My March Watches Ranked

Had a couple of days I was unable to watch anything this month, and I can foresee a similar pattern forming over the next couple what with assignments and other bits and bobs coming up.

In any case, though I mostly had fun, I did have a couple of disappointments in March. Having started to immerse myself a little more in the Taiwan New Cinema towards the latter end of the month, I’ve found myself finding a more complex picture of the movement than I had before. My first watch of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s was admittedly somewhat disappointing – though I know I’ve picked an odd choice for my first piece of his work (I’m a little limited by what I can access, currently). While its compositions are beautiful and his storytelling is engagingly oblique and elliptical, I found the overriding style of the film frustratingly simplistic. When a story is fairly straightforward, you would hope to see and feel more of the world acting as a setting (as in Rebels), but – confined by the incredibly theatrical framing and staging he’s chosen here – there’s often not a lot to glom onto, other than an often-silent Tony Leung. On a brighter note, while Yang’s work Terrorizers still stands out as my favourite of the movement (and one of my top 4 films of all time), Tsai Ming-Liang is hot on his heels with my first watch of Rebels being difficultly slow but ultimately rewarding.

Another couple of standouts were Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime and Mommy. I’ve been recommended Mommy many times now and after finally sitting down and giving it the time it deserved, I found that although the film is certainly strong, it was topped by Dolan’s later work in Matthias & Maxime, a tender exploration of latent homosexuality and male friendship. Dolan is fearlessly personal and emotional in his filmmaking, and although he occasionally teeters into a jarringly melodramatic mode, it’s often that his punchlines land perfectly, causing you to forget any minor misgivings. I’m genuinely very excited to dive into the rest of his filmography.

At the bottom of the list, you’ll see the French smash-hit Les Intouchables. Though it’s not a terrible film, I found it quite manipulative in its attempts at evoking sentimentality. The worst case of this, for me, was how cynically the film discarded its more social realist elements and themes just as soon as they had served their purpose, that being to give Driss something to lose. By the end of the film, all I could really think was “yeah, but what about Driss’ family?”

Here's everything I watched in March, the highest rating I gave was 5/5, the lowest was 2.5/5.

1.       Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986).

2.       Matthias & Maxime (Xavier Dolan, 2019).

3.       Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945).

4.       Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021).

5.       After Yang (Kogonada, 2021).

6.       X (Ti West, 2022).

7.       Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1992).

8.       Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014).

9.       Sometimes, I Think About Dying (Stefanie Abel Horowitz, 2019).

10.   A Reasonable Request (Andrew Laurich, 2015).

11.   The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot, 2019).

12.   Visions of Ecstasy (Nigel Wingrove, 1989).

13.   Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998).

14.   Spencer (Pablo Larraín, 2021).

15.   The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022).

16.   Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945).

17.   River (Jennifer Peedom, Joseph Nizeti, 2022).

18.   Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946).

19.   Manufractur (Peter Tscherkassky, 1985).

20.   Taming the Garden (Salomé Jashi, 2022).

21.   Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962).

22.   A Taxi Driver (Jang Hoon, 2017).

23.   The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946).

24.   Muktir Gaan (Tareque Masud, Catherine Masud, 1995).

25.   House on Haunted Hill (William Castle, 1959).

26.   Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2018).

27.   The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007).

28.   Les Intouchables (Éric Toledano, Olivier Nakache, 2011).