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"You saved Hollywood's ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution! Seriously, Top Gun: Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry!"

- Steven Spielberg to Tom Cruise

Let us take Spielberg at his word: no irony darkens his tone, no mask behind which cynicism skulks--only awe, a humbled filmmaker bearing witness not merely to the return of “cinema,” but to its rescue. But what is this thing called "cinema" that Cruise is said to have saved? Is it the industry, the machinery of production and profit, or something more elusive, more essential? A mode of being, a relation to time and movement, an image not simply seen but inhabited? To grant Cruise this charitable reading--that his ambition is to offer an “authentic” cinematic experience--is to it that saving cinema means more than preserving theatrical exhibition as a commercial form; it means safeguarding an entire metaphysical edifice: a faith in the image, in the body, in the irreducible presence of the real. Cruise, then, is less a star than a figure of age, a conduit through which the spirit of classical Hollywood cinema momentarily returns. Should his stuntwork, then, signal a continuity between spectacle and sincerity: a satisfaction not merely in witnessing risk, but in believing the artistic heroism it claims--a lineage recalling the silent audacity of Keaton, the death-defying grace of Lloyd? Yet this return is no mere nostalgia or appeasement; it is strategic, performative, a wager on the ongoing vitality of Hollywood’s totalizing mythos, where danger, pleasure, and belief converge in an image insisting--with seductive certainty--on its own necessity.

Maverick and Dead Reckoning may be understood not simply as action films but as rituals of belief--not in plot or character, but in cinema’s material vocation: to render duration sensible, to bind perception to sensation, to return to that which resists simulation. Cruise’s body can then be treated as the guarantor of this faith; he inserts himself into the frame not as character but as testament--to affirm that something irreducibly real has transpired. No green screen, no digital surrogate, no disembodied CGI: only the acceleration of the present, the precision of a body moving through space, the purity of lived time. What is preserved here, or so the myth goes, is not merely theatrical exhibition as collective ritual, but something more sacred: the conviction that cinema still matters because something es through it that resists manufacture, abstraction, and doubt. In Maverick, this faith is embodied in the figure of the pilot--the irreducible human agent resisting the cold logic of unmanned systems. In Dead Reckoning, the threat is ontological: not a nation or ideology, but an algorithmic power dissolving the very coordinates of presence, identity, and truth. Here, the grammar of action is retooled into a gesture of reclamation--not of genre convention, but of “authenticity” itself, as if sheer physicality might fend off the virtual’s encroachment. It is a stirring conceit, to be sure, but one that mistakes physical presence for ontological truth, and mediation for betrayal, convenient fiction in an industry built on illusion, where technical augmentation is cast as suspect even as the spectacle depends on it to exist at all.

And yet, if these films yearn toward authenticity, they are haunted by its impossibility. Their promotion shines with conviction, but within the images, we detect the seams. The body is offered as real, but cut, spliced, multiplied: the construction and assemblage of images reveal spectacle as a meticulously engineered and intricately orchestrated production--real stunts carefully controlled, rehearsed, and safeguarded to the point that their very authenticity becomes compromised; what es for truth is less an ontological veracity than a testament to the scale and expense of its manufactured set pieces. What Maverick in particular exposes is that its claim to the real is inseparable from the ideology it naturalizes. It cannot be authentic, not because its stunts are fake, but because its world is. The “reality” it affirms is a militarized fantasy, a purified myth of American virtue abstracted from history, politics, and their casualties. Such images do not dismantle the official philosophy of the U.S. government; rather, they convey its perilous and hegemonic certainties with seductive, implacable precision. Dead Reckoning appears intelligently made, but this intelligence must be situated properly: as engineered intelligence, self-consciously displayed, inviting iration not for cinematic vision but for production logistics. Its feats lie in infrastructure; the film organizes its images as though a behind-the-scenes reel were projected through the movie itself. Beyond the film, promotional materials relentlessly showcase the production’s elaborate logistics--an insistence that ironically underscores the images’ own inability to confidently sustain the authenticity they purport to capture. Regardless, that Cruise performs his own stunts becomes cinematically inert--the construction of the images offers no grounds on which such authenticity might .

The Final Reckoning extends Cruise’s ongoing pursuit of an “authentic cinema”--one rooted not in narrative complexity or interior depth, but in the sheer visibility of physical action, in the body rendered as the axis of danger, control, and temporality. Here, authenticity is equated with endurance, with the body’s traversal of space and resistance to disembodiment; what is offered is not merely movement, but time made visible through exertion, impact, and velocity. This is the legacy of Maverick and Dead Reckoning: to affirm that the image still matters because the body still moves within it. Yet if Cruise’s wager is that the real can still be felt--that authenticity might emerge through the body’s endurance in time--then The Final Reckoning reveals how elusive that ideal remains, not because the pursuit is insincere, but because it unfolds within the industrial logic of a Hollywood franchise committed less to revelation than to repetition and obligation. For all its fidelity to the stunt as proof of presence, the film does not merely inherit the contradictions of its predecessors--it magnifies them. Each gesture is encumbered by the surplus of its own resources: every set piece a marvel not of artistry but of engineering, every movement already overdetermined by the infrastructure that enables it. What was once framed as bodily risk now feels buffered by the precision that surrounds it. The thrill, in turn, is not of danger but of coordination--of the sheer magnitude of capital, labor, and design mobilized to simulate immediacy. In the process, even the visibility of action--the very index of authenticity--becomes compromised.

It is the opening itself that signals the extent to which these images are compromised, fracturing their own temporality through a rapid-fire montage of Ethan Hunt’s prior exploits--a sequence less invested in narrating origin than in accumulating franchise memory as affective residue. What might have anchored the viewer in the urgency of present stakes instead ruptures immersion, substituting the sensuous unfolding of cinematic time with compressed recall. Duration collapses into citation; presence yields to reference. This technique is not confined to the opening: flashbacks to previous films are repeatedly inserted, ostensibly to reaffirm continuity and the corporeal history of Ethan Hunt’s body--its wounds, feats, endurance--as a source of emotional weight. Yet these recalls enact a double betrayal: offering memory as continuity while evacuating the immediacy of embodied time. The body, repeatedly invoked as a guarantor of authenticity, is rendered instead a ghostly archive, visible through the sedimented traces of past spectacle rather than the lived presence of the present moment. What emerges is less an act of world-building than a gesture of franchise mythologization--an effort not to expand narrative horizons, but to fortify brand lore through repetition and reverence.

The film’s teleological insistence--that every action, image, decision, and risk converge toward inevitable culmination--overdetermines its form, reducing multiplicity to vector. Its structure, governed by a logic of franchise convergence, reifies rather than releases its images, enfolding them within a self-congratulatory mythology. What emerges is not a cinema of movement, but of Hollywood monument: images weighted not by affect, but by their indexical function within the franchise canon. This dialectic--movement versus monument--crucially reveals the film’s contradictory relationship to authenticity. The spectacle sells itself on the visibility of real bodies in motion as the ultimate proof of cinema’s truth, yet the monumentality of these accumulated images produces an inertia that paradoxically betrays that very pursuit. Instead of vitality and immediacy, what we receive is a crystallized archive of stasis--a monumentalized spectacle that impedes the fluid temporality and embodied presence it claims to preserve.

