My list of favourite films continues in no particular order.
80. The Apple (1998)
Directed by Samira Makhmalbaf when she was just 17, The Apple is based on the true story of twins Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi, who were imprisoned at home by their father until the age of 11. The films cast was made of non-actors and infact the girls and their family appear as themselves. The seemingly eccentric father of the two girls could have been depicted as an opressive monster, but instead he is imbued with genuine pathos. The dialogue was improvised according to a script co-written by Makhmalbaf with her father Mohsen (an acclaimed director in his own right). The episodic story, and the distinctive cinematography of Ebrahim Ghafori, give the film a symmetry and beauty. A true story told through visual poetry, the film also seems to be a fable with the apple of the title as the fruit of knowledge.
79. Come and See (1985)
Elem Klimov's iconic movie about the Nazi invasion of Belarus during the second world war, Come and See is as harrowing as it is beautiful. The war is abstracted, reduced (or perhaps elevated) to a seemingly endless prossesion of images which are unforgetable. Its a profoundly visual film. The title of the movie seems apt, although its also a reference to The Book of Revelations ("I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth").
The story is told, or rather shown, from the perspective of a boy, Florya, who is apparently just old enough to join the Russian resistance forces against the Germans. At first he is eager to join, but soon becomes disillusioned and eventually completely broken by the violence and atrocities he witnesses and barely survives. The intensity escalates until its final harrowing climax which is essentially a vision of hell. In the end Florya is a different person, a hardened soldier, but he is also a civilian. His face seems to represent all the victims of war, particularly of THAT war.
78. Love Exposure (2008)
Cult director Shion Sono's four hour epic on the human condition and the nature of love has to be one of the greatest films of modern times, and certainly of the 21st century. This is a love story with a unique religious context, that of the Catholic Japanese. Its a film so long, and so full of ideas, that its hard to remember everything that happens and in what order, its a bit like trying to recount the last ten years of your life to a stranger. The plot is fairly bizarre. Yu is the son of a priest who falls in love with his step sister, Yoko, whom he sees as the Virgin Mary.
Yoko, however, seems to regard Yu with disdain. She is infact a lesbian, and in love with her adopted mother, Yu's step mother, Keiko. During the course of the film, and for various reasons, Yu finds fame as an 'upskirt' porn photographer and also creates a female alter ego whom Yoko falls in love with, not knowing that its him. With the arrival of the mysterious Aya, the head of a sinister cult known as Zero Church, and who has become strangely infatuated with Yu, things start to take a darker turn as it becomes a love triangle of rejected youth. Love Exposure left me emotionally drained. At times incredibly sad, but also very funny.
77. Weekend (1967)
Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend is essentially the story of a journey through the French countryside, but unlike other road movies the protagonists are not rebels or outcasts, but merely a modern, outwardly respectable, bourgeois Parisian couple. Roland and Corinne are a husband and wife who are both having affairs and plotting the others murder. They decide to visit Corrine's wealthy father in the country in order to murder him and stop him from changing his will. So begins their 'Weekend'. From the very outset of the film motorists are shown in conflict with one another. The characters of these early scenes also seem outwardly respectable: affluent, even glamourous, white Parisians, but their behavior is distinctly base. Animalistic. They behave excessively with each other, either through violence or verbal abuse, to the point of absurdity. These occurrences seem to intensify in the country, which is apparently abundant with car accidents and bloody fatalities, to a point verging on apocalyptic. After the couple crash and write off their own car, they attempt to flag down a car. The driver confronts Roland with a question, "Are you real, or in a film?" to which Roland replies "in a film". The man in the car drives away exclaiming "you lie to much!". Eventually they are captured by some hippie cannibals and Roland is eaten. Corrine joins them and seems nonplussed by the death of her husband. Godard paints a picture of the French class struggle, and in particular depicts the French middle class as terminally shallow and materialistic. The irony is that these are the very people who would probably end up watching the film. Godard is perhaps laughing at himself as much as anyone else.
76. Shogun's Samurai (1978)
A masterful example of samurai melodrama by veteran director Kinji Fukasaku, Shogun's Samurai takes place after the death of the second Tokugawa shogun in 1623, and concerns the subsequent struggle for power between his two sons, the stammering, birth-marked heir Iemitsu, and his younger brother, the popular and benevolent Tadanaga, his fathers favourite. Various factions choose their side and what results is a hugely entertaining, if largely fictional account of a war of intrigue and political machinations during an established historical period. What it lacks in historic accuracy it makes up for in atmosphere and high drama, the plot is practically Shakespearean. So many characters and sub plots emerge, the story eventually takes on a truly epic scale, until a final, violent and satisfyingly dramatic climax. Whether it happened is unimportant, its a great story, and brilliantly acted by the cast which includes Toshiro Mifune and Sonny Chiba.
75. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
This uniquely touching film by Spanish director Victor Erice, has to be one of the greatest ever made about a childhood. Ana is a small girl living in a Spanish town just after the civil war (sometime around 1939). She spends much of her time with her sister Isabel, who is slightly older and has told her about a mysterious 'spirit' who lives nearby. Ana's imagination attributes this spirit to Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, from the James Whale film which has been shown in the town's improvised cinema, and later to a Republican soldier she encounters, who is on the run from Nationalist forces, now the established power in the country. Post civil war Spain is shown abstractly through the eyes of these two sisters, who are offcourse quite innocent and oblivious to the political climate of the time. The issues are therefore tackled with a degree of subtlety, which allowed the film to be made in the early 70's, the waning days of this same oppressive regime that had existed since the war.
