My 2025 Watchlist Frenzy!

So, 2024 was a kooky experience as far as catching up on my watchlist goes, because I watched and reviewed many more films than I ever thought I'd be able to, and in the end my watchlist count actually went forwards instead of backwards. I've mentioned it a few times in the previous thread, I must be so much more aware of adding new movies to it, and it wasn't at all a case of putting any old movie I fancied into my watchlist - there are strict criteria. If a movie takes my fancy, I still do research on it to make sure it's really watchlist-worthy - taking notes of reviews and ratings from a whole range of people and places.

Last year, the target was 300 - as in 'get my watchlist down from 450 to 300'. What actually happened was, my watchlist went from 450 to 452, despite knocking around 275 films off in 2024. So this year, my target will be a more realistic one :

TARGET : 400

I was supposed to watch and review Love According to Dalva (2022) to round off my watchlist year, but when it came to sitting down and watching it I had the unhappy experience of finding out that the promised "English subtitles" weren't to be found, and as such that was a complete bust. Anyway, I ended 2024 with a string of incidental watches - ones where I only find out when I'm reviewing them that they were on my watchlist :


Yet I still went over on my count! My fears of running out of watchlist films (that was a genuine sadness I felt when I really hit my stride - turns out I had nothing to worry about) were unfounded. So here we go again - let's move the needle this time!

First up on the list is Falcon Lake (2022) - Directed by Charlotte Le Bon

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There is so much haunting imagery in Falcon Lake, where darkness can either be literally haunting, or else it can be tranquil. It can allude to something hidden, or it can take the form of a mystery that is only revealed once we lose our innocence and grow up. Charlotte Le Bon and cinematographer Kristof Brandl do so much with the seemingly mundane - a wet towel drip-drying on a rail, or a pair of hands pressed finger-tip to finger-tip. It's a feature that elevates this film above your ordinary coming of age love story - one which I was singularly impressed by. Bastien (Joseph Engel) is a 13-year-old boy who finds himself on vacation at a lakeside cottage in Quebec, often laden with a very young brother to entertain or watch over. At times watching over Bastien is 16-year-old Chloé (Sara Montpetit) - a morbid girl who likes to pose as a corpse and makes up tales about people who have drowned at the lake and haunt the waters. As the two get to know each other (disconcertingly bonding over whether it's possible to bite your own hand until it bleeds) Chloé takes to Bastien more and more. All of the older boys simply want to try and force her to have sex with them, and have no interest in her beyond that. As they become closer, and more intimate, Chloé tries to cure Bastien of his fear of the water via a variety of means - but Bastien's lack of romantic experience threatens to derail what they share and could possibly turn this family holiday into a dark and terrifying tragedy.

For most of it's journey, Falcon Lake is a very grounded, peaceful movie that feels like a direct reflection of real experience, and as such I'm betting that it will bring back memories for many of the people who watch it. Suddenly, young Bastien finds himself having to contend with dilemmas he's probably never had to face before. For example, he has to learn how to deal with seeing Chloé dance and have fun with other boys - a great test of maturity and manhood. What endears him so much to Chloé is how interested he is in forging a new friendship, and how ready he is to talk to her once he overcomes his initial shyness which stops him at first. Staying in a lakeside cottage with so much scenic beauty abounding is the perfect place for such a romance, and personally school camps produce the sharpest romantic memories for me - even though many were unrequited crushes and not all-out haunting love tales. Bastien and Chloé spend a lot of time alone together, doing what kids do and there's something refreshing and idyllic simply watching them be kids and finding something within each other that's precious in that moment, especially considering what would otherwise have been an empty and almost miserable holiday. But Falcon Lake adds a little something else that's more unusual considering what these movies usually feel like.

