayin, 2023) The majority of this is very strong. Jiayin's observation of the mundane and making it seem so extraordinary & full of purpose is retained even in this work of fiction. It's when she moves into more overtly fictional territory that the film's careful tone is disrupted.

Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (Hark, 1980) The body as a weapon. Manifest fury and become the bomb/gun as the world goes to hell. In many ways that Hark that I want to love the most but the one I have the hardest time fully getting on board with.

Savage Nights (Collard, 1992) Finding fulfillment in death and learning to live again. Collard's camera and performance feel inseparable from each other. An artist wrestling with his vision of the world and how to render it through himself on film. A wonderful vision of rebirth.

Might try this for a while and just post my 10 fav new album releases for each new month. For anyone who's interested, here's January.

Viduthalai: Part II (Vetrimaaran, 2024) The first half is kind of a mess but the film gets back on stable ground in the second half. When Vetrimaaran commits to his central duo & how they play off of each other he returns to the heights of the first film but otherwise it felt a little too lopsided.

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (Edström/Winter, 2020) Returning to the land. The work is constant and continues even when we expire. Ours is but a small piece of the whole yet while we are actively engaged, it feels so significant.

Private Fears in Public Places (Resnais, 2006) Beautiful evocations of a time past, wherein emotions were sincere and there was no shame in love being given and misunderstandings leading the way for learning. So lonely, yet so full of tenderness and affection.

Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (Thompson, 1987) When sometimes even the laziest works, who are so uninterested in even themselves, creates a tension within itself to remain compelling. Even its violence can't help but feel tired, and yet that is its greatest asset.

The Man Who Sleeps (Queysanne, 1974) Significance placed upon oneself means that when oneself is removed, that empty hole is rendered irrelevant. History moves on without us, but the examination of the belief that becoming nihil as a protest is shown to be just as meaningless.

Devil De Story (Natsuki, 1983) Not a million miles from the sort of work Obayashi was doing around the same period, just a far rougher approximation of it. There's still a lot of quirky and off-beat charm to a lot of what is put on screen and Natsuki does know how to stage comedic beats effectively

Published my first piece in over a year. Kinda just where I'm at and what I've felt about cinema this past year. open.substack.com/pub/nnmore/p...

Grand Tour (Gomes, 2024) More mixed on this than I would have liked but Gomes is still one of the most interesting filmmakers working right now imo. The editing and clashes between shots, scenes, and approaches is by far the most interesting part of this though.

Caught By The Tides (Zhangke, 2024) Somehow always on the brink of collapsing over itself yet perfectly in control. Probably an even more essential text than I can currently grasp but as it is, the fact that Jia can still imbue such disparate pieces with a richness of feeling is frankly astounding.