• Metropolis (1927)
• Rope (1948)
• The Killing (1956)
• The Night of the Hunter (1955)
• There Will Be Blood (2007)
• When the Raven Flies (1984)
• In the Shadow of the Raven (1988)
• Earwig and the Witch (2020)
• The Blue Angel (1930)
• Modern Times (1936)
• The Gold Rush (1925)
• No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
• Aim for the Ace! Another Match (1988)
• Destiny (1921)
• Vampyr (1932)
• Dracula (1931)
• Drácula (1931)
• M (1931)
• The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
• Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc (2025)
• Rome, Open City (1945)
• Drunken Angel (1948)
• Yojimbo (1961)
• Rashomon (1950)
• Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
• The Hidden Fortress (1958)
• Westfront 1918 (1930)
• High and Low (1963)
• The Man Who Laughs (1928)
• Red Beard (1965)
• Kagemusha (1980)
• Predator: Badlands (2025)
• Brain Powerd (1998)
• Invincible Super Man Zambot 3 (1977)
• Combat Mecha Xabungle (1982)
• The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923)
• Sunset Boulevard (1950)
• The Seventh Seal (1957)
• King Kong (1933)
• The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006)
• The Big O (1999)
• City Lights (1931)
• All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
• The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
• Zero for Conduct (1933)
• Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (1998)
• The Rules of the Game (1939)
• Heavy Metal L-Gaim (1984)
• Overman King Gainer (2002)
• Invincible Steel Man Daitarn 3 (1978)
• Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
• Trouble in Paradise (1932)
• Kekkaishi (2006)
• Space Runaway Ideon (1980)
• Tomorrow's Joe (1970)
• Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked (1982)
• The Lower Depths (1936)
• Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (2006)
• Excalibur (1981)

Gonna kinda blow through this because writing that new additions list took a while. We rang in the new year with Coming Soon (2008), a horror film directed by Sophon Sakdaphisit, probably best known as one the writers of Shutter (2004). It is... less good that Shutter, mostly lacking compelling characters and with a plot that wanders a bit too much and fails to tie back to its main themes effectively, but the themes are interesting and it at least has some effective frights in it.

A Page of Madness (1926) is a silent horror film by Teinosuke Kinugasa, which caught my attention both for its striking poster art and because as far as I know "horror" as we understand it as a genre wasn't really a thing in Japan until much more recently. A Page of Madness has a rather more timeless, ghost story—like quality to it, and has a consistently dreamy quality largely because of the interesting decision to include no intertitles at all. I don't know why. It certainly makes it a bit harder to follow what's going on but it allows the film to exist almost as an impressionistic series of scenes, with a focus on framing and physicality. Indeed the standout performer of the film, the 17-year-old Eiko Minami, is known for her career as a dancer much moreso than her near-nonexistent filmography. The copy on the server includes the 1971 score by Muraoka Minoru, which I believe I read that Kinugasa ultimately disavowed, but it's a pretty good score and my millennial brain feels weird at the thought of watching a movie in complete silence. Maybe I'll give it another shot sometime and just mute the audio.

My insistence on watching every Gundam show means necessarily I'm gonna end up watching some real garbage, and Mobile Suit Gundam-san (2014) falls into that category. Based on a somehow-popular long running manga series, it's just a series of short sketch episodes making juvenile and honestly pretty boring jokes about the characters of the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It's just the most boring sex comedy, and operating with an understanding of the characters that is merely memetic. There's an episode or two where the joke centers around the fact that Haro is a full-grown human man who is simply flexible enough that his job is to roll around inside the little robot ball, which is probably the funniest the show ever gets but even that is hardly focused enough to make the joke work past the premise.

Focus (1996) is a harrowing found-footage thriller about a news interviewer who takes advantage of a shut-in radio nerd (played by Tadanobu Asano) for the sake of a story, and gets in over his head when that leads them to witness an apparent criminal conspiracy. It is a taut, brutal film with very compelling performances, but is also pretty hard to watch for how insistently it forces you to sit in awful discomforting meditation of the worsening circumstances on screen. Because it probably merits a content warning, there is a pretty horrifying sexual assault scene towards the end of the film. It's not an easy recommendation but if you're up for something heavy it is a very powerful film.

I truly almost forgot to mention Mieruko-chan (2021). It's kinda fine, a cute story about a shy girl who suddenly finds herself able to see ghosts, and decides her best course of action is to just pretend that she can't. It's a low-impact, friendly comedy but it takes way too many of its 12 episodes to start having a plot and is entirely too lewd for what it's ultimately doing narratively. I'm a bit interested in checking out the manga since I've heard both of those issues are lessened there, in which case it might be a nice, relaxing read.

The Summer Hikaru Died (2025) is like what if a paranoid supernatural body-horror were also very, very yaoi. In their rural village, high schooler Yoshiki confronts his best friend Hikaru with his belief that Hikaru, who disappeared on the mountain for several days the previous winter, has been replaced by some other creature that is pretending to be him. He turns out to be right, and it continues to get weirder from there. Alternately creepy and touching and with a killer sense of style throughout (the OP is phenomenal and constantly getting stuck in my head). This is definitely one I'll be looking forward to the second season of.

I rewatched Incantation (2022) to see if a second watch would change any of my feelings about the film, and kinda not really. I think a bit of foreknowledge definitely helped me appreciate some of its plotting tricks a bit more (particularly as in retrospect there is one pretty important plot point that seems to be deliberately obfuscated in the English subtitles for some reason), but broadly it remains a very good film with which I have the same minor tonal issues I discussed last time I wrote about it.

We watched Oppenheimer (2023). It's pretty good. I think it maybe verges on being a bit too impressed with its own cleverness but I also think that if its primary intention was to present an extremely dramatic story of the beginning of the nuclear age in a manner that constantly keeps the viewer on a knife's edge of tension, the frequent cutting between interlocking definitely help achieve that end.

We also watched Bong Joon Ho's The Host (2006), notable as "one of those films I remember seeing on the shelf at Blockbuster a lot when I was younger." It's a monster film about a mutated fish monster terrorizing the area around the Han River, which I expected to be presented as horror but is really more of an extremely dark comedy. It's pretty good, I still haven't watched Parasite, I gotta get to that at some point.

Finally I closed out the month with Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921). It's also pretty good. There are some aesthetic choices that... certainly haven't aged well, but by and large it's an interesting and powerful story about the inescapable burden of mortality.