Yes - Falcon Lake certainly has a very haunting quality to it. Something unique to the point of view of our two lover protagonists. The way their story is presented reminds me a little of a film I saw recently - Poison For the Fairies, a 1986 film directed by Carlos Enrique Taboada - because the camera rarely takes note of the adults in the story. This is very much from the perspective of the kids, and really confines itself to their viewpoint. Because the kids are a little preoccupied by ghosts, corpses, urban legends and the macabre, the dank, dark lake and it's surrounds seem a little off-putting to us, the audience. The film opens on what seems to be a body floating in the lake, until it's revealed to be Chloé, determined to be one. She often takes delight in scaring Bastien, and if he swims out to the depths despite the fact he once nearly drowned, we're reminded of how much that really represents his emotional journey. It's all wonderfully captured by the filmmakers and evocatively scored by Klô Pelgag and Shida Shahabi - with an ending that's mysterious and will rely a lot on every individual's interpretation. If there are ghosts roaming places like Falcon lake, they may well be the ghosts of lovers who once had the most intense, perfectly painful moments of their young lives there.

Glad to catch this one - nominated for Best First Feature Film at the 2023 César Awards, winning the same award at the Prix Louis-Delluc and Vancouver International Film Festival. Debuted at Cannes.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Falcon Lake

母情 [A Mother's Love] (1950)
Les dernières fiançailles [The Last Betrothal] (1973)
Les Perses (1961)
破戒 [The Outcast] (1962)
Himmel und Erde [Heaven and Earth] (1982)
牧野物語 養蚕編 映画のための映画 [Magino Story: Raising Silkworms] (1977)

Nice review - enjoyed the read.

And I really liked the movie, the tranquility and haunting atmosphere you speak of. It's the type of film that lingers.

As to finishing a watchlist, I've had to accept I'll never put a dent in mine, I have hundreds upon hundreds of films in bookmark files; the watchlist, aside from that, is well over a thousand, and for everyone I mark as watched, 2 more are recommended to me.

And sometimes, while watching, I have no idea why it was in my watchlist to begin with, because it might be a pretty weak flick with low ratings - but maybe there's a performance I needed to see, maybe the score or the camera work was praised - maybe there's some historical relevance, some advancement in technique (especially with silent films) I wanted to check out... but at that point I've forgotten what it was I supposed to keep an eye on. (I should keep better notes, lol)

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Completed Extant Filmographies: Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Fritz Lang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Buster Keaton, Yasujirō Ozu, Carl Th. Dreyer - (for favorite directors who have passed or retired, 10 minimum)

So wait, new thread for the new year? The other thread is over? *sniff*

I think it will still be the same content. Just in a new thread.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

I'm determined to put a dent in my watchlist this year.

My problem is that, at this point, I've watched all the "fun stuff", and I'm down to 400+ films that largely have plot summaries starting with things like "After the devastating loss of her mother . . ." or "In this stunningly bleak look at a possible near-future . . .". Then I think NO THANKS! and go watch something else.

My goal is to try and use the 2025 Film Challenge as a way to knock out about 50 films from my watchlist. As always, I'll have an eye on this thread, which is one of the reasons my own watchlist has continued to grow!

I see the emphasis on those 6 (recommendations?) are that they're all eminently underseen movies of quality.

I'm sure that when my 2025 Watchlist Thread really hits it's stride it'll be so great it'll make 2024 look like absolute piffle!

Mr Minio is to thank.

They are the ones I like the look of from his favourite viewings of 2023.

This is mostly my problem too.
I'm running out of great films that aren't a total f*cking drag to watch anymore and honestly the World has become too much of a drag for me to go seeking more.
Like, I've accepted that I am never going to watch Come And See. Or probably Grave Of The Fireflies either. There's getting to be a list of them.

They are so good though. Can your joy of seeing a truly great movie trump the feelings of horror or sadness you get from the narrative, sights and sounds? (Come and See was a hard one to come to grips with admittedly.)

I really like watching bleak films.
Egg and Stone, Shoplifters, Apparition, Come and See, Grave of the Fireflies are all great classics.

What a tricky movie this one is to try and come to grips with early in the year. There's an element of greatness to it, but at the same time it's frustratingly flawed - and that mix makes it hard to talk about it's wonderful attributes without feeling disingenuous about my various frustrations. I'll get it out of the way right now. R.M.N. is far too long - needlessly so. At times the focus will meander, and I kept seriously becoming anxious as to what the movie was going to finally settle on as regards to theme, narrative thrust and main character. Cristian Mungiu is a filmmaker that almost seems to have to much confidence in himself, allowing so much breadth and time for the audience to soak up the Transylvania town this is set in - and it's people - a positive to some no doubt. Matthias (Marin Grigore) is a man who has returned after working in Germany - having attacked a coworker he no longer has the employment which kept him from his estranged wife, Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) and son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi). He's also eager to take up where he left off with his lover, Csilla (Judith State), who has a senior position at the town's bakery. The physical altercation that starts the film has something to do with racial hatred, and eventually it's this theme which will darken and then power the film's narrative when the town turns against three Sri Lankan workers who have been hired by the bakery - the positions having gone unfilled because none of the townspeople are willing to accept the low wages on offer.

