lists

The 50 Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century

When Film4 published a list of their “100 Must-See Films of the 21st Century” and only bothered to include two Chinese films (Yi yi and In the Mood for Love, of course), I countered with this list on letterboxd of 100 Must-See Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century. Almost two years have passed since then, and I’ve been wanting to update that list, since honestly I was kind of stretching the limits of what I’d recommend when I got into the nineties. Well, yesterday came The Playlist’s list of The 50 Best Foreign Language Films of the 21st Century. Five of the films on their list are Chinese Language (the same obvious Edward Yang and Wong Kar-wai picks, along with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo, Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time is It There? and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That’s right: no Johnnie To.), and while they’re somewhat hampered by their self-imposed one-film-per-director rules, that, to me, is still an unacceptably low number for what has been and continues to be the most vibrant and fascinating film culture in the world. And today, Richard Brody’s response in the New Yorker, while an improvement in making room for Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing (and Korean director Hong Sangsoo), still has only seven Chinese titles.

So here are my 50 Best Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century. I’m limited in making this list by the movies I’ve seen, and there are still many, many Chinese films I haven’t watched yet. I’m also sticking with The Playlist’s rule and limiting myself to one film per director (in the case of collaborations, I’m counting them as separate directors: Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai together is a different director from either Johnnie To or Wai Ka-fai individually. This is arbitrary of course). The movies are ranked in order of my current preference, with links to where I’ve written about or discussed them, along with, in some cases, no more than five other recommended films by the director.

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30 Essential Wuxia Films

With the highly-anticipated release of two King Hu masterpieces on home video by the Masters of Cinema organization, as well as the critical success of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin last year, it seems like the wuxia film is making some inroads into the Western critical consciousness. So I thought I’d put together a guide to some of the essential films of the genre. The Chinese martial arts movie is generally split into two primary subgeneres: the kung fu film and the wuxia film. The kung fu film is newer and focuses primarily on hand-to-hand combat, it’s steeped in traditional fighting forms and there’s a general emphasis on the physical skill of the performer: special effects are generally disdained. Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan are its most famous practitioners and Lau Kar-leung its most important director.

Wuxia is a much older form, based ultimately in the long tradition of Chinese adventure literature, in classic novels such as The Water Margin or Journey to the West, or more contemporary works by authors like Louis Cha and Gu Long. Its heroes follow a very specific code of honor as they navigate the jianghu, an underworld of outlaws and bandits outside the normal streams of civilization. Wuxia films often incorporate fantasy elements, using special effects to allow their heroes to fly, shoot concentrated chi energy out of their hands (or eyes) and in other ways violate the laws of physics. Strictly speaking, wuxia should probably be confined to stories of code-following traveling knights-errant, but genres are a fluid and conventional thing, especially in Hong Kong, where films regularly mash together comedy, action, romance, melodrama and horror elements into a single impure whole, and as such, stark lines are difficult to draw. King Hu and Tsui Hark are the essential wuxia directors, and Jet Li, Ti Lung and Jimmy Wang Yu the genre’s greatest stars. The following is a list of 30 of the genre’s highlights, taking a reasonably expansive view of generic boundaries and arranged in chronological order:

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A Top 50 Films of 2015, More or Less

As I did last year, I’m making a Best of the Year list following the conventional system for what counts as a 2015 film, mainly the nonsensical and ahistorical system that decrees that critics may only consider movies to have existed once they have played for a week in a commercial venue in New York City. (This is the system that claims my favorite film of 2013 (La última película), which played for a week in Seattle in 2014, can only be considered a 2015 film because that is when it finally got a New York release, although it will only play Los Angeles in 2016). (Not to mention the absurdity that is the fact that Tsai Ming-liang’s 1992 debut feature is qualified for this list.) But alas, we all must bow to convention, however silly, every once in awhile.

My 2015 list of course will never be finalized, as there’s no such thing as a final list here at The End: there are always more new movies to discover and old movies to reevaluate. But in a couple of weeks I’ll have the nominations up for the 2015 Endy Awards, with the winners to be announced during the Academy Awards ceremony. This list is a snapshot of my favorites of 2015 as they stand now, on the last day of the year.