74. Mother and Son (1997)
The first in acclaimed director Alexander Sokurov's cycle of films dedicated to platonic, familial love, Mother and Son is in intensely original and unique work of cinematic art. The film features only the characters of the title, a mother and son. The mother appears to be gravely ill, and the son is her carer. There is no geographical or chronological context, it is unclear where they are or when it is, the only suggestion of a world outside them is the occasional sight of a steam train, and later a sailing ship, both seen from a great distance. Their relationship seems therefore magnified. Sokurov stretched the film so that the images are distorted, and sometimes the lens even seems dirty or smudged with water, creating blurs in the frame. It looks and feels like nothing else. Surely one of the most beautiful films ever made.
73. Mirror (1975)
Andrei Tarkovsky's most personal film, Mirror is a partially autobiographical account of Russian life from the 30s, until the 70s when the film was made. The three periods of pre-wartime, wartime and post-wartime Russia are represented un-chronologically, in a series of flashbacks, archive footage and present day scenes and seemingly abstract, dreamlike sequences which are visually startling even by Tarkovsky's standards. All jumping back and forth in the life of Alexei, the films protagonist, as if in a process of thought. The present day scenes are infact shot subjectively, looking out from inside the protagonists head, his adult face is never seen, but his voice, the voice of the narrator, is heard throughout the film. Margarita Terekhova, who plays Alexei's mother during the childhood scenes, also plays his ex-wife in the contemporary ones, and the young actor who plays Alexei as a child in the 30s also plays his son in the 70s. Alexei's mother in the 70s is played by Tarkovsky's own mother. Despite all of this, the film is never indulgent. On the contrary, its astonishing originality and style are strangely moving. Its a film which manages to be at once intensely personal and subjective, and yet also somehow universal.
72. Pather Panchali (1955)
The startling debut feature of Satyajit Ray, who would go on to become the most prominent Bengali film maker working outside the bollywood system, Pather Panchali's beauty is in its story and incredible pathos. It was adapted from a novel by Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, and is the first part in what would become known as 'The Apu Trilogy' after Ray also adapted the novel's sequel into two more films: Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959). The story of Pather Panchali concerns an impoverished writer's family living in their dilapidated ancestral home in rural Bengal, and in particular his young son, Apu. As his father is often away trying to find work, Apu grows up around three women. His elderly aunt, his mother and his older sister, Durga. He is particularly close to his sister, they seem to experience everything together, they're a team. The movie is probably one of the earliest examples of a film telling its story exclusively from a child's perspective (along with Yasujiro Ozu's 1932 film I Was Born, But...), and undoubtedly one of the most touching and beautiful. Although its set in the 1920s, the only hint that we are in the recent past is in Durga and Apu's astonishment at the telephone lines and steam train they encounter in one of the films most iconic scenes. A profoundly moving and ultimately tragic story told with exceptional style by Ray, Pather Panchali is in my opinion one of the greatest films of and about the 20th century.
71. The Deer Hunter (1978)
The Deer Hunter is simply one of the greatest American films ever made, and truly one of the greatest films ever about blue-collar American life, its dreams and hardships. Examining the impact of war on a small group of friends from a working class, Russian-American community, it is also certainly the most subtly moving film to be made about the war in Vietnam. The cast is essentially a who's who of 70s method actors. Mike (Robert De Niro), Stan (John Cazale, in his last role), Nick (Christopher Walken), Steven (John Savage) and Axel (Chuck Aspegren) are childhood friends who all work in a steel refinery in Clairton, a small town in western Pennsylvania. The movie opens on the evening of Steve's wedding. These are the last few hours of their adolescence. High school photographs of Mike, Nick and Steve are hung up at the wedding reception along with a banner reading "Serving God and Country Proudly". They have all signed up for Vietnam and are dew to be shipped out soon. Gradually their individual characters are introduced. Mike is a sort of quintessential Russian male, stoic and overtly masculine. His best friend, Nick is a sensitive, slightly introverted individual. From the start he is the most detached of the group. Steven is a hen-pecked mothers boy. Stan an extroverted and slightly erratic ladies man, and Axel is the hard drinking, life and soul of the party. The characters are so beautifully drawn by writer director Michael Cimino, and perfectly interpreted by the cast, and this is ultimately what makes the film so engaging. After Steven's wedding, the rest of the guys, along with another friend, a piano playing barman called John (George Dzundza), decide to go hunting for deer. Mike reveals his ethos of 'one shot' in regards to deer hunting. "One shot is what its about. Two shots is pussy." The wedding and hunting sequences at the beginning of the film are the last time all the characters are together, the last time they are happy. After the war everything will be different. The films second act takes place in Vietnam. Mike, Nick and Steve are captured by the Viet Cong and forced to play Russian roulette. The resulting scene is perhaps one of the most succinct portrayals of the life and death situation in war. During the third act, when Mike eventually returns, alone, to the community they all grew up in, he and Nick's sweetheart, Linda (Meryl Streep) take solace in each other and seem to bond over their love for Nick. All in all, a subtle and beautifully structured masterpiece.