This is based on a true story - a 2020 incident in the village of Ditrău, Romania where locals protested the hiring of Sri Lankans because of a general fear of immigrants and their culture supposedly threatening the "Hungarian local ethnic identity." Yes, this is the kind of movie that makes me angry, and the sheer hateful ignorance on display is very ugly, but Cristian Mungiu doesn't want to simply let that narrative speak for itself, and as such we'll spend plenty of time with characters contemplating and dealing with their own fears and insecurities. Matthias is disconcerted when, upon arriving home, he finds that Rudi is suffering from anxiety and fear - so much so he isn't developing speech like he should be. The answer for Matthias is to throw Rudi in at the deep end, but Ana wants to protect and sooth the boy - letting him sleep with her, and having Matthias guide him through the forest on his way to school, for it's in this forest that Rudi saw something that spooked him quite badly. What lurks in the forest might a gypsy - most of whom have been driven from the town with the same fervour everyone displays towards the Sri Lankans. It might be someone who has hung himself from the branch of a tree. It might be a bear, or the very strange (read : totally bizarre) spectre that greets us at the films' absolutely bonkers and inscrutable ending.

Whatever your take is regarding all of this, it develops very slowly - in increments at first, as some fears do. For movie lovers, there's plenty to devour and savour - for example the incredible one-shot town hall sequence which is where the film hits it's dramatic peak. While not haunting as a whole, he shoots sequences in the forest so that they feel like they wouldn't be out of place in a horror film and cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru filters most of what we see through a cold, blue lens that adds an icy, frozen and dead atmosphere to this part of the world. By the way many of the people in this town talk, you'd think this was the early part of the 1900s - or perhaps even much earlier, at a time when this part of the world was a "bulwark against invading barbarian hordes heading west." There's a great irony in the movie being set during the Christmas period. Yet, there are so many threads (not disparate at all, but thorough) making this such a rug that it feels both amiss and impossible to take note of them all. It's a strange place - there are many Hungarians and even Germans which make it a melting pot, but what seems most important is not being black (which makes some churchgoers insist these people are dirty) - especially if you're making their bread. More central, in the end, is Matthias himself, who leads the movie to a "have to rewind that...twice" ending which is open to interpretation - but will regardless confuse and seems so supremely weird. One of the strangest endings I've ever seen to a movie.

Glad to catch this one - Awarded the Golden Tower for Best Film at the 2022 European Film Festival Palić, and it received a Special Mention from the Press Jury of the 2022 CinEast Film Festival.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch R.M.N.

Occasionally films come along that are basically powered by a single performance - they concern a character that is larger than life, and very noticeably different from nearly ever other person you've ever met. Meet Lulu - played in a performance that's really beyond measure by Louise Brooks. While not actually portrayed as an ordinary everyday prostitute, Lulu does get by on the favours her regular rich "patrons" bestow on her, and has a way about her that's naturally irresistible to the men she spends time with. Unfortunately this vivaciousness does not have an "on or off" switch, and as such the guys who become close to this bright and softly expressive vixen are in the end completely destroyed. One of her suitors is newspaper magnate Dr. Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner), but when he decides to marry Charlotte von Zarnikow (Daisy D'ora) Lulu's jealousy erupts, and she manipulates matters in such a way that forces his hand, and the resulting disaster will send Lulu, Ludwig's son Alwa (Francis Lederer) and an old rascal called Schigolch (Carl Goetz) to the very fringes of society, forced to flee the mess and utter destruction wreaked by unchecked passion, jealousy and abandon.

