My Favorite Movies 2025 Edition, part 7 – 16-10

Ooh, starting AND ending with Kurosawa today.

16. Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950, Japan)

A woodcutter and a priest look for cover in rain at an abandoned temple. They begin to talk about a case, where the woodcutter found a murdered samurai. There were several witnesses (including the dead samurai himself through a witch), but each account was very different. Soon, a third man joins them in discussing the complicated situation.

This has become a commonly used trope. Many movies and TV shows have used the same idea. The first time I encountered this (before even seeing this movie) was actually a one issue, comic relief story in Spider-Man (which they were able to do in serialized media that doesn’t cost hundreds of millions per episode) probably in the early 90s, where JJJ and Mary Jane give their exaggerated versions before Peter Parker tells it how he sees is the truth, thus letting down JJJ and angering MJ, who was just trying to make JJJ look good and thus keep him friendly towards Peter.

On the other hand, just a couple of years ago, there was Anatomy of a Fall, which had it’s roots in Rashomon even though it approaches the different points of view mostly through evidence rather than jumping from narrator to narrator, and Monster, which had to defend it’s position as something fundamentally different. It’s just an approach which has a lot of play.

Eyewitness accounts are seen as very unreliable in real life detective work. People misremember things, people interpret what they see through their mental filtering, thus misunderstanding the situation, and often being useless as evidence. Not that they can’t be helpful in the investigation itself, but there are risks involved. In writing in general, situations where different parties focus on different details and read situations differently has become known as the Rashomon effect.

A little personal anecdote on this: Back in the day my apartment was broken into while I was home. I managed to scare them off (which sounds much more macho than what happened as I think they thought they were breaking into a storage room in the basement and didn’t know you could access my apartment through there, so they were probably much more afraid in the situation than I was). Later on a police officer called me to get my statement. I told the person (after checking the number was an actual police number, just in case) calling me that there were two of them. She asked how I knew this, if I hadn’t seen them. I realized that I actually didn’t know. There was no reason for me to believe there were two of them, but somehow I had just decided that this was the case. I was giving her misinformation without any malicious intent.

At the same time, obviously, they didn’t have much more to go on then those testimonies in that era, whatever it is (I’m not sure, as I can’t really claim I can identify historical Japanese clothing styles, but historical anyhow). That’s all they had, besides confessions. At least they didn’t seem to torture those out of their suspects.

And then there’s the completely new layer of deceit, when people have outside interests in the situation. It’s not only about memories being false or our perceptions being prejudiced. Sometimes the witnesses have something to gain by distorting to truth, whether by lying or lying by omission.

Like the samurai’s wife. The woodcutter has the least amount of trust in her version. He explicitly doubts it because of his personal distrust of women and their ability to hide their lies with tears. The bandit, who killed the samurai, according to himself, just decided to “have her”, but instead of raping, tried to manipulate her into giving in to his advances by showing her how weak her husband is. Smell of rape still lingers, even if the wife goes with it in order to protect herself. The husband takes this as betrayal.

Of course, we don’t really know who is telling the truth. In general, these kinds of stories are structured in a way where the last one to speak is the one who corrects all the lies and mistakes in the other versions (like The Last Duel, which makes it explicit), but here the woodcutter is also caught in a lie, so even though he is the last to speak, we can’t trust him either.

15. Das Boot (The Boat) (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981, Germany)

I guess I should note that while I’ve listed this as having been released in 1981, the version I’m most familiar with is the 1997 Director’s Cut that’s about 200 minutes long (in Europe which is roughly 10 minutes less than the US version because of format differences). That’s about an hour more than the original release.

A bunch of eager seamen set out on a U-boat for their mission of disrupting the flow of materiel from the US to the UK (quite inhumane task, as the purpose is really to starve out the British), as well as other missions needed. Not much in the way of a story here. Closest to a story is the arc of the propaganda officer onboard, who starts to lose faith in his own personal role of trying to keep the men in line.

The crew, as a whole, have their arc as well. The environment below water in very close quarters, without sunlight and with poor nutrition takes it toll. The movie tells us early on that they had about 75% chance of death on the seas. Compare that to the 25% of the men on the frontlines.

Most of the movie is just waiting and trying to cope with the boredom, which is appropriate, as that’s probably what their life was mostly like. Then they probably miss the boredom when something happens and their lives are on the line with most of them not even knowing what’s going on except that they can hear and feel explosions. Think about it: You have some specific job like keeping some part of the engine going and that’s all you know, as the battle that’s deciding your fate is going on just outside the metal hull.