Such monumentality is reinforced by the film’s relentless, exhausting exposition--a deluge of narrative scaffolding that overwhelms rather than orients. Far from clarifying stakes, it saturates the viewer with information, suffocating cinematic rhythm and emotional resonance. Crucially, this expository overload is not only a mere flaw of storytelling but also emblematic of a Hollywood totality the film purports to challenge; it replicates the very sins it seeks to transcend: subordinating sensation to explanation, collapsing cinematic immediacy into industrial coherence. Symptomatic of the contemporary blockbuster, sequences fold back upon themselves as commentary, laced with winks to its own industrial and cultural status. Such is not the unfolding of authenticity, but codification--image as emblem, sequence as ritual citation. Even its central moral axis--Ethan’s resistance to compromise, his insistence on agency and ethical responsibility--remains suspended in contradiction, unable to disentangle itself from the machinery of contemporary Hollywood it simultaneously resists yet reproduces.

[The following, while not revealing explicit details, may contain spoilers.]

It is through these very contradictions, these very compromises, that the film inflates to nearly three hours. The Final Reckoning fails to achieve the temporal density that transforms duration into rhythm. Time is expanded, yet never deepened; what should have been a temporal immersion becomes instead an accumulation of interstitial moments encumbered by Hollywood convention, strung between two major set pieces. The first of these, the submarine sequence, exemplifies a paradox of stasis with striking clarity. Submerged beneath the surface, the body--once a cinematic instrument of velocity and expression--is rendered sluggish. Movement is not intensified but impeded; kinetics give way to drift. The aquatic environment, by its very nature, resists momentum. What might have ed as high-stakes choreography on land becomes, underwater, a tableau of languid movement. Even if one considers thematic intentions, action defaults to the most expected outcome dictated by its geography: confined maneuvers, slow propulsion, blunt collisions. The sequence exhausts its scenario through the motion of predictable stunts, never fully utilizing the expressive potential of the space it occupies.

One might consider the submarine sequence as a deliberate counterpoint to the film’s climactic set piece--a pairing that juxtaposes two contrasting s of the cinematic body. Where the underwater choreography is viscous and constrained--its potential energy dissipated in currents it cannot command--the climactic sequence aspires to unbound scale and kinetic freedom. Yet this aerial spectacle, despite its ambition, falters in sustaining a coherent rhythm, favoring fragmentation over modulation, intensity over affective build. Action collapses into an over-calibrated pattern of acceleration and release, severed from the pulse of lived time. Even if one concedes a certain spectacle or technical prowess to this finale, it remains difficult to justify the narrative and aesthetic detours that precede it--detours that regurgitate the tired aesthetics, repetitive schemas, and ritualized image construction of Hollywood’s totalizing machinery. The film’s grand ambitions risk being undercut by the very structure designed to them, leaving the viewer to wonder if the ultimate spectacle warrants the exhaustive journey.

[The following contains spoilers.]

The Entity--an AI capable of recursive self-reprogramming and omniscient network manipulation--re-emerges as the central anxiety, embodying not only total annihilation but infinite substitution. Untethered from referents, the image fractures into endless permutations, its claim to truth dissolved in synthetic recursion. This is the film’s deeper terror: not erasure, but relentless overwriting. Yet The Final Reckoning contains this crisis within a familiar ideological frame: an exceptionalist fantasy where extralegal operatives--Ethan Hunt and the IMF--wield near-limitless discretion with minimal oversight. Though the screenplay gestures at resistance via token conflicts with governmental authorities, these obstacles are superficial. The narrative depends on the fantasy of autonomous saviors operating beyond legal or institutional bounds, revealing the superficiality of its critique. Any suspicion resolves into reaffirmation. Even as the film toys with governmental ambiguity, it finds reassurance in military iconography and sovereign authority, in the righteous discretion of a commander-in-chief who can make the right choice when no one else can (Note: The President faced the difficult choice of deploying nuclear weapons against command centers worldwide compromised by the Entity--including those in China, the U.K., Israel, and others. If she were truly committed to that logic, she would still have spared every target except for authorizing the nuclear obliteration of Tel Aviv). The Entity’s deployment of networked illusion--deepfakes, misinformation, the orchestration of synthetic consensus--brushes against real-world fears: the generative disfigurement of the visible, the erosion of public trust, systemic violence fueled and obscured by disinformation, and the spectacle of leadership discredited by its own inaction amid unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. But the film confronts these crises only to transmute them, neutralizing systemic breakdown into the manageable aesthetics of thriller logic.

The Final Reckoning is slated as the last installment in the Mission: Impossible saga, yet its ending orbits a question of belief--not merely in one another, but in the very integrity of shared reality. The Entity, now in Ethan’s possession, signals not closure but rupture: a deferral that reopens rather than concludes. This final image invites reflection: has control shifted from the system to the subject, or simply mutated its form? What new regimes of surveillance, simulation, or sovereignty might emerge in their wake? The image offers no answers; it recedes into a fantasy of safety--one where the world is secure simply because the Entity rests in the hands of a man we are told is good and will destroy the Entity as he promised. But that belief is itself a construction, authored by the very film that demands our trust. Here, the film offers comfort in place of confrontation, resolution in place of reckoning. In its final gesture, The Final Reckoning reassures through fiction what it cannot guarantee through reality--suspending us in a carefully curated illusion of authenticity. And yet, if Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is the film’s guarantor of an “authentic cinema” grounded in the physical and the tangible, and if that same Hunt now wields the Entity--an analog for the generative AI threatening creative labor worldwide--what are we to make of Cruise’s position as the champion of authenticity? The authenticity he embodies is inseparable from his access: not only to his body as a vessel of physical commitment, but to a vast infrastructure of capital--technological, financial, institutional. What appears as daring is underwritten by logistical omnipotence: elite engineers, comprehensive safety nets, infinite takes. His is a cinema that simulates the possibility of failure without ever actually courting it. The freedom to fall, after all, is not the same as the certainty of surviving the fall.

This is not to dismiss the technical virtuosity involved but to question what kind of risk remains when every contingency is managed by wealth. The economy of Cruise’s stunts--marketed as heroic--obscures a different kind of artistic bravery: the courage to work within limits, to make something fragile, or even fail. In some sense, real risk has been evacuated from the frame, relocated into the abstract terrain of budgets and production schedules. For all its efforts toward realism, this is a cinema that has forgotten what it means to go without. One wonders whether a certain kind of creativity, one that emerges from pressure and scarcity, has been traded for the sheen of invulnerability. Constraint, once the mother of invention, now appears almost taboo--an inconvenience to be engineered away. But it is in precisely such conditions of lack that some of the most enduring cinema has taken shape, stripped down to elemental choices of rhythm, composition, tone. There is a quiet authority in works born from necessity, from an insistence on doing more with less--not because it flatters some ideal of purity, but because it compels thought. Not all virtuosity is visible. Some of it lies in how limitation becomes form. Cruise’s cinema, by contrast, stages danger without ever confronting destitution--material, aesthetic, or existential. It is a spectacle of a "mastery," but not of vulnerability. Perhaps that is what unsettles in this final image: the realization that the figure we associate with risk is, in fact, insulated from the conditions that make risk meaningful. In this light, The Final Reckoning becomes less an elegy than a contradiction: a farewell not to a man, but to an idea of authenticity whose foundations, once examined, begin to blur.

Violence unfolds both as sudden shatter and continual fracture in the flow of history; homes and schools collapse, yet the ruin reverberates, splintering the days that follow. Spaces where care and knowledge once gathered now stand hollowed out, emptied not of meaning but of use: structures intact in recollection, but no longer able to shelter the warmth of nurturing and learning, the murmur of shared growth. Waterways--those quiet arteries of sustenance--are sealed by concrete: the path of life interrupted, the gesture of nourishment arrested mid-motion. Elders--bearers of long memory and slow wisdom--are struck down under the indifferent weight of power. And in the aftermath: a field of debris--chairs overturned, tables splintered; remnants of another rhythm, another order of living. Within the hush of homes, in the private alcoves of ordinary life, farmers and their families speak: quietly, vulnerably, without performance. They do not plead but offer a kind of invitation, to witness not spectacle but spirit. Their fears do not cry out so much as breathe. In these spaces, time dilates; each word, each silence, carries the weight of seasons.