After watching so many recent films, it does take a bit of acclimatization watching as old silent classic - and choosing the right musical score also becomes critical in my estimation. It took a couple of goes before I really found the right fit for Pandora's Box. Once in the swing of things, I actually found the film itself to be extraordinary - but apart from all it's other merits, it's hard to not become completely consumed by what was one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. It was unfortunate for Louise Brooks that Hollywood never welcomed her back with open arms after she made a few films in Germany (two with Pabst), but I think she really earned her immortality here. Pandora's Box is a movie that ended up a "rediscovered" classic during the 1950s, and thankfully that happened while Brooks was still around to soak up some of the enduring fame due to her. Refreshingly, her character doesn't harbor evil intent, or even have any darkness hidden deep inside. You can see in her expressive joy her simple love of life, and the exultation she experiences simply by melting a man's heart. Call it an observation on morality, but what the film really sets out for us is how unwise it is to just welcome every man's attentions without any kind of limit or measured caution. The men she usually attracts all have some kind of weakness of character, and are not well suited to loving Lulu.

Much is said about the modernity of G.W. Pabst's film, and that extends to the way the movie is presented - very Weimer Germany in many ways, and freely expressive, sensual and open. Nothing at all is sugarcoated and everything is suggested. You could almost see it as the quintessential film about the raw sexuality that supposedly enveloped Post-World War I Berlin, and the price weaker, naïve men pay for falling in love and wanting to possess a girl who is more into having fun and being open to any and every experience on offer. The danger is universal however, because the movie sensationally adds Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) to it's cast of characters while at the same time, almost as if the movie is holding out an olive branch to the audience, it also includes a scene featuring the Salvation Army. In the end I hands down thought the movie truly fantastic and on repeat viewings it has a chance to really cement a spot amongst my most favourite and highly regarded of the silent films I've seen. It's certainly one I'd like to explore in finer detail at some stage later on down the track.

Glad to catch this one - Criterion #358 and is another one that's included in Steven Jay Schneider's 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Pandora's Box

I really like Michael Haneke's confronting, visceral filmmaking style, but I have to confess to having seen only 5 of his films (that's including two versions of Funny Games, of which the second - the English-language version - I never really saw the point of being made, unless it was simply to gain a wider audience.) Finally I've come around to seeing more of his work, of which The Seventh Continent is his very first feature film. I wasn't sure what to expect. Did Haneke's bent towards psychological horror develop over time, or did he hit audiences with a withering blow the first time out of the gate? I wasn't given much indication as Seventh Continent got going - it provides us with some Jeanne Dielman-levels of ordinary domesticity. A perfectly average, middle class Austrian family go about their lives, encountering your normal everyday problems. Georg (Dieter Berner) works as an engineer at a plant, and is good at his job - despite the best efforts of his boss to sabotage him and protect his own position from being taken over. His wife Anna (Birgit Doll) is an optometrist, and the two have a young daughter, Eva (Leni Tanzer), who gets into trouble at school for inventing ailments. We learn about their normal everyday problems and issues via narrated letters to Georg's parents. There is a slight undercurrent of discontent, depression and grief that adds a very slight despairing tone to their interactions with each other and their chores.

It seems that the ultimate destination for this family is Australia (thus the film's title), where they say they're going to immigrate - and occasionally we're shown brief glimpses of a very stylised and artificial version of what Austrians might imagine Australia to be - a rocky shore with an ocean that's bounded by mountains. It looks more like an alien landscape. Overall my impressions were that this was a very arthouse kind of movie, and my experience with Jeanne Dielman and other kinds of subtle slow burn cinema had me well equipped to go with the flow. Of course, Michael Haneke then turned around as if they say, "Hey, I'm Michael Haneke!" and turned into the artist I'm most familiar with. I won't go into spoilers, but The Seventh Continent turns into a gut-wrenching horror show, and he does that in a very original and theme-oriented way. It's almost clinical. Methodical. In fact, what occurs is based on a true story - Haneke having picked up the details in a news article he read. I hate to go into specifics, but one scene proves so consequential to what he was doing I have to reveal it. You see, a huge sum of money is flushed down the toilet in a passage that lasts minutes, and Haneke guessed that it would be this scene that upset audiences most. He was right - and indeed that moment in the film is strangely bothersome, probably for the most obvious reasons.

