Sam Ho

Film critic and former programer of the Hong Kong International Film Festival

Japan

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

City of Sadness, A	1989	Hsiao-hsien Hou
Days of Being Wild	1990	Wong Kar Wai
Godfather: Part I, The	1972	Francis Ford Coppola
Late Spring	1949	Ozu Yasujirô
Nostalghia	1983	Andrei Tarkovsky
Parents' Heart		Chun Kim
Règle du jeu, La	1939	Jean Renoir
Searchers, The	1956	John Ford
Spring in a Small Town	1948	Fei Mu
Vertigo	1958	Alfred Hitchcock

Comments

La Règle du jeu is a coming together of the mind, the heart and the senses; Spring in a Small Town is the high point of art and artistry in Chinese cinema, reached when the burdens of war, nation and ideology had been lifted, ever so slightly; Late Spring – Yasujiro Ozu, Hara Setsuko, Ryu Chishu… enough said; Parents’ Heart is the epitome of the 1950s Golden Period of Hong Kong cinema; The Searchers distills humanity, landscape and time into sublime poetry; Vertigo and The Godfather prove that genre pictures can be great art; Nostalghia makes one wish that metaphysical was always so sensuous; City of Sadness is a true epic and a whole lot more; and Days of Being Wild is cinema’s ultimate unfinished masterpiece.