Between ruptures, beauty persists, not as ornament but as breath. The wind brushes over the crops, golden and bending, returning us to the opening gesture of history itself. Gatherings flicker into being: children laughing, elders threading memory into words, meals ed hand to hand in intimacy that brushes the sacred. Bravery blooms not in clamor but in the steadiness of those who remain. Even as the struggle wears on and outcomes fray, the fields return. The crops multiply--defiantly, faithfully--golden rows gleaming with the quiet resolve of endurance. The struggle continues, not only beyond the village but through it, coursing outward like a widening current. Resistance becomes more than a moment; it becomes a movement carried by many. And in this gesture--of standing, of staying, of speaking--history is not severed but sustained. History does not end here; it carries forward in the enduring image of wind-swept crops and the hands that still reach to tend them.

---

I’m grateful that J.T. Takagi was present for the screening and Q&A. I had the chance to ask a question to both her and a Nodutdol community organizer, and to speak with Takagi further afterwards.

Their responses were inspiring. I left with a deeper appreciation for the care and commitment not only in the storytelling itself, but in the sustained presence with communities rendered vulnerable or displaced by the imperial violence of Empire, and in the honoring of histories so often silenced.

Gestures do not signify but resonate--they emerge not as sensorial impressions but as sensitiveness: a duration detached from function, loosened from symbol, sinking into flesh. A hand does not reach so much as the possibility of reaching--not as a past act, but as an unrealized future returning in delay, hovering like breath held between desire and disappearance. Movement contracts rather than unfolds; it is not action but affect--an endurance, a persistence, an interval in which the body becomes both medium and message, transmitting the thickening of time. The wind does not respond to her; it emerges with her, as her--she does not move through space but gives form to its invisibility. Suspended between stillness and motion, her body opens a rift in presence: wrists lingering mid-air, ankles grazing the earth, touching the world as if laying claim to it. Each motion bears the texture of hesitation, the rhythm of a wound through which the unspeakable seeps--what cannot be known, only felt. Love murmurs in the folds of movement, at the threshold between vanishing and return. Narrative cannot contain this motion; only the slow implosion of subject and world into one prolonged exhalation.

Images do not depict but consecrate--they enter her event, becoming sacraments of the ephemeral. Cinema, in this , gathers what trembles and falters, and says, "This, too, is worthy." It does not tell the story of lovers, but of loving as a condition--dispersed, elemental, temporally estranged. Their bodies are caught in the indiscernibility of gestures, melted across the interval between impulse and articulation. Yet disillusionment folds time inward, curving it into a density that gathers lovers in the same room, only to scatter them across diverging durations--co-present yet out of phase, misaligned like overlapping wavelengths, as if time itself had forgotten how to hold them together. And in this misalignment, they begin to lose even the claim to shared presence--not through rupture, but through a slow erosion, as if intimacy had no ground to stand on, no horizon to orient itself toward. Landscape, then, becomes affective: plains, suburbs, drive-throughs transformed into thresholds between immanence and transcendence. Between sky and soil, void and rigor, the images conjure a world where light, wind, water, and ground speak. They do not merely show; they allow the invisible to shimmer--memory diffused into sunlight, duration suspended in a gesture, the sublime caught in the slow dissolution of shadow, and the bodies in between, wandering and wondering.

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

We fade into a submerged opacity; sudden descent--unseen, only inferred--disturbs the stillness. Ripples articulate what had remained latent: that we were always looking at water. Then, a fading, an image withdrawing into dissolution.

At sunset, a forsaken school ground or, rather, a forsaken space: overgrown, left to rot. The pool lies stagnant, choked with debris. But from somewhere unseen, light spills through windows, not as a source but as a trace: rectilinear imprints cast onto the ground. A girl enters, tentative yet absorbed, weaving through these spectral geometries. Amid neglect, the light becomes uncanny. She halts, raises her hand, and grazes the beam, tracing the tactility of apparition.

We return to the same submersion, though not of water, but of light and surface. The ripple this time is gentler, less of a rupture than a whisper. The brightness lifts slightly; contours stir but do not cohere. Again, the image dissolves, quietly slipping from view.

Against a bruised blue sky--dawn or dusk suspended in ambiguity--she raises a fractured crystal to the air. Its broken surfaces catch the first available light or perhaps the last, not reflecting so much as refracting it inward, concentrating the atmosphere into a serene clarity.

Surrounded by the debris of shattered glass--fragments of the abandonment--she moves with uneven rhythm: hurried, hesitant, as if responding to the shifting density of light. She lifts the crystal again, its refracted glimmer multiplying the world into tremors of clarity, never settling into a single shape. Each step unsettles the stillness of the place, not violently, but as a visitor might unsettle memory, through presence alone. Skipping, weaving, tossing aside shards, she dances across the ruin, her motion a kind of inscription: a girl entering space not to claim it, but to let it refract her.

Ascending toward light, she steps into darker interiors, then climbs upward, closer to the sun. Below: a tangle of foliage. Around her: more fractured crystals. She picks them up and throws them into the undergrowth. Not carelessly, but with quiet conviction, as if dispersing herself across the unseen. The gesture lingers: a silhouette against an indeterminate sky, her movements shifting between dusk and dawn, like a crystalline pendulum suspended in the act of visitation.

She sits now, low to the ground--an inverse of her ascent--surrounded once more by fractured crystals. Her hands drift along her legs in slow, inward gestures; her gaze lowered, drawn somewhere beneath thought. A quiet pensiveness settles, almost solemn. Then, with measured grace, she extends her body alongside the scattered shards, reclining as if to mirror their abandonment. For a moment, she lies still: crystalline, discarded, luminous. The image floods with light, as if the act of laying down dissolves her into brilliance, a final overexposure that renders boundary and body indistinct.

A top-down view of the staircase reframes its function: once a vector of ascent, now seen as a path of descent. Light and shadow carve it into segments, not quite steps but alternating thresholds. Such contradiction--the promise of upward movement seen from above, from a gaze that flattens it--unsettles orientation. Still, the girl moves upward, her figure ing through the sharp partitions of light and shade, affirming a kind of ascent even as the image suggests its reversal.

A cluster of shattered crystals: each one subtly distinct, surveyed in quiet succession. Her gaze narrows, eyes fixed downward in focused absorption, until it settles on a fragment of paper littered among the glass. Its illustrations are indiscernible, yet a singular star-shaped aperture interrupts its opacity. When she lifts it to the sky, refracted sunlight pierces through--crystalline and sharp--projecting a scattering of starlight. She angles the fragment, attempting to align chaos into clarity, to concentrate dispersion into illumination. Light enters from the opposite side, filtered through absence.

Below us, she looks upward, face framed by the paper she holds: an invocation or offering.

We return once more to the ripple: now clearer, no longer a disturbance but a soft disclosure. The water--once stirred into ambiguity--begins to still. Contours faintly resolve, yet resist solidity. What emerges remains transient. The surface quiets, not with finality, but with a breath held. Then again, the image recedes, less an ending than a soft exhale.