I leave The Seventh Continent with a strong need to watch it again, now knowing what happens - it almost feels as if there's a mystery within it to be solved. It's a mystery of motive and reason which isn't an unanswered question - I know the answer, it's just that I need to see it more clearly. For animal lovers - fish suffered during the making of this movie, and we the audience are forced to watch that suffering, so be warned. I found that extremely unpleasant - but thankfully no other creatures are involved. Overall though, I thought the film was excellent, because art that deals with modern, urban malaise should treat the subject with the same severity and starkness that Michael Haneke does here. No pussyfooting around. It's what Lorcan Finnegan's Vivarium tried to do in a very different way, but Haneke uses a cinéma-vérité method that has much more of a powerful effect - and chances are you'll walk away shaken. It's Der Untergang on a micro scale - and I imagine that many filmgoers immediately took notice of this new filmmaker. It gives us a definite clue as to what we might expect from him in the future, and that hard-hitting edge continued to keep audiences aghast and riveted.

Glad to catch this one - Part of Criterion's Michael Haneke trilogy, #1163. Awarded the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival and the prize for Best Application of Music and Sound in Film at the Ghent International Film Festival.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch The Seventh Continent

I'm finding more and more these days that when I watch good movies that could broadly be considered "arthouse" I often need to have seen them once before I can start really appreciating them on subsequent viewings. That's mostly the case with Juliet of the Spirits, although by the time the film was reaching it's hallucinatory climax I was fully on board and enjoying it a great deal. It's something like when I hear new music, where I need to know a song so I can enjoy those moments of anticipation and narrow my focus down to what I enjoy about them. I need to feel assured as to where a movie is going. In this Fellini film, Giulietta Boldrini (played by Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina) lives a life of marital neglect and spends her days frequenting places with friends and various psychics/spiritual guides. She also has a rich inner life, where various visions appear to her - either people she knew from her past, people she's met or the dead walking the earth, along with various dream-like apparitions of places and things that astound the senses. It is these visions that start to take over when she starts to suspect that her husband, Giorgio (Mario Pisu), is cheating on her. Will they show her the way? Should she take a lover of her own? Is Juliet going mad? Only her tears prove that inside she's a heartbroken woman who only wanted to be with Giorgio for the rest of her life.

I am really not used to seeing a Federico Fellini film in colour - the four I'd seen before this were all in black and white. He really overwhelms the senses here - with bright splashes of glowing orange, red and green contrasted by white houses and dresses, and at first it felt a little gauche. The colour really comes on strong, and I'm not sure if this was down to the filming process or if it was intentional - but it made me ponder, "do I dream in colour?" My dreams are nothing like this. Some of Juliet of the Spirits also crosses over into nightmare, and actually scared me. Fellini would have made an excellent director of horror movies going by how he constructs Juliet's fantasy world when it's careening out of control. Crucified girls (representing Juliet herself and a childhood memory) with demon eyes keep popping up, as does every other disturbing kind of apparition related to Juliet's day to day life and memories. I found myself being spooked, quite unexpectedly. Giulietta Masina though, is as lovely as she ever was - an actress that I've come to like a great deal after seeing her in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria - two Fellini films I adore a great deal. Will I come to like Juliet of the Spirits just as much? I think only time will tell, but it is packed full of little details and that makes it a movie I'll be glad to come back to a few times so I can examine it in more detail.

So, what does it all mean? Juliet is obviously just stumbling over a very emotional, turbulent moment in her life, and while I have no idea if the visions she sees have ever intruded on her life to this extent before, I think I can safely say that this is the absolute crest of the biggest wave she's ever encountered. During moments of spiritual crisis we're often revisited by our past, and sometimes we find that people who are long gone are whispering to us from places we hardly ever think about anymore. Spirits (and I use the term loosely) play havoc, and although I've read that Fellini was really into psychic phenomena and the like, I think with regard to this film we can also see the spiritual as existing within our memories and past experience with people. It's one way that those who have departed do get to live on - in our minds. Dreams also play their part in this with their phantasmagorical procession of ghosts, places and strange events - at times related to whatever emotional process we're going through. Certainly, we also see some of Juliet's dreams, and it's easy to see how Juliet of the Spirits kind of carries on where Fellini's 8½ left off. I know virtually nothing of Fellini's films beyond this point in his career, but I'd sure like to see more of his visionary output.