After a few years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, some of the Talibans, who were now governing the country, were interviewed about their feelings on the new situation. They found it boring. They longed for the freedom and brotherhood they felt while sleeping rough and fighting a common enemy. Having finally, after 20 years, won their war they got what they wanted and it turned out that it wasn’t very fun.

I would like to know how often this happens. I doubt the German seamen would have felt like this if they made it through the war. Their war was traumatic. It had a huge negative impact on the whole society. For example, as people were looking for some kind of relief from that trauma and also guilt, many of them joined cults, which were often destructive in their own way, but were able to use those negative feelings to manipulate the people. The people we are following are living through what caused this trauma (at least in part).

There aren’t many women in the movie. The few we have are there as entertainment for the men. There’s only one credited female role and couple more uncredited. This is of course quite common for war movies and those shouldn’t really be judged for this. It is not the movie’s fault the world is what it is.

This does raise a question. Well, many, but right now I’m thinking one specific: How does one relate to women after months without seeing one? In a way this is kind of an absurd question, as obviously we should see women as people as much as men, but at the same time, if all the people you have interacted within the last six months (as some of the deployments were) are men, how hard is it to return to normalcy? No wonder manatees were mistaken for mermaids.

At the same time, the German government of the time, also known colloqually as Nazis, would paint in their propaganda women into a single role: Mothers. Sure, some women were secretaries, worked for the army in some capacity or were even filmmakers among other things, but how the country worked was that they needed the mothers to raise the next generation to feed into the machine. Continuous war was part of the big plan and you couldn’t keep that up without having new soldiers to replace those lost in fighting.

Like these men here. They are there to die for their fatherland. Sure, they have objectives to reach before doing that, but the machine doesn’t really care if they live or die, except that they are difficult to replace.

This ideology is seen as so important that despite the very limited room in the sub, they still somehow are able to afford to have the propaganda officer there and as an important officer he is afforded special accommodations, so it’s not even as if he is just one more bunk in the barracks. He isn’t contributing to the mission in any way.

He is there as some sort of lubricant in the larger machine, which sees all people only in terms of their utility, which is often tied to things other then merit. Following dogma is more important than doing something useful.

A great example of this is their Mexican recruit, as the captain calls him. He has bought into the lie to a degree that for a very long time he keeps shaving every day and maintains his uniform, where noone else cares that much about it. Eventually even he gives up on this, but in real life… I can’t but help think of Cult of Trump. They don’t give up despite harming their own position by supporting someone who doesn’t care about them at all.

Despite all of this, the author of the book the movie is based on felt like the movie had lost his original anti-war stance. I don’t really see where this came from.

14. The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997, United Kingdom)

Gaz and Dave are victims of industry dying in their hometown and have become unemployed. This is worse for Gaz, who is now possibly losing his son, and while Dave is still married and has his wife’s income to rely on, he is still feeling emasculated by the situation. So, after seeing a male stripper performance draw a huge crowd, they decide to form their own troupe and perform themselves.

While I don’t want to play the role of a male rights advocate, this movie is an excellent example of how society’s expectations can be bad for men. Its just that this in no way erases any of the obstacles other groups have and you have to keep that in mind. Straight white cismen are also victims of hierarchies, but usually not as much as women, LGBTQ+ people or people of color.

For Dave, the biggest problem is specifically the expectation he feels of having to be the person to bring in the money for the family, even though his wife is fine with being the bread winner. It’s strongly insinuated that because of this he can’t even perform in bed. Still, at the end of the movie, he still decided to do the show, even though he has found a new job.

This movie will turn 28 this year, but sex work still isn’t normalized. Its often called the oldest occupation (which is arguable), but we still see sex work as something below ourselves, when we shouldn’t as a huge portion of people watch porn regularly, but for some reason can’t figure out that the people making it are actual people as well. So, Dave’s decision was courageous. He didn’t need to put himself into that position and he even knew everyone in their small town would know (well, Sheffield isn’t exactly small with a population of over half a million, but the way the story is told, they seem to live in a much smaller community).

Gaz almost bails out at the last moment, even though the whole thing was his idea and he needs it more. That does have a feel of being just a random attempt to bring little extra drama to a movie, which isn’t quite as long as it should have been (it even has a few scenes without Robert Carlyle, because they needed to shoot that afterwards to lengthen the movie, but Carlyle wasn’t available). The shame of the situation is just too much for him (at least for a minute).

Again, this is about gender roles. After having advocated for the show throughout the movie, Gaz still doesn’t feel right about doing it, because there is a stigma for men dancing, even if there isn’t stripping involved. It’s just not seen as manly. He fights against taking a job from his ex-wife, because that would be emasculating as well, so he mostly just steals to make ends meet.

This fear of emasculation also manifests itself as sexism and homophobia. Gaz and Dave rate women they see on the streets and at one point Gaz is angry at the owner of the venue, because he has sold tickets to men as well as women. The movie does attempt to mend this a little, but I’m not sure that message doesn’t get overshadowed by everything else. It would appear, however, clear that the movie isn’t sexist or homophobic, just the characters. After all, the women here are in control of their lives and two members of the group do find each other, so to say.

The movie is still a great feelgood movie in a way only Brits are able to do them. This just happens to be the epitome of the genre, at least to me. There are plenty of good ones like Pride, Billy Elliot and maybe even the Paddington movies, if you want to put them into the same category (they are feel-good movies, but don’t quite feel like they are in the same genre).

There is one more matter to discuss: The actors in the film actually decided to go “full monty” at the end. The climate on this has changed enough that I’m not sure this would be seen as appropriate anymore. I’m not saying it should be, but to me that kind of apprehension for simple nudity seems weird.

13. Festen (The Celebration) (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998, Denmark)

Helge is turning 60 and everyone is there to celebrate. Initially, there’s a level of awkwardness as people, who haven’t seen each other in a long while try to rekindle their relationships, but Christian, one of his sons, has different plans. He is going to use this opportunity to expose Helge’s abuse of his children to the world… but no one pays attention.

Why does no one pay attention? Because of hugge, the Danish tradition of comfiness, which overrides any other needs. Needs like actually dealing with a real situation. Its just not culturally acceptable to break the good mood. Even after the truth comes out (after one of the help finds the dead sister’s suicide note), the toastmaster tries his best to maintain a light atmosphere.

So, Christian just gets thrown out. For his benefit, the staff is on his side, as the chef is an old friend of his, and he can continue to hammer in his message, even though even his brother, who may be another of Helge’s victims, is initially against him.

The impetus for this happening right now is the suicide of their sister. She had been living with the trauma of their childhood, but was eventually driven over the edge into killing herself.

The class differences here are also worth a look. The staff help Christian. Not overtly, but they let him back into the house after he has been kicked out. Why are they risking their position? Were they aware of what was happening back in the day? Is this their way of apologizing for not doing anything back then?

Maybe they are just more sympathetic to Christian and his siblings. According to various studies, rich people are no longer capable of connecting to other people. Why? They don’t need anyone in the same way poorer people do, as people with little means have more to gain from the support of those around them. Rich people can’t trust anyone either. They can’t know whether the people around them are there simply because they want something from him or her, or whether they actually want to be there. Rich people don’t even look people in the eye in the some way others do.

Yeah, don’t ever become rich. It’s actually a miserable existence. Are Christian and his siblings any better off being rich? Their sister still killed herself. They are still living with the trauma of having been systemically abused sexually as children. Money won’t help there.

Okay, on the other hand, you are more likely to have some sort of trauma, if you have been poor as a child. There needs to be a middle road, but society has been moving into a direction where middle class no longer exists. So, we, as a society, have been blocking all opportunities to actually live a happy life by forcing people into the extremes, where that happiness is hard to find.

The movie emphasizes the destructiveness of patriarchy. The patriarch, who is supposedly there to be the breadwinner and thus take care or at least enable others to take care of the family, is the cause of all the trauma within the family with no-one questioning this until one of the victims actually kills herself. Before that, there was no accountability. We’ve seen this a lot in the last ten years or so, as #metoo has finally brought things forward at least a little bit, but going back a little further, it wasn’t only the entertainment industry. Domestic violence was often just completely ignored in the past. It wasn’t too long ago, when the thinking was that whatever happens within a home is not something society at large should involve itself in, which meant that all sorts of abuse, including rape, at home was completely legal in some countries and often overlooked in others.

The mother, Pia, hasn’t intervened either. That’s sickening. We tend to think of mothers as fervent protectors of children, but she did nothing. On the other hand, what was she supposed to do? Would society have protected them, if she just left with the children? We don’t know what life was like for her. Maybe the children were just a shield for her as Helge’s toxic attentions were elsewhere.

I mean, the depictions of Helge’s behavior are just horrible. It’s clear that it wasn’t just about sexual satisfaction (which child abuse never is), but he is just a sick person, who enjoyed being sadistic and keeping his children in constant fear. And, of course, being a coward, he took on the easiest victims possible. The very people he is supposed to be taking care of.

In the end, when Christian finally manages to prove his case with the help of the staff, Helge is ostracized. However, at breakfast hugge must once again prevail, so he is just asked to leave as everyone else just continues the celebration even as the person being celebrated is gone.

Here’s a sidenote the movie never goes deeper into: Before making his speech, Christian holds up two envelopes. One green and one yellow. He asks Helge to choose between them. Helge chooses green. We never find out what the other contained. I do have a Danish take on this: According to my source, the other envelope would have had a perfectly pleasing speech and Christian would have kept his secret for the rest of his life. That’s just the fair thing to do, apparently. Give Helge a chance, even if he doesn’t know he has one.

12. The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent, 2018, Australia)

Clare has been serving her sentence in Tasmania as an indentured servant. When her family (husband and baby) is killed right in front of her by the officer who owns her contract and want let her free (basically just to be petty), Clare takes it upon herself to avenge them with the forced help of Billy, an aboriginal.

This is set in 1825. This was a horrible place for both women and aboriginals. These prison colonies didn’t have many women in them, so often women would be sent there for any reason. They would then protect themselves by doing their best to keep themselves in jail rather than in the open by doing petty crimes. Aboriginals, on the other hand, were seen basically as vermin and were freely hunted. Even in the context of full human history, this was a horrible time and place to be alive.

In these specific cases, Clare has been raped regularly, and Billy has lost much of his people. And the person responsible for Clare’s situation and who has probably done more than enough to Billy’s people, is going to be rewarded for this with a promotion, just before which his boss had threatened him with the horrible punishment of not getting one. You know, for multiple rapes and murders, that would have been the punishment.

Clare isn’t even seen a person. She is just a commodity. Clearly a valuable commodity, because she is a rare woman and can even sing (thus the name of the movie and entertainment in such conditions is very scarce). It just happens that under these circumstances, her value just serves to take even more of her independence away, as her “owner” needs to control her to use her as much as possible.

Yet, in the end, when Clare finally has the opportunity to enact her revenge, she doesn’t do it, which is actually a more satisfying ending.

To me this feels like Heroine’s Journey, more precisely Maureen Murdoch’s version of it. Clare loses her femininity to masculinity and has to go through various experiences to reconcile her newly found masculinity with her femininity in order to realize that revenge will not bring her any kind of happiness or satisfaction, as it will not bring her family back.

At the same time, we can’t forget how Clare first sees Billy. If Clare’s owner sees Clare as barely human, Clare has a very similar relationship to Billy. At first. She does learn along the way that Billy is trustworthy and intelligent. He isn’t a savage, as she has been taught by the people killing the aboriginals (who basically just need an excuse to kill them). Indeed, Billy is much more symphatetic to her situation than anyone else.

Basically every named character is either a victim or the perpetrator. There is nothing in between. One of the more interesting characters from this point of view is Eddie, who is still a kid. I’m not sure how old he is supposed to be, but pretty much a preteen. He has still been convicted of something, sent to Tasmania and earn his way out. He becomes a sort of favorite for the officer, but that isn’t really to his benefit, as this requires him to perform better than the adult males around him. When he doesn’t, his fall is even faster than his rise.

This is in the heart of intersectionalism. Suppressed groups should be working together instead of using each other as stepping stones in their own attempts to find a better place in the hierarchy of all groups.

Note on the aforementioned Heroine’s Journey: While there should definitely be alternatives to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, one could argue that the existing Heroine’s Journeys do have a problem. They all feel like variations on the Hero’s Journey, which would make men the default. I’ll talk more about this later on another entry.

Finally, it should also be noted that Gail Carriger, in her book Heroine’s Journey, warns against using rape as part of the journey. However, I do think that it actually fits here, because the movie is trying to depict the horrors of this place in a way that is historically accurate and in that case removing rape from the story would be ingenious. Also, this movie is directed by a woman, so it feels less exploitative than in most other movies, where rape is used as a plot point.

Final difference on this is that this is not a power fantasy. Clare is desperate. Any defiance she has comes out of that desperation. In movies like I Spit on Your Grave and Revenge, the main character is depicted as cool as she seeks vengeace. Clare is not like that. She’s a mess and she’s barely holding everything together.

However, in I Spit on Your Grave and Revenge, there is revenge, but then what? It doesn’t remove the trauma or bring back the dead person and will probably just inflict more of it after a police investigation, which will force them to live the whole thing through again and again. There’s no winning… except the way Clare does it by choosing to follow a different path.

11. Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975, Belgium)

Jeanne is a widowed single mother, who makes money through prostitution. We follow her life for three consecutive days.

I am very glad our local arthouse theater had a screening of this in late 2022. It’s long and intensive in a weird way. I don’t know if I could have sat through this at home, where I have plenty of distractions. And you need to pay attention. Those little things matter.

Jeanne does everything meticulously. Even the way she makes sure to not have the lights on anywhere in the apartment, unless she or her son is in the room, might seem trivial or even funny at first, but it is part of the way she runs her very planned out life. She has planned menus for the whole week, she has a very specific time of the day when she meets her gentlemen, and its only one a day and they get their preset days.

She doesn’t speak much, but when she does, there’s always this quiet desperation or longing for something unspoken. She has settled for this life, but she would like to escape it. The routine is just there to keep her sane.

And then things start to go wrong. On the second day her routine just starts to break down. It’s just small things. There’s an old lady holding up the post office and she overcooks the food. So, nothing that would matter to most of us, but as this is all part of the walls she has built for herself, the dam can’t really take the hits.

So, on the third day she loses control, when she orgasms with her gentleman visitor, which leads her to kill him. Again, this might be a good thing for most of us, but in her perfectly crafted world, that is a sign of her losing control, so she can’t have it. The movie ends with her just sitting there in the dark, staring at the wall. For something like six minutes. And at that point you are so invested that you don’t even notice the time passing.

Of course, the reason my local arthouse theater screened this was the way it won Sight & Sound critics poll in 2022. Did anyone expect that? I doubt it. It had debuted on the 2012 list, but it wasn’t near the top at that point. Does it deserve the win? Does any movie deserve that position? Not really. On the other hand, does it belong to the pantheon of greatest movies of all time with Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane and Vertigo (the previous winners)? Yes.

The reactions to the win were wild. There was the typical “wait, what?” – a group I belonged to, as I had never seen the film, there was the “what took you so long?” crowd, and there was the haters, who also ranged from “well, it isn’t actually that good” to people who can’t give women credit and thus claim this only got votes for being feminist.

Nicely for our theme of the list, this was actually widely touted as a feminist masterpiece upon release. However, in 2022, the DP for the movie expressed unease with that label, as she felt that putting the movie into such a category took away from the appeal of the movie at the time. She was probably right, as it has never been as widely seen. It still has pretty low number of ratings on IMDb.

Is it feminist? Yes. It is about how women have limited options in society, because certain expectations are put on them. I might be reading too much into this, but Akerman’s mother was, according to all sources I’ve seen, very manipulative and the two had a somewhat unhealthy relationship. There was a reason behind this: The mother was a holocaust survivor, so she was carrying a lot of trauma she was probably pushing onto her child. Akerman actually killed herself only a year after her mother had died, after a stint in a mental institution.

Knowing this, I can’t help but assume Akerman used her understanding of her mother’s struggles in the movie. On the other hand, as a new director, she also probably understood the struggles she would face throughout her career, as female directors were very rare and resources were harder for them to come by, as there wasn’t much trust in their commercial viability and this thinking would also kill any possibility of growth as when you make low budget films, you won’t get marketing either and you will remain in the low budget game, because you can’t show that you could find an audience. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Again, this movie is still something even most movie fans haven’t seen.

We can’t forget Delphine Seyrig either. She wasn’t some performative feminist, who clamored for Barbie to get more Oscar nominations. A few years earlier, she had been one of the signatories of a list of women, who had had an illegal abortion, because they wanted the practice legalized, and talked about her experience on the topic at a trial of a teenager being accused of having had one. She had tried the domestic life in the 50s, having married at just 18, and had found it unfulfilling. Around this time, she was already working mostly with female directors. She went to a panel show to discuss female sexuality with men, who had no idea what they were talking about. She, too, should be more of an icon than she already is.

Finally, the weird thing is that people actually latch on to a movie like this, which is actually just an exercise in form rather than an actual narrative (despite having a narrative of sorts). This is the kind of movie that would generally inform other moviemakers on how to use these techniques and would be thus designated to be studied by academia and nothing else. Still, here we are. Discussing this movie as one of my favorites.

10. Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) (Akira Kurosawa, 1954, Japan)

A small village in the late Sengoku period in Japan is threatened by bandits, so the villagers decide to hire a few samurai to help them. Finding competent warriors turns out to be more difficult than expected, but villagers manage. So, they have their defenders, but that is only the first step, as the village also needs to be ready.

This movie has been remade at least twelve times and that’s just the movies. There’s also a TV series and wonderfully enough a bunch of roleplaying scenarios based on the same idea (my favorite being, and here’s a deepcut, Munchrooms for RuneQuest, which puts the players on the side of trollkin against trolls, which means pretty much nothing to most people reading this). There’s also around 170 listed references to this film on IMDb. I guess this is pretty much par for the course for Kurosawa movies, considering how many takes there are of Rashomon and Yojimbo as well. And how many time have we seen the part of the movie, where a team is put together? I mean, just on this list, we have seen at least in Full Monty and Sound of Noise, which are of completely different genres. In many ways this movie is precursor to the first blockbusters of 1970s and Hindi cinema was revolutionized by Sholay, a movie inspired by Seven Samurai (admittedly, this latter statement is purely based on hearsay, as I’ve never seen that movie). So, it is hard to underestimate how important movie this is in the history of cinema. IGN’s Cinefix even went so far as to call this the grandfather of all the movies that have come since, which does feel kind of myopic to me, but it is still a statement you do want to consider before dismissing.

My limited understanding of Sengoku period is that it had started well over a century before the time this movie is set. That whole period was a series of civil wars, so at this point in time, the whole country has been ravaged by various warring factions. There are plenty of ronin (masterless samurai) available, as various clans have been taken down. To many of these people, the farmers just seem to be nothing. They feel entitled to push them around without repercussions, and where would that repercussion even come from, when the ruling class can’t afford to protect each village?

Not that the farmers really respect them either. They are just more afraid of some other party at that given time. Nor should they have any respect for the upper classes, if those upper classes can’t provide the services they are supposed to in exchange for the taxes those villages pay.

This is by no means a modern action film. Sure, when we finally get to the action, it is great, even if it is technically (obviously) much simpler than it’s modern counterparts. On the other hand, you can actually tell what’s going on. At the same time, the movie is three and a half hours long, so most of the movie is something completely different. It is about the lives of the villagers and the samurai in this new situation, where they need to find common ground in order to survive what’s coming.

These are not homogenic groups either. They have disagreements amongst themselves and there’s even a point at which things go so far that the self-appointed leader of the samurai takes matters into his own hands and forces some of the village men back into formation after they try to leave.

In the end, it is a solemn movie. It’s not something celebratory. The victory is bittersweet at best. The samurai are in a difficult position. They are at once the officers keeping the men in line, scouts and the ones taking the riskiest roles in combat. In the end, they are more likely to die than not. The villagers just return to their traditional roles, while the samurai leave to find another opportunity to die for miniscule compensation.

The number of named female characters in this movie: 2. One of which I don’t even remember. The most prominent is a daughter of one of the main villagers, whom that villager disguises to be a boy in order to protect her from the samurai. There is no trust in the samurai in this way. Women of the village are hidden away from them, because they are afraid that the women might be interested in the newly arrived, strong men. And yes, the daughter actually is, but what ends up happening is that the samurai, the youngest of the group, ends up giving up his position as a samurai-in-training in order to stay at the village.

Of course, the village could use the extra hands to work when they are readying themselves for the bandits, but instead they choose to remove the women from their daily lives for as long as they can function without them. I don’t know how realistic this would have been. It doesn’t feel like it, although at the same time, fears like these are still common among various right wing groups.

But in the end, despite all the gloom and death, the movie is hopeful. The village is able to overcome the adversitiies they are presented with. Sure, some of them died, but at least they survived and life goes on, as it always has. It doesn’t really matter who’s in charge. Changes to the lives of the desperate don’t change much whether it’s Biden or Trump “leading” the country.

At the same time, there’s an insidious part to it: If you are not in the in-group, you are left without the defenses the group provides, so in that sense it is much worse if someone, who is willing to sacrifice minorities for some little immediate benefit, is in power.

This is the longest movie on the list, coming in at 207 minutes, which is just 5 minutes more than Jeanne Dielman, the previous entry on this list. The next longest is Barry Lyndon at 185.

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