She lowers the paper from her face, but her face does not return; instead, light issues from its place, as if her features have been replaced by a radiance. The image recurs, more closely framed: her face now faintly visible, yet once again eclipsed by overexposure. Such repetition refracts like crystal: each instance a mirrored echo, multiplying rather than clarifying, as if her image could only be glimpsed through the prism of its disappearance.

A model horse, still and ornate, emerges: an emblem of a carousel frozen in time. The frame begins to spin, as if revolving around an absent axis. In this orbit, fragments reappear: the crystals, the girl, the sun--each reflecting, refracting, collapsing into one another like light through faceted glass. The carousel’s movement is illusory, yet it holds her, visitor or apparition, part of the circuit or ensnared in its repetition, its revolution.

Then the horse burns. The rhythmic rotation halts, a moment suspended in fixation.

Then the motion resumes, more erratic now: spiraling, reversing, unraveling, but always drawn back to the smoldering figure.

At last, she walks away; the image brightens to white. Her departure is not a displacement, but the crystallization of her presence, a reflection and a refraction: not simply of a visitor, nor of the space she leaves behind, but of a figure suspended in her own immolation, burning at the axis of return, igniting memory itself.

Wouldn’t such a visitor’s absence, in her hallowed departure, prompt us not only to reflect on what has been abandoned, but to ask what remains--trapped in the refractions of memory, waiting to be seen again?

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Collider: I wanted to highlight one particular visual effect that I absolutely loved. It's what happens when someone encounters the Void.

SCHREIER: Oh, I can nerd out on this.

Collider: Is that how you pictured it looking day one, or is that a visual effects design that evolved from draft one to what we see in the finished film?

SCHREIER: That was a long search, and it started with Grace's references. It definitely came from images from Hiroshima and those kinds of shadows...

idk man. kinda weird to use imagery born from the Hiroshima bombing--literal shadows of incinerated human beings--as aesthetic inspiration for... American superheroes being depressed? For Americans (and Eastern European stereotypes) being sad? Come on now.

Even with all that A24 talent, what's the point if the images are going to end up not just grey, but the kind of dull, undifferentiated grey that feels algorithmically selected (I'd argue A24 has a similar problem with homogenizing aesthetics)?

I also find myself questioning the sincerity--or at least the consistency--of these images. If we’re to accept the climactic confrontation in the shadow dimension as an allegorical articulation of confronting painful memories and past trauma, and if Yelena pleads with Bob to stop assaulting The Void (his shadow self) as a means of internal reconciliation, then what do we make of the violence that precedes this climax? Not just in this movie, but across the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe, where violence isn’t merely a recurring motif but a foundational spectacle. If this movie--and Marvel as a brand--were to attempt any real differentiation between “good” and “bad” violence, between healing and harm, it would have to reckon with the structural contradiction of its own iconography: namely, that superheroism is premised on interventionist violence enacted against perceived threats. Such a contradiction remains unresolved because resolving it would mean dismantling the ideological foundation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Given the state of world politics--continually destabilized by American foreign policy--I wonder what such a gesture truly accomplishes: what it obscures, what it rehabilitates (rehabilitation being a major theme of the movie), and whose power it ultimately reaffirms. What, exactly, is the language of therapy in this movie accomplishing?

I forgot the rest of the movie on the way out of the theater.

"Mr. Kafuku. As far as I know, Oto was a really lovely woman. Of course, what I know must be a tiny fraction of what you know about her. But I still think so with certainty. You lived with such a lovely person for over 20 years, and you should be grateful about that. That's my opinion. But even if you think you know someone well, even if you love that person deeply, you can't completely look into that person's heart. You'll just feel hurt. But if you put in enough effort, you should be able to look into your own heart pretty well. So in the end, what we should be doing is to be true to our hearts and come to with it in a capable way. If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself squarely and deeply. That's what I think."

In the slow surfacing of morning--darkness still hanging low, yet light beginning to unfold its threads--he saw her again, a figure suspended between night and day, arisen like mist, like breath from his own ribs.

The space between them had once been nothing at all: only the warmth of a palm placed on the arch of a back, the slow, murmuring touch that makes a body known again. Is not the work of love the closing of distance, while the work of creation is the enrichment of it? And was not the first creation the desire for a face to turn toward--for a home to return to, within another's voice?

Their days had been written in small, hidden places: car rides that turned into confessions, stations between departure and return, hands seeking each other in the nowhere of transit. In the sanctuary of moving, closed-off spaces, they had invented a world: a hush, a secret language born only between the two of them. Because it moved, it belonged to no one; because it belonged to no one, it became their truest dwelling.

"Mr. Kafuku, about Oto... Would it be hard for you to accept her, everything about her, as genuine? Maybe there was nothing mysterious about her. Would it be hard to think that she was simply like that? That she loved you dearly and that she sought other men constantly don't seem to contradict each other or sound deceptive to me. Is that strange? I'm sorry."

There had been betrayals. Small fissures she did not name, gestures he did not press into speech. But if she smiled against his neck, if she kissed him so long at the door that the day had to wait its turn--then was that not also true? Her laughter after a teasing word, her sudden embrace when she saw him falter: were those too not a kind of oath?

He wondered: was her love a fixed star, or a flickering fire built from many hands? Is it so strange that a heart might contain several thirsts at once, without ceasing to beat steadily for one?

Even after her voice crossed into silence, he recalled the late-night calls, the clumsy video chats, the easy, unguarded laughter that said, "I am here, I am yours." If he trusted that voice once--should he not trust it now?

"I... should have been hurt properly. I let something genuine slip by. I was so deeply hurt. To the point of distraction. But... Because of that... I pretended not to notice it. I didn't listen to myself. So I lost Oto. Forever. Now I see. I want to see Oto. If I do, I want to yell at her. Berate her. For lying to me all the time. I want to apologize. For not listening. For not being strong. I want her back. I want her to live. I want to talk to her just once more. I want to see her. But it's too late. There's no turning back. There's nothing I can do. Those who survive keep thinking about the dead. In one way or another, that will continue. You and I must keep living like that. We must keep on living. It'll be OK. I'm sure we'll be OK."

He ed the soft weight of a blanket placed over her sleeping body, the way she pulled him down without waking fully, pressed her mouth to his forehead as if to say, "I found you again."

He ed the last time they kissed goodbye, the door clicking shut like a small final note--still smiling, still waving, not knowing how permanent some farewells would become.

He drove alone now, through streets they once filled with talk and laughter, the moving, nowhere spaces still whispering with their unfinished symphony. Creation had been constant between them: the daily forging of trust, the daily braiding of voice and silence into belonging.

He had thought love would guard them from absence. He had thought faithfulness would armor them against fate. But love, too, can harbor unknowable shores. Faithfulness, too, can be blind and broken.

Even so--should the mystery of another heart, the shadows we cannot reach, make us turn away? Even if we can never fully know someone, must that stop us from loving them?

Still, what choice was there? Should the persimmon tree refuse to grow because the hands that planted it trembled? Should the wheat withhold its seed because it was sown by fallible beings?

No.

Even betrayal could not annul the tenderness that had been. Even absence could not unmake the home they built each time they touched, each time they laughed, each time they said, without saying, "I am with you. I am for you."

And so he chose--he would choose, again and again--to live. To bear the ache properly. To properly. To carry, not erase. To move forward with the wound, not despite it.

There would always be another sunrise struggling against the dark. Another voice rising out of silence. Another reaching hand.

He would keep living. And somehow--they would be okay.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

A village caught between stone and sky prepares for a celebration beneath the weight of its captivity. A father dreams of a wedding, radiant enough to outshine the curfew, pleading the night into existence, only to share the festivity with those who impose silence. Within the clasp of two days, time bends--becoming both burden and pulse.

Amid roasted grains and jasmine oil, the bride is adorned, the groom paraded; burden marks the pulse of history. What festivity is free when watched? What intimacy remains when overseen by uniforms? The young couple drifts into whiteness drained of sound and shadow, where touch becomes proof, and consummation is claimed like land--seen, seized.

Bodies, gazes, textures, and songs. Time coils, returns, echoes. Resistance murmurs in kitchens and bedrooms, not yet erupting but crackling, a fire smoldering beneath each breath. A brother refuses to attend, seeing in the celebration not unity but humiliation. The youth, restless, aching with pride.

Women move like constellations--washing, dressing, tending--refusing to disappear. Their labor sustains the rhythms of life, memory stitched into careful gestures. They cradle the enemy as they would their daughters. The air is thick with rosewater and memory; their touch speaks a language older than law. Yet soldiers eat food they call foreign, unaware they are tasting the land they seek to erase.

A mare dances between life and death, guided not by bullets but by gentleness. One must coax an animal with whispers; the future seemed possible--not through domination, but through patience, love, and care.

A mother becomes the fulcrum of the family, translating the presence of absence into guidance. A bride, bloodless still, acts. Her gesture--precise, fearless, mythic--replaces violence with self-possession. A stained sheet ends the ceremony; outside, stones begin to fly--not to wound, but to declare. We are here, they say, and we are not ghosts.

Children run.

A boy, breath ragged, finds himself against the darkness. He runs from something--or perhaps towards it. The sounds of children dissolve into gunshots, but it is the moonlight that catches him--not in triumph, but in transition. The land is already soaked, already heavy with history, yet his body becomes a page not yet written on.

This texture, this rhythm, this intimacy--with soil and story--cannot be erased, lingering in contradictions: beauty shadowed by worry, tenderness pierced by threat. It maps geography from flickers of light and hushes of shadow, where night is thick with tension, too fragile to dream in twice.

The moonlight is beautiful because the moon is far--untouchable, watching from above as the chase unfolds beneath the trees, the ribs of childhood. Even if the land burns, its people sing. Even as the curfew steals the night, the celebration refuses silence. Even through the darkness, a boy runs--not towards escape, but into the breath of the land, into the hush before dawn, where history lies not buried, but breathing.

And in that last breath, what was meant to end becomes a beginning--not of return, but of a third day, a third dream: unmeasured, unpromised, where time steps outside its captors and drifts beyond the reach of curfew.

The images drift through the loneliness of existing. Some would perceive this as a failure to live; others might accept it as the long, slow endurance of time, of existence. To be old is not simply marked by frailty or forgetfulness, but by the gradual collapse of attention: the elapse of a gaze that once lingered. The old are not only dying--they are ceasing to be seen. Yet within that invisibility, something endures: not presence, but duration. Not motion, but repetition. Such images suggest that stillness is not absence; if motion deposits space, duration--even in stillness--deposits meaning. Not in the grand gestures of life-as-living, but in the repeated gestures of existence-as-endurance: the quiet ritual of eating in isolation; the after-meal cigarette, its smoke curling like memory from one's fingers; the patient futility of coaxing life back into a broken clock; the distant sorrow of a palm pressed to the window, her gaze suspended between a past that lingers and a future too clouded to name. Such are the rhythms of endurance: of becoming, even in neglect. Existing, then, is not the opposite of living, but its quiet twin--collapsed into subtlety, salvaged from silence. Why should living be the one extolled as an embrace--an elegance--when existence may be the truer intimacy: the duration that does not rush to mean but remains? There is continuity even in the static: the beauty of the inanimate, the sublime held in the reflection of a face abandoned by history. Such images endure by duration--elegance not despite inelegance, but within it.

I don't think this film possesses the appropriate qualities in content and construction necessary to constitute the kind of compelling cinema its images demand, though I'm not quick to dismiss it as something bad per se, as I do think it's distinguished by its efforts to pool from a vast repository of genres--the histories and conventions of both cinema and music--with a kind of frantic reverence that’s audacious, even if the result is overdetermined, belabored, even istrative. Certainly, it is a film lavish with ideas, though they are scattered by the varied accidents of exhaustion: either a sequence is diluted by a rapid barrage of cuts or adulterated by an obligatory long take, both of which prioritize the immediate experience of activity over a sustained grasp of rhythm, texture, continuity, modulation, or the shape of duration. It is a cinema that values gratification over lucidity, the sensorial over the sublime, and perspective over poetry; yet the ambition behind the artifice remains irable.

In 2003, Hayao Miyazaki decided not to attend the Academy Awards, even though his film, ‘Spirited Away,’ was up for Best Animated Feature. He did not give a reason at the time, and it was conjectured that the Japanese animator’s absence was related to President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq that year.

Miyazaki, who has not spoken publicly of the subject, today explained his reasons in an interview with The Times at Comic-Con.

"The reason I wasn’t here for the Academy Award was because I didn’t want to visit a country that was bombing Iraq,’ he said. ‘At the time, my producer shut me up and did not allow me to say that, but I don’t see him around today. By the way, my producer also shared in that feeling."

- Comic-Con: Miyazaki breaks his silent protest of America’s actions in Iraq with visit to the U.S.

I feel like we are nearing to the end of times.

We humans are losing faith in ourselves. . .

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 23, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 23, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 22, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Thursday March 20, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

newest first

• Noryang: Deadly Sea
• Love Reset
• The Roundup: No Way Out
• Kill Boksoon
• 20th Century Girl
• Project Wolf Hunting
• Confidential Assignment 2: International
• Seoul Vibe
• Carter
• Hansan: Rising Dragon

...plus 694 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

- list of (film) soundtracks I like
- includes OSTs, pre-existing music from other sources, rearrangements, etc.
- notes may include samples
- no particular order + work in progress: may rank it in the future

• 24 City

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi8rVAnRoKk

• 3-Iron
• Asako I & II
• Babel

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBd23zyz1w4

• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD5wQROo_bs

• Between Calmness and ion

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrg_q7l9uvw

• A Bittersweet Life

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=epTS2o-lKPY

• Blossom Again

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIT90BTS_Lg

• Blue Velvet

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxej6yUJv-E

• Bongja

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6ygD1s8TtI

...plus 79 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films I Like from 1995

wip

1. The People in White
2. The Bridges of Madison County
3. The Enclosed Valley
4. God's Comedy
5. Safe
6. Ulysses' Gaze
7. A Single Spark
8. 301/302
9. Love in the Time of Twilight
10. La Ceremonie

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

wip

5 stars also wip

diary date (newest first)

• Onibaba
• Manoel’s Destinies
• War and Peace
• Demons
• Abraham's Valley
• The Journey
• The Sound of the Shaking Earth
• City of Pirates
• Voices Through Time
• The Blue Planet

...plus 272 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

- list of anime openings and endings I like
- notes may include samples
- no particular order + work in progress: may rank it in the future

• The Ancient Magus' Bride

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuZbmLLv1vM

• The Apothecary Diaries

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ-DKvLQlyQ

• Asobi Asobase - workshop of fun -

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ88sSjAETU

• Baccano!