Glad to catch this one - Criterion #149 and in Steven Jay Schneider's 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. It also won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 1966.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Juliet of the Spirits

To a point yes. But no longer to the point that has been suggested these movies reach.

I really used to.
But Life has kinda poked a pin into that balloon.

I've had this high in my queue for a long time but haven't pulled the trigger. Part of that is because on work-nights I really need a movie to be at maximum 2 hours. So that only leaves the weekend when I do a lot of other things and it probably wouldn't be nice to spring a 2h13m silent film that I haven't seen and therefore cannot actually vouch for on my girlfriend.
But I think your review has knocked it up even higher and I'm gonna try to watch it in the next couple weeks.

Growing up, I'd always heard about Japanese soldiers left over from the Second World War who had been left defending islands, isolated from the world, thinking that the war wasn't yet over - some of them spending decades surviving however they could and holding out. It always fascinated me a great deal - how for them the war had continued into the 1950s, 1960s and beyond. When I heard about Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle I was naturally eager to see one of these stories in movie form, especially because it was based on the experience of a real person : Hiroo Onoda, who only ended up being discovered and surrendering in 1974! How does a person survive in the jungle for 30 years? Why would he assume Japan was still fighting after 30 long years of terrible warfare? What happened? Surprisingly, Onoda didn't disappoint me one bit. The film was everything I hoped it might be, and answered all of my questions to my supreme satisfaction. In fact, the movie has such a dramatic and emotional coda that I was quite moved and pleasantly surprised by the quality of the film as a whole. It takes us from Hiroo Onoda's (Yuya Endo as young Onoda, Kanji Tsuda as old Onoda) recruitment to his training, his time on Lubang Island (in the Phillipines) fighting with his compatriots, his secret mission of guerrilla warfare which he continued with a dwindling contingent of men and on to the years when he was the last man standing right up until a Japanese tourist searching for him finally finds one of the last Japanese holdouts from the war.

Now, I'd always been planning to praise the make-up effects in this film for ageing Onoda so incredibly well - then I found out two actors had played this character. Instead, I have to praise how well these two melded together, because I never noticed any switch from one actor to the next! The same goes for fellow soldier Kinshichi Kozuka (played by Yuya Matsuura as a young man, and Tetsuya Chiba as an old man) - who lasted the longest with Onoda. He's still with him in 1969, as the pair listen to the first moon landing on a transistor radio supplied to the pair by a hopeful party of friends and relatives trying to convince the men to give themselves up. Unfortunately, the paranoid pair keep insisting to themselves that all of these attempts to ferret them out are tricks being played on them by enemy forces. The gradual ageing of the characters is seamless. The film also gave me a taste of something else I'm quite fond of : movies about survival in the jungle, which the Japanese soldiers are surprisingly adept at. Of course, Filipino civilians live on the island, and the surviving soldiers manage to steal livestock and crops to help them get by. Unfortunately, they also often clash with the locals - with casualties on both sides. In the real story, most regrettably, it's rumoured that Onoda actually killed up to 30 civilians during his time there. On this island, a long since over war was still being bitterly fought.

This movie turns out to be an excellent examination of psychology, isolation, indoctrination, fortitude and paranoia. We aren't left with Onoda alone until quite late, and as such it's the bonds he makes with those left with him that creates a series of emotional climaxes as he loses his compatriots one by one - they are his family, and the men experience the unique kind of togetherness that comes from spending their entire lives in close proximity to each other. The costume, art and make-up departments deserve a lot of praise for the way they continually age the characters, their clothes and equipment. To survive out there for 30 years would be an unbelievable feat and seem nonsensical to me if it hadn't of actually happened in real life. Not only do questions of physical survival seem important - how do you manage that in a psychological sense? Could these soldiers have been considered crazy by some stage? How could they dismiss letters from home, magazines, newspapers and radio broadcasts as clever ruses and think the war still continued after so much time had passed? The answers might have something to do with a combination of Japanese military characteristics and the unique psychological state complete isolation gives to human beings. In any event, this 167-minute film was fascinating and emotionally compelling in many different ways, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Glad to catch this one - this won the Prix Louis-Delluc (Louis Delluc Prize) for 2021 - it's an international production, but France had a large part in making it. 97% on Rotten Tomatoes - and excellent reviews.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle