My Top 25 Film Discoveries of 2022! (and a goodbye, at least for now …)

Another year and MMC!’s favourite first-time watches list expands yet again, this time recounting our top 25 discoveries! Plenty of Criterion Collection titles find representation, as well as releases by Kino, Disney, Deaf Crocodile, Film Movement, Radiance Films (upcoming), and VCI. Our Noirvember screenings manage to make up a fifth of this list and streaming platforms like the Criterion Channel, Midnight Pulp, and Kanopy (plus some less legitimate options) fill in the rest.  And for anyone keeping score, Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli takes the top spot as MMC!’s favourite first-time watch of 2022, followed by Konrad Wolf’s Goya: Or the Hard Way to Enlightenment!

Un carnet de bal (Julien Duvivier, 1937)

“Dance Card plays like High Fidelity in glorious French mono as a wealthy widow revisits a list of old suitors nearly twenty years later. In a series of vignettes, Duvivier tours through French cinema, from fated nightclub noirs to bittersweet Catholic piety, from queasy, canted, quayside seediness to Raimu and Pagnol-esque banter. Love French cinema and you’ll find here a full house, ace of diamonds high, loaded with wistful romance, fated tragedy, swooning melancholy, and evocative compositions. A lovely and sad confection.”

Make Mine Neon Eagle!

When Jared Auner of Mondo Macabro posts about a new label devoted to Asian Cult cinema, MMC! takes gleeful notice!

With the announcement below, Auner and his partners Jesse Nelson and Brian Izzi of Cauldron Films launch Neon Eagle Video, a new home video boutique imprint dedicated to Asian cult cinema, and reveal their first release, the Taiwanese revenge-fest Kill Butterfly Kill. This inaugural edition will offer multiple cuts of the film and promises a stacked, double-Blu-ray, limited edition release. Needless to say, MMC! is intrigued by Kill Butterfly Kill’s cartoonish violence and its Pinky Violence meets Turksploitation sensibility (not to mention that cover image which appears to include appropriated Kamen Rider V3 masks!). NEV promises future releases including a title from Japan – just take MMC!’s money already!

NEW ASIAN-FOCUSED LABEL ‘NEON EAGLE VIDEO‘ MAKES DEBUT WITH DELUXE BLU-RAY EDITION OF THE TAIWANESE EXPLOITATION MOVIE ‘KILL BUTTERFLY KILL’

Cauldron Films’ Jesse Nelson and Brian Izzi, in collaboration with Mondo Macabro’s Jared Auner are proud to announce the formation of a new home video boutique imprint, Neon Eagle Video (NEV),that will focus on the trashier side of Asian cinema, highlighting exploitation, action, horror, and other ‘cult’ films that have been neglected in the High Definition era.

Each disc will be lovingly curated and produced by Jared Auner, with restoration, authoring, manufacturing, and distribution handled by Cauldron Films. Each release will be sold through the Cauldron Films site and DiabolikDVD.com.

My Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2021!

Another year, another new crop of cinematic discoveries! Now five years into sharing MMC!’s annual list of favourite first-time watches, it’s interesting how each year manages to bring forward its own character. Our inaugural list in 2017 boasted far-flung films with audacious choices while the 2018 selection seemed to specialize in pervading fashions of low-key dread. MMC! pivoted toward dense and daring cinema in 2019 and 2020 seemed to retreat into Japanese cinema and experimentalism. This year offers something of a return to more classical narrative forms in its globe-hopping. Egyptian master Youssef Chahine joins Yasuzo Masumura, Ulrike Ottinger, and Toshio Matsumoto as an MMC! discoveries list double-entrant, and this list sees returns by Frank Perry, Frederick Wiseman, and Yuzo Kawashima. In keeping with our capricious standards, this list treats Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Dekalog as single entries, yet chooses to include only one part of The Marseilles Trilogy and Chahine’s “Alexandria Trilogy.” What can we say? It’s our list and we choose the rules.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)

“Such an exceptional film. Murnau is in full command of the silent form here, pushing it in cleverly imaginative ways – novel framings, sloped sets, superimpositions, collages, miniatures, unusual title cards, and always those silent film close-ups. And the film hops tones and genres with alacrity, swaying from tragedy to comedy and back again, dabbling in dance and slapstick and adventure along the way. An improbable culmination of the silent era that arguably shouldn’t work, yet is a masterpiece.”

My Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2020!

Reviewing my Top 50 Discoveries of 2020, it’s hard not to miss that this year has been most notably defined by a falling back into Japanese cinema. There’s no complaint in saying so as I adore Japanese cinema and as there is plenty of variety otherwise appearing on this list – experimental cinema, documentaries, dream cinema, Afrofuturism, animation, Canadiana, and plenty of general weirdness. Certainly this list owes a great debt to the bounty of streaming options out there. This list includes films screened on The Criterion Channel, MUBI, Shudder, Midnight Pulp, Kanopy, Netflix, and this year’s online version of the Fantasia International Film Festival. And if hard media is still your bag, many of these titles are available from The Criterion Collection, Arrow Films, Film Movement, Vinegar Syndrome, Synapse Films, Cult Epics, Third Window Films, and even the Winnipeg Film Group.

And so, without further ado, here are MMC!’s Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2020!

The Blue Sky Maiden (Yasuzo Masumura, 1957)

“An absolutely charming little melodrama featuring a plucky and adorable Ayako Wakao as a true-hearted young woman discovering her estranged family, whether they like it or not. Nice gals finish first!”

My Top 20 Film Discoveries of 2019!

I’m generally pretty open-minded about cinema, but I wanted to be challenged in 2019 and so one of my resolutions for the year was to watch films that are too easy for me to avoid — films that are too long, too dense, or too specific. The results of those efforts have been astonishing as 2019 has provided new appreciations for John Waters, Terence Davies, and Tsui Hark, introductions to Toshio Matsumoto, Craig Baldwin, and the Japan Animator Expo shorts, new favourites in already beloved movie franchises like the Showa Godzilla titles and the Tora-San series, and a bevy of brilliant discoveries from Eastern Europe.

Below are my 20 favourite first-time screenings and you can see my top 50 discoveries in my “New to Me for 2019” list on Letterboxd, but the truth is these lists could have gone up to 100 or more and they would still be stacked with killer titles. This is year is almost over so let’s get to it!

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927)

“Berlin in five acts and one day. An astonishing array of footages, from sleepy, early morning hours to commerce and industry, from midday dining and rest to nighttime sport, recreation, and leisure, from children to the elderly, from affluence to poverty. Wonderfully constructed, briskly paced, and always fascinating, I could watch this time capsule again and again and never grow tired of it. Hooray for city symphonies!”

Shout-Outs!

Because sharing is caring!

First, a shout-out for a shout-out! Thanks to Aaron West and the Criterion Now podcast for the dap given to MMC! on episode 82. Aaron was kind enough give MMC! a nod for its precognitive effort on Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Aaron is joined on the episode by Canadian filmmaker Brad McDermott and Matt Gasteier of The Complete podcast to discuss the Collection’s announcements for July, as well as Criterion visits, Claire Denis and Mike Leigh screenings, the potential for further announcements involving Buster Keaton, Wong Kar-wai, Abbas Kiarostami, and others, and Documentary Now! episodes and how the Company episode is not potentially going to be connected to an upcoming Criterion release.