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSjOcXSv-JY

• Bakemonogatari

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SwCnmUI8QI

• Berserk

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOXMt5O4Ly4

• Chainsaw Man

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymQ3wEIq84Y

• Cowboy Bebop

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru_H5PiyfSA

• Cross Game

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-D6RwES6Ls

• DAN DA DAN: First Encounter

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4na2opArGY

...plus 32 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "I would like to ask you if you know any film abt Alzheimer’s"
- films about "memory"
- films related to the above

• Umberto D.
• Ikiru
• Tokyo Story
• Ordet
• Wild Strawberries
• La Jetée
• Mirror
• Nosferatu the Vampyre
• L’homme atlantique
• My Memories of Old Beijing

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Suggestions are welcome (preferably films I've already seen)

Essays/reviews will be anywhere between a paragraph or multiple pages long depending on the film.

Current Project: Asako I & II

• 12 Angry Men
• Amadeus
• American Psycho
• Asako I & II
• Autumn Sonata
• Bacurau
• Beauty and the Beast
• Bicycle Thieves
• Blue Velvet
• Burning

...plus 64 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "any horror / thriller / generally accepted as 'scary' or 'unsettling' films that you have seen and i have not / you haven’t seen but always wanted to / had friends say is ‘genuinely’ scary in some way?"

• 301/302
• The Addiction
• Blow Out
• Body Double
• Come and See
• The Devil
• Eaten Alive
• Elephant
• Empire of ion
• The Faculty

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 301/302
• 3-Iron
• Ardor
• Beastie Boys
• Beat
• A Bittersweet Life
• Blossom Again
• Bungee Jumping of Their Own
• Burning
• Café Noir

...plus 66 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "korean director recs"
- "not looking for a particular era or time period"
- open to any suggestions

Each entry is my favorite film of each director

Notes may include brief descriptions about the directors or their films

In general, watch their films in release order

• Yeong-ja’s Heydays

  Canonized director + film

  Foundational "hostess melodrama" in its reconfiguration of its genre template to that of a "youth film" on unilateral urbanization and modernization

• The Road to Sampo

  Canonized director + film

  Quintessential Korean "road movie involving two men and one woman"

  Lee Man-hee's renowned for his powerful command of melodramatic devices

• The Shower

  Canonized film

  Go Yeong-nam has made two films worth checking out: this, and Suddenly in the Dark

• The Last Witness

  Canonized director + film

  Brilliant reconfiguration of crime melodrama as an epic

• The Man with Three Coffins

  Canonized director + film

  Lee Jang-ho's one of the boldest filmmakers of the 80s

• North Korean Partisan in South Korea

  Canonized director + film

  Chung Ji-young's infusion of politics and dramatic psychology creates some of the most compelling images

• Our Twisted Hero

  Canonized director + film

• A Single Spark

  Canonized director + film

• The People in White

  Canonized director

  Bae Yong-kyun's mostly known for Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? However, I would say The People in White is not just my favorite film he directed but also my #1 favorite, maybe.

• Habitual Sadness

  Canonized documentary trilogy

  Trilogy includes The Murmuring, this, and My Own Breathing

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- no restrictions (anything goes)

• Ad Lib Night
• Afire
• All That Heaven Allows
• Beau Travail
• Blissfully Yours
• The Butterfly
• Cléo from 5 to 7
• Embracing
• Fallen Leaves
• The Fiancés

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "curious about eastern films"
- "no particular preference but would avoid horror probably"

• The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter
• Asako I & II
• The Ascent
• The Assassin
• Black Rain
• Boy
• A Brighter Summer Day
• The Butterfly
• Chungking Express
• Confessions Among Actresses

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- slice of life
- "describes the everyday life of a character."
- "Preferably not in English, I would like to know the cinema of other countries. If it's in English, it's still fine, if it's something indie or not so well known"

• Ad Lib Night
• Christmas in August
• The Company of Strangers
• The Fiancés
• From the East
• Homecoming
• Il Posto
• Killer of Sheep
• The Meetings of Anna
• Moonlit Winter

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "directors/films tonally (and aesthetically) close to park chan-wook."
- "kinda offbeat & somewhat campy but still emotionally gratifying."

• Black Christmas
• Blow Out
• Bongja
• Boy
• Declaration of Fools
• Deep Red
• Exotica
• The Face of Another
• Fresh Kill
• Green Snake

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- free-for-all

Notes include things interesting about the film or reasons why I think you'll like it.

1. 301/302

   food and sex; unhinged

2. The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter

   very impressive stunts + acrobatics

3. A Bittersweet Life

   pretend he's gay

4. Boy

   very smart + emotionally stirring

5. Colossal Youth

   each formal decision s as something deeply historical and symbolic

6. Confessions Among Actresses

   very smart + fun

7. Daughter of the Nile

   city pop urban ennui

8. Day of Wrath

   serious cinema

9. The Dupes

   engrossing history + aesthetics

10. Exotica

    smart

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "a free for all. I'll take anything you think would be good for me to check out."
- "I'm relatively new to cinema so my horizons are vast"
- "I guess stuff I wouldn't like to see a lot of is nudity or stuff like torture porn. Anything you'd see on a darkest media tier list would be something I wouldn't be all for lol"

Keep in mind I'm recommending films I think you'll like, so there will be films I don't personally like here. Some films will include notes to elaborate on reasons why I recommended them or some context that could make your viewing experience more interesting.

1. Man with a Movie Camera

   One of my go-to recommendations to people who are either new to cinema or are eager to learn more about what cinema is capable of.

2. It's a Wonderful Life
3. Sunset Boulevard

   Quintessential "Hollywood film about Hollywood."

4. A Streetcar Named Desire
5. Singin' in the Rain

   La La Land homework.

6. Ikiru
7. The Wages of Fear

   I think you'll like Friedkin's Sorcerer, which is a "remake" of this film.

8. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
9. Roman Holiday
10. Tokyo Story

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "revolutionary or socialist (or 'leftist') korean movies"

You're not going to find many films from south Korea that endorse or champion "revolutionary politics" (the most you'll get are "anti-imperialism," "anti-capitalism," "anti-American," and "working class struggle/labor rights"), but the south Korean films I've recommended here can be invaluable when engaged with a leftist perspective; as platitudinous as it is, it truly is a matter of interpretation, and I think that's what makes these works invaluable from a leftist perspective. I'm also recommending films from directors whose filmography may include other works that I typically avoid recommending to folks younger than college students. I don't want to sound like a parent or a teacher (despite being a teacher for 4+ years) but I do want to be responsible with what films/art I share. You're more than welcome to explore the rest of their filmography, though do be aware that they deal with content that isn't exactly suitable for kids, even teens (I know you mentioned you watched Throw Away Your Books but hey I think you get what I'm saying considering boundaries and all). Regardless, hope you enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions!

*notes will include some context to consider
*sorted by release date

• When We Pick Apples
• The Flower Girl
• Yeong-ja’s Heydays

  Foundational "hostess melodrama" in its reconfiguration of its genre template to that of a "youth film" on unilateral urbanization and modernization.

• The Last Witness

  The source is a popular anti-communist novel that was adapted to redirect its politics to uncover and dissolve (south) Korea's troubled history since the division of the peninsula. The director himself has stated that his aim with the film is to focus less on the anti-communist message of the source and more on the dark history of contemporary (south) Korea. There's a reason why this film was initially heavily censored and pulled from screenings upon release.

• People in the Slum
• Whale Hunting
• Deep Blue Night
• A Traffic Controller on Crossroads
• The Age of Success

  Jang Sun-woo's a favorite filmmaker who aims to fulfill a particular aesthetic or genre of cinema with each film he releases. Although I would argue that all of his films are "Marxian," Jang has labeled The Age of Success as his "Marxist" film.

• A Short Love Affair

  If The Age of Success is Jang's "Marxist" film, then A Short Love Affair is his "socialist realist."