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1. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

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2. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)

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3. La última película (Raya Martin & Mark Peranson)

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4. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso)

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5. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson)

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6. Blackhat (Michael Mann)

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7. Horse Money (Pedro Costa)

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8. The Royal Road (Jenni Olson)

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9. Carol (Todd Haynes)

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10. World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt)

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The Best Older Movies I Saw in 2015

An annual tradition here at The End, this is a look at my favorite film discoveries of the year, any movie more than a few years old that I saw for the first time in 2015. Previous years include: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006. I watched 368 or so movies in 2015, roughly third of which qualify for this list. That’s a sizable decline from last year, where half the films I watched were discoveries, a result of spending more of my movie-time this year on new releases for Seattle Screen Scene and on rewatches for They Shot Pictures. Here are 75 that I liked.

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1. Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005)

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2. It Felt Like a Kiss (Adam Curtis, 2009)

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3. News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977)

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4. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

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5. Le bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965)

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6. The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990)

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7. Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934)

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8. Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa, 1965)

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9. Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

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10. The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, 1953)

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A Top 100 Films of All-Time

It is time once again for a Top 100 Films of All-Time list. As I’ve done for the last few years, the first ten spots on the list comprise a hypothetical Sight & Sound-style ballot. We’ll be discussing them on this week’s episode of The George Sanders Show. This top ten is presented here in chronological order. The remaining 90 films were randomly selected from a consideration set of 902 films, which excluded films that made my Top Tens in 2012, 2013 and 2014.

1. Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
2. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
3. Out of the Past (Jacques Turner, 1947)
4. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
5. Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
6. The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968)
7. A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971)
8. The Killer (John Woo, 1989)
9. The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)
10. Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, 2008)
11. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
12. Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973)
13. Fat Choi Spirit (Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai, 2002)
14. The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991)
15. Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, 2006)
16. Ivan the Terrible Part 2 (Sergei Eisenstein, 1958)
17. American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)
18. The Midnight After (Fruit Chan, 2014)
19. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
20. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007)

21. Eight Men Out (John Sayles, 1988)

22. Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, 2011)

23. Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

24. Wee Willie Winkie (John Ford, 1937)

25. The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973)

26. The Fate of Lee Khan (King Hu, 1973)

27. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

28. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

29. Dream of the Red Chamber (Li Han-hsiang, 1977)

30. Last Hurrah for Chivalry (John Woo, 1979)

31. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

32. Dune (David Lynch, 1984)

33. Starman (John Carpenter, 1984)

34. Wolf Children (Mamoru Hosada, 2012)

35. Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (Tsui Hark, 1983)

36. Applause (Rouben Mamoulian, 1929)

37. Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)

38. One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1981)

39. Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948)

40. Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

41. Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1959)

42. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

43. Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012)

44. Run of the Arrow (Samuel Fuller, 1957)

45. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

46. New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)

47. Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)

48. Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004)

49. The Age of the Medici (Roberto Rossellini, 1972)

50. Bambi (David Hand, 1942)

51. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

52. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)

53. 7 Women (John Ford, 1966)

54. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

55. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)

56. I am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)

57. I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Turner, 1943)

58. Red Beard (Akira Kurosawa, 1965)

59. Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Chor Yuen, 1972)

60. Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939)

61. They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)

62. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

63. The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992)

64. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

65. What Price Glory (Raoul Walsh, 1926)

66. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

67. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

68. Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1996)

69. Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994)

70. Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954)

71. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (John Lounsbery & Wolfgang Reitherman, 1977)

72. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

73. The Sun Also Rises (Jiang Wen, 2007)

74. Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974)

75. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

76. Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

77. Romance Joe (Lee Kwangkuk, 2011)

78. The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)

79. The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1959)

80. The Royal Road (Jenni Olson, 2015)

81. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

82. Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty, 1948)

83. Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964)

84. The Thin Man (WS Van Dyke, 1934)

85. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

86. Golden Swallow (Chang Cheh, 1968)

87. Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948)

88. Porco Rosso (Hayao Miyazaki, 1992)

89. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

90. Godzilla (Ishirô Honda, 1954)

91. Two Rode Together (John Ford, 1961)

92. Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

93. They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)

94. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)

95. An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)

96. Madame de. . . (Max Ophuls, 1953)

97. Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

98. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

99. The Wold Shadow (Stan Brakhage, 1972)

100. Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004)