Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I've only seen The Warriors in the "director's cut" version with the comic book style inserts. I'd like to see the theatrical version, which I understand has just been released as a ruinously expensive Blu-ray.

I've only seen the theatrical version to date. I did buy a copy off of iTunes during the pandemic when the price dropped. I bought a lot of things during the past few years, so I've never gotten around to watching it, but I've checked the beginning and it gets through the beginning (to them boarding the subway), and no comic book panel, so apparently that's the theatrical cut.

Yup, plus my rewatch earlier this year reminded me of just how great Leone's direction of it was overall; I mean, yeah he was great with the big moments, but also with the smaller ones as well, like with the unbearable tension of the "spurs" scene, which I legitimately think Hitchcock himself would marvel at the suspense of:

Ah, The Warriors. Finally we get back to some good films. What am I saying? Great films. I've professed my love for this for many years on this site. I've loved it since childhood and it just never ages or seems silly to me. Maybe that's because I was about 9 when I first saw it, so I just accepted it for what it was as children do? Maybe it's because I've never really grown up and still see it as I did then? Maybe it's because I didn't get the chance to be a child when young and so now am enjoying things I've always loved with a child's love and wonder? I don't know. But it's ****ing great. I still have the UK home release video tape which means it's the oringinal cut and has this song in the film, which isn't on any other, TMK, and is just weird watching without it. Not that I have for years as I'm terrified the tape will mangle or be affected by the mould which can grow on old videotape.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Akira Kurosawa was well into his 70s and losing his eyesight when he pieced together what may be one of the greatest late-period films any filmmaker has ever created. A loose adaptation of King Lear wherein an ageing lord (Tatsuya Nakadai) sows discord among his three sons by dividing his dominion amongst them, Ran sees this familial dispute spiral into all-out war between the clans as said lord descends into madness and exile. A stunning epic in every sense of the word, Kurosawa renders intimate chamber drama with the same vivacity as any of the clashes between colour-coded armies (Mieko Harada practically steals the show as the vengeful noblewoman who exacerbates existing tensions between the brothers with her seductive machinations). Underneath the tale of an old warlord reaping what he's sown over a lifetime of conquest, there is still room to find all manner of personal tragedy within the lives of the many characters impacted by his reign. One doesn't have to see the lavishly-detailed storyboards painted by Kurosawa himself to appreciate the visual grandeur on display, wringing a terrible beauty from this tale of feudal chaos.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: N/A

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Ran is brilliant and something which might've made my own 100 had I seen it enough times. As I've said it many times before, and so, I may as well say it again, if the first thing someone says about a film are wtte "the battle scenes are amazing", I get a sinking feeling. If it's already a film I don't think I'll like/enjoy, then it usually puts the kibosh on it. Ran is the exception which proves the rule, because it was the first thing I heard about it but, while they are amazing, there's so much more than that and that's usually where the other films fall down. Obviously being based on King Lear helps greatly in that, but the fact is, the battle scenes are great but then, so's the rest of it.

Ran is excellent. Probably a top 5 Kurosawa for me.

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I do owe Ran a rewatch, but I think after enough exposure over a long enough period of time, it does feel like I'm the odd-man-out in terms of not loving Kurosawa like everyone else does.

And by "everyone else," I do mean it seems like "everyone else on this planet."

Knowing Takeshi Kitano primarily as the eponymous host of the wacky game show Takeshi's Castle and the sinister but pathetic villain of Battle Royale still did nothing to prepare me for just how idiosyncratic his directorial filmography would get. Sonatine is ostensibly about a turf war between yakuza clans, but its peculiar cinematic rhythms are clear from the jump and are amply reflected by how the bulk of the film revolves around a squad of gangsters (led by Kitano himself as a world-weary underboss) hiding out in an isolated beach house, finding whatever ways they can to pass the time while trying to figure out their next move. Kitano's established status as a famous Japanese comedian bleeds through into his films, though here it intermingles with the criminal element of his work to create some fairly dark humour - there's a reason the film's most iconic image is of him smiling gleefully through a game of Russian roulette that his character has started out of boredom. Being able to juggle such wildly different tones is always a tall order - deadpan humour abounds as the gangsters fight about nothing or play silly games on the beach while the moments where it does engage with the serious side of the yakuza business are sufficiently discomforting or shocking in their bluntness (to say nothing of the moments where the line between the two gets extremely blurry). The complete lack of fuss to the technical approach certainly aids that sensibility and matches Kitano's largely stony expressions, in which case a melancholy score by the legendary Joe Hisaishi really infuses every possible moment with as much levity or misery as is demanded.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: #26

It's amazing to look at Jarmusch's filmography up until this point and really realise just how much of a break this was from the mundane slice-of-life indies on which he'd first made his name. Sure, Dead Man continues in a similar vein with its eccentric characters deadpanning their way through a somewhat directionless narrative, but Jarmusch's pivot into a genre as distinct yet checkered as the Western is at once a radical shift and a natural growth in his sensibilities. The story of a timid accountant (Johnny Depp) whose ill-fated journey to a new town leads to him being mortally wounded and escorted on a spirit quest by a loquacious Native American (Gary Farmer) allows Jarmusch to deliver another characteristically fragmented tone poem that traipses through the ugliness of the Wild West, occasionally finding beauty in the unlikeliest of places (that deer scene) but still making no shortage of observations about the ways in which the many tentacles of manifest destiny keep threatening to choke the life out of the land. Jarmusch finds a murderer's row of character actors to embody the evil that men do for their own gain - Lance Henriksen's cannibalistic bounty hunter, Robert Mitchum's vengeful factory boss, Alfred Molina's racist missionary - and utilises the legendary Robby Müller to properly capture their craggy features in evocative chiaroscuro. Bringing on Neil Young to do some cacophonous noodling on the soundtrack is the real masterstroke - what could have been annoyingly anachronistic proves the perfect vessel for the wailing that this world is doing. "Do you know my poetry" indeed.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: #44

I've had that film for decades and the poster for even longer... And I still haven't seen it.

Sonatine - I am not familiar with. In college, whatever movies I was renting, Fireworks kept coming up as a trailer for some reason. I still haven't seen that nor have any idea what it's about, but I know it exists.


Dead Man - Every time I start watching this movie I keep waffling between, "this okay/good movie," and, "this movie is ****ing amazing."

I took this July's B&N criterion sale as a chance to upgrade from whatever generic blu-ray I had of the movie to the Criterion blu-ray. Who knows when I'll get a chance to actually watch that transfer (given the number of blind buys in my collection all wanting to push their way to the front), but I did take a peak at the extras on that one, and they were pretty amazing (recoding actors reading William Blake's poems seems like one of those obvious, yet brilliant, ideas for an extra for this one).

I need to rewatch Dead Man. I feel I didn't give it nearly enough credit when I first watched it.

I'm no Kitano expert and haven't seen Sonatine (I think MKS is a fan), but Boiling Point was one of my favourite early pandemic watches. There's a woozy, boozy bar scene that still makes me chuckle.


Also, fun fact: Kitano once "designed" a videogame (apparently by shouting ideas at the designers while on a bender). It's supposed to be borderline unplayable.

Hard to think of many studios with as high a batting average as Ghibli where their few mediocrities are more than cancelled out by their peaks. For me, it doesn't get much better than Mononoke, one of Miyazaki's many attempts at creating a swansong with which he could properly bow out of the medium he'd redefined over and over. A remarkably nuanced environmentalist fable that sees young Prince Ashitaka (Yôji Matsuda) suffer a curse from a demon's attack and set off on a quest to find out what created the demon, eventually stumbling into the middle of a war between iron-crafting noblewoman Lady Eboshi (Yûko Tanaka) and the creatures that dwell in the forest she wishes to destroy. It's an explosive conflict that involves many distinct and different players on all sides - the eponymous princess (Yuriko Ishida) is a human girl who was raised by wolves and now fights tooth and nail against Eboshi, as perfect an emblem of this film's approach to ideological and ontological grey areas as any - but Miyazaki is able to spin so many plates while keeping the film going that it continues to prove remarkable. It also has as resplendent a display of the Ghibli aesthetic as ever, conjuring all manner of magical creatures and atmospheric locations against which the story can unfold. It is great that so many Ghibli films can be chosen as a favourite without much in the way of counter-argument, and while there are certainly quite a few that I love, it's hard to imagine any of them overtaking Mononoke as my favourite.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: N/A

All of the early Kitano's are as essential as genre filmmaking gets. Then, once one has watched all of those, they should immediately proceed to watch Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, for possibly Kitano's greatest performance.


One of these days I'm going to have to force myself to like Princess Mononoke. So far I haven't been persuasive enough, though.

I don't think I've actually seen anything he's directed, but I have seen Merry Christmas, because, well, Oshima.


Wrt Mononoke, it was probably my first Miyazaki*, watching a bootlegged copy in college (because Disney hadn't released it yet), so I'm still positive on it. Though, and temper this statement with the proper suspicion since I haven't seen it since I think, also college, I would choose Kiki's as my favorite Miyazaki.


*: I was about to say Ghibli, but then realized I'm pretty sure I saw Grave of the Fireflies in high school.

I would be tempted to say Kitano would have to be on my top 20 most essential directors of all time. Not necessarily for the history of cinema, but for my personal tastes. His approach to violence and humour the crime film (because, I guess that's what they essentially are) are all uniquely his own. Weird, profound, challenging, terrifying, hilarious. And he has one of the most marvellously powerful on screen presences I can think of (he's continued with that aura of being both charmingly sweet and blood-chillingly menacing, depending on the scene, just like he cultivated in Lawrence).


Princess Mononoke is a film that looks incredible. On those merits alone I should love it. But it is also densely plotted, in ways that I don't find terribly engaging, and yet demands to be paid attention to. I found it kept holding my eyes open Ludivico style, forcing me to follow along with every narrative beat and every character motivation, and my brain sometimes resists attempts at such fascism. It just wanted to get lost in those landscapes and I had to keep listening to why so and so was doing such and such and why it all mattered. But I think if I ever rewatch I'll be prepared enough to alert the other half of my brain that it needs to be an active participant too, this time around.







Also, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence is one of the greatest and needs to be on the lips of as many people as possible.

I watched Princess Mononoke a week ago and enjoyed it quite a lot.

Mononoke is great and Crumbsroom is on the wrong side of history, but I do think he's correct about how narratively busy it is on top of the meticulous imagery. Of Miyazaki's work, I think Spirited Away handles the density of its visual style a bit better as it grounds it in an easy to follow child's perspective.


It's been a while since I've seen Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, so a rewatch is certainly in order. The only Oshimas I've seen are that and the stupid chimpanzee movie (which I kinda like). I probably should have seen In the Realm of the Senses already, given my viewing habits.