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "korean films"
- "im looking for directors that arent as well known"

• Ad Lib Night
• Chilsu and Mansu
• Gyeongju
• North Korean Partisan in South Korea
• The Road to the Racetrack

Theme(s):

- "films you love/would like me to see for the new year"

• Awaara
• Death by Hanging
• Declaration of Fools
• The Extras
• The Fiancés
• Jealousy Is My Middle Name
• Moscow
• Our Twisted Hero
• Sacrificed Youth
• Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?

Theme(s):

- "movies about cinema"
- "about lonely people"
- "samurai"
- "Japanese"
- "Korean cinema"
- "childhood or childhood nostalgia"

• A Bittersweet Life
• Bleak Night
• Boy
• Close-Up
• A Hometown in Heart
• House of Hummingbird
• Man with a Movie Camera
• Motel Cactus
• The Naked Island
• Nobody Knows

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "road trip vibe"
- "ing through somewhere, nature/landscapes, being on the road, lacking a fixed setting"
- "looking back at a past time, seeing how people perceive an era after its already 'ended'"

• Badlands
• Bandits of Orgosolo
• Blissfully Yours
• The Butterfly
• The Company of Strangers
• The Dupes
• Fertile Memory
• From the East
• Gabbeh
• The House of Us

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Here's a list of "Asian Diaspora" films I like. I've taken some creative liberties when it comes to selecting which films I think are about the "Asian Diaspora" so yeh

• Banana Paradise
• Between Calmness and ion
• The Butterfly
• Columbus
• Death by Hanging
• Decision to Leave
• Deep Blue Night
• Farewell China
• Fukuoka
• Gyeongju

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "korean films"
- "preferably 2000s films"
- "easy to get into"
- "simple but very beautiful"
- "rich atmosphere"
- "something melancholic"
- "any genre works but melodrama/romance mainly"
- "extreme gore is probably off the table"
- "exploitation stuff is also not really my thing"

• Castaway on the Moon
• Christmas in August
• Failan
• Family Ties
• I Wish I Had a Wife
• t Security Area
• Josée
• Late Autumn
• Little Forest
• A Midsummer's Fantasia

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- Korean
- Mostly pre 2000s but some 2000s "new wave" (renaissance) films

Important Notes:

- Ranking is for ordering and organizing purposes.
- 1-16 are my favorites (from oldest to newest).
- 17 and onward are ordered from oldest to newest.
- 18-21 are "Golden Era Melodramas."
- 22 and 24-29 are landmark films during era of greater censorship.
- 1-2, 30-35, and 37-38 are landmark films during the "recovery period"
- 3-6 and 40-46 are films during the "new wave" (note: Bodhi-Dharma may end up as a favorite)
- 7-16 and 47 and onward are films during the early renaissance (post-IMF crisis)

1. The Last Witness
2. The Man with Three Coffins
3. The Road to the Racetrack
4. age to Buddha
5. The People in White
6. Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie
7. Lies
8. Peppermint Candy
9. Jealousy Is My Middle Name
10. Oasis

...plus 47 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s)

- "I like movies that tackle political/historical/ethical issues"
- "I also love movies about familial bonds (with a spice of psychology)"
- "ionate about punk and the underground representation of youth"

• The Ballad of Narayama
• Blow Out
• Crimes of ion
• Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind
• The Decline of Western Civilization
• Fresh Kill
• Funeral Parade of Roses
• I Don't Know
• Made in Hong Kong
• Mamma Roma

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "like blue spring by todoya or night flight by leesong"
- "movies that are full of repressed feelings and rage."

• Beat
• Boy
• The Butterfly
• Cain and Abel
• Flower Island
• Leila
• Maborosi
• Mahjong
• The Needle
• Paradise Villa

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "non asian"
- "europe"
- "commercial stuff"

• 35 Shots of Rum
• Adoption
• The Ascent
• The Banshees of Inisherin
• The Company of Strangers
• The Double Life of Véronique
• Friday Night
• Hiroshima Mon Amour
• Malignant
• Safe

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s)

- any "experimental" film involving korean landscapes
- "(Korean) landscapes are shot really nice"

• The Flower Girl
• Hwang Jin Yi
• The Last Witness
• The Man with Three Coffins
• North Korean Partisan in South Korea
• Painted Fire
• age to Buddha
• The Road to Sampo
• Scenery
• The Shower

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "anything similar to fukuoka and probably close-up."

• Ad Lib Night
• The Extras
• Gusto Kita with All My Hypothalamus
• Gyeongju
• Homecoming
• House of Hummingbird
• A Midsummer's Fantasia
• A Moment of Innocence
• The Mourning Forest
• Moving On

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s)

- "found family, pretend family, miserable families, all families and friendships and human connections"
- "no plot just vibez and walking and boring conversations and long silences and longer roads oh and i love minimal camera work"
- "stories dealing with loss, grief, angst, loneliness"
- "please no incest or weird relationships "
- "preferably not a lot of explicit scenes.. tryna keep it as halal as possible aha"
- "honestly overall.. i like miserable stories and idc if they're being melodramatic"
- "also im still scared of watching old films but ill give them a go if u have cool recs"

• Autumn Moon
• A Borrowed Life
• The Cloud in Her Room
• Dreams of the City
• The Fiancés
• The First Lap
• For One More Hour With You
• Homecoming
• House of Hummingbird
• Killer of Sheep

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "korean or Asian cinema"
- "really interesting cinematography"
- "crazy but amazing stories and interesting like old boy that you cant look away from"
- "whatever you think I’ll like, I haven’t seen much of your reviews for animated works but if you have any you really like id love to watch"

• The Assassin
• Belladonna of Sadness
• Christmas in August
• Cure
• Decision to Leave
• Don't Go Breaking My Heart
• Ernest & Celestine

  chingu's rec

• Happy Together
• In the Mood for Love
• Intentions of Murder

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "Underrated gems"
- "entertaining films"
- "I also like horror"

• Addicted
• The Ballad of Narayama
• The Beyond
• Blow Out
• Bongja
• The Butterfly
• Cure
• Death by Hanging
• Fresh Kill
• Ganja & Hess

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "I'm looking for some movies which give me the same vibes as Gyeongju"
- "like what I mean is, the characters not talking much exploring the city the place and just doing some everyday tasks with a little silence and and the background score not really diverse in it"

• 35 Shots of Rum
• The Butterfly
• The Cloud in Her Room
• The Fiancés
• The First Lap
• Friday Night
• House of Hummingbird
• In the Mood for Love
• Like Someone in Love
• A Midsummer's Fantasia

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):
- "my fav directors are like jung ji woo, zhang lu, hong sang soo, sion sono, kiyoshi, ryusuke"
- "was trying to find more films like Eungyo or Fourth Place - really enjoyed those"

• Ad Lib Night
• Autumn Moon
• Between Calmness and ion
• Blue Moon
• The Butterfly
• The Cloud in Her Room
• The
• The First Lap
• Flower Island
• The Harmonium in My Memory

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- films similar to The Last Witness

• Children...
• Cruel Story of Youth
• Decision to Leave
• Idol
• The Last Witness
• Moby Dick
• No Mercy
• Paju
• The Truth Beneath
• The Verdict

Theme(s):

- "similar to lily chou chou or let the right one in"

• Autumn Moon
• Birth
• The Butterfly
• Cleaners
• The Cloud in Her Room
• Eureka
• Hot Gimmick: Girl Meets Boy
• House of Hummingbird
• Julien Donkey-Boy
• Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy.

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "Korean drama’s"
- "I like stories with heavy themes of melancholy and relationship dramas"
- "Anything you find interesting in that very broad spectrum I’d be interested in"

• 3-Iron
• Ad Lib Night
• Addicted
• Be with You
• Beat
• Bongja
• The Butterfly
• Camel(s)
• Christmas in August
• Come Rain, Come Shine

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Homework for understanding the references, symbols, ideas, etc. in A Quiet Dream (Zhang Lu, 2016).

• A Bittersweet Life
• Breathless
• The Day He Arrives
• Drunken Master
• Gyeongju
• Jane
• The Journals of Musan
• Love And...
• Paju
• Poetry

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "im largely into Surreal, psychological, fucked up movies"
- "not exactly into action or edgy gore/overtly violent shit—especially if it doesnt contribute to the plot at all."
- "i love experimental/surreal / psychological works but also stuff that brings light to the fucked up edges of society."

• Cape Fear
• Charade
• Daisies
• Empire of ion
• The Face of Another
• Foxcatcher
• I Can't Sleep
• Idol
• The Insect Woman
• Nowhere

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "Asian films only"
- "Crime/thriller"
- "Friendship or family"
- "Realistic/sad"
- "Comforting"
- "With lgbt+ rep"
- "Pretty cinematography"
- "Disturbing but good movies"
- "Films similar to: vengeance trilogy, nobody knows, the Florida project"

• Ad Lib Night
• Bleak Night
• Bongja
• A Borrowed Life
• Cure
• Exiled
• Homecoming
• The Last Witness
• The Love Eterne
• Moving On

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):
- "Korean film recommendations."
- "some deep cuts"
- "some horror"
- "black comedies"
- "high concept"
- "surrealism"
- "absurdism"
- "class war"
- "love stories"
- "feel free to go nuts, even if it's just a good film that doesn't meet the criteria"

• 301/302
• Beasts Clawing at Straws
• The Call
• Gyeongju
• Lies
• M
• Paradise Villa
• The President's Last Bang
• Save the Green Planet!
• A Single Spark

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From skullsquisher's list.

Lots of fun stuff here 👀

1. Blow Out
2. The Beyond
3. Deep Red
4. Zombie Flesh Eaters
5. Suspiria
6. The Brood
7. Phenomena
8. Opera
9. Cemetery Man
10. Stage Fright

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- cosy korean movies
- similar vibes as Microhabitat or Poetry

• Ad Lib Night
• Be with You
• Christmas in August
• Double Patty
• The First Lap
• Fukuoka
• Gyeongju
• The Harmonium in My Memory
• The House of Us
• Late Autumn

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- Asian
- Melodrama
- "even genre films that function as melodrama would be good to throw on"

• The Ballad of Narayama
• Between Calmness and ion
• Blossom Again
• Chunhyang
• The
• A Day Off
• Deep Blue Night
• The Extras
• Gilsodom
• Happy End

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- "probably any film that's similar to ad lib night"
- "and camel(s)"

• A Bride for Rip Van Winkle
• The Butterfly
• The Cloud in Her Room
• A Day Off
• The Double Life of Véronique
• The Extras
• The First Lap
• Heavenly Homecoming to Stars
• Homecoming
• July Rhapsody

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Here is a link to the Korean Film Archive YouTube Channel:

www.youtube.com//KoreanFilm

• The Age of Success

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DLNGgfbXfo

• Aimless Bullet

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S3srD7qx9c

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfxIfK8ThFc

• Ambiguous Man

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0Vo4rRyz1M

• The Ascension of Han-ne

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a3klnIdQdI

• Assassin

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mHFsRElnHY

• A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISEN_toFuA

• The Barefooted Young

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Z2mI8ZOCA

• Black Hair

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukToRODESnM

• Black Republic

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr7jZASR-uU

• Bound by Chastity Rule

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm62W7_3hSg

...plus 98 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

""Fun"" meaning anything that's insane, crazy, "unethical," enjoyable, stupid, "bad," ridiculous, memey, charming, sweet, absurd, etc. in a way that generates a lot of responses/reactions/etc. during group watches

• The 15:17 to Paris
• 4th Period Mystery
• Angst
• Annette
• Another Child
• Attack the Gas Station!
• Bad Boys II
• The Ballad of Narayama
• Banana Paradise
• Beastie Boys

...plus 118 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s):

- Toxic movies (Soju why?)
- Cinephilia movies
- High entertainment value
- Solid pacing
- Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
- Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching
- "some romantic comedies that fit that kinda description would be cool as well"
- "mainstream western movies with high meme potential that we can make fun of"

• Bad Boys II

  - Toxic movies (Soju why?)
  - Cinephilia movies
  - High entertainment value
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
  - Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching
  - "some romantic comedies that fit that kinda description would be cool as well"
  - "mainstream western movies with high meme potential that we can make fun of"

• Benedetta

  - Toxic movies (Soju why?)
  - Cinephilia movies
  - High entertainment value
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
  - Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching
  - "mainstream western movies with high meme potential that we can make fun of"

• Blue Velvet

  - Toxic movies (Soju why?)
  - Cinephilia movies
  - High entertainment value
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
  - Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching

• Captain Fantastic

  - "mainstream western movies with high meme potential that we can make fun of"

• Click

  - High entertainment value
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
  - Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching
  - "some romantic comedies that fit that kinda description would be cool as well"
  - "mainstream western movies with high meme potential that we can make fun of"

• The

  - Toxic movies (Soju why?)
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
  - Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching

• Crimes of ion

  - Toxic movies (Soju why?)
  - Cinephilia movies
  - High entertainment value
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
  - Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching
  - "some romantic comedies that fit that kinda description would be cool as well"
  - "mainstream western movies with high meme potential that we can make fun of"

• Daddy You, Daughter Me

  - Toxic movies (Soju why?)
  - High entertainment value
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]

• Don Jon

  - Toxic movies (Soju why?)
  - High entertainment value
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
  - Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching
  - "some romantic comedies that fit that kinda description would be cool as well"
  - "mainstream western movies with high meme potential that we can make fun of"

• The Dude in Me

  - Toxic movies (Soju why?)
  - High entertainment value
  - Solid pacing
  - Ethically/morally questionable movies (toxic) [Rhombus and Soju why?]
  - Stimulates back and forth conversation while watching
  - "some romantic comedies that fit that kinda description would be cool as well"

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s)

- "Friendships based on human connection (Trust, Girlfriends, California Split, Reinette and Mirabelle, Happy Hour)"
- "Family (Mike Leigh, Edward Yang)"
- "Travel movies (Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders)"
- "Character studies/Character driven (Blue, Red, Irma Vep)"
- "Comfy (Most of the films on my list)"
- "Good cinematography and atmosphere (Opera, Wings of Desire)"
- "And calm films of people just talking, going through their lives, or moving through scenery"
- Other (three filmbro, three filmsis)

• A Summer's Tale

  ""Friendship""

• Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy.

  Friendship

• The Host

  Family

• Pather Panchali

  Family

• Swades

  ""Travel""

• The Beaches of Agnès

  Travel

• Vengeance Is Mine

  Character Study

• Reprise

  Character Study

• Moonlit Winter

  ""Comfy""

• Petite Maman

  Comfy

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Theme(s)

- Romance
- Angsty
- Emotionally tangible
- Films that "develop a sense of really tangible emotional feeling, of intimacy"

• Ariel
• Between Calmness and ion
• Blossom Again
• Certified Copy
• Christmas in August
• The Extras
• Green Chair
• Kaagaz Ke Phool
• Love & Basketball
• Love in the Time of Twilight

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.