We finish up Masaki Koboyashi's The Human Condition and need some extra time to talk about both the third movie and the work as a whole. After nearly 2 hours talking it out we're left unconvinced that this is an anti-war movie let alone the best Japanese anti-war movie, unless you thinly define "anti-war" as "anti-the WW2 Japanese war machine". How disheartening.

In part two of Masaki Koboyashi's epic The Human Condition our main character for some reason decides that being a good soldier who sticks to the word of the regulations will somehow make things better for him in a war he claims he fundamentally disagrees with. That's right, the politics get even murkier in Road to Eternity.

We start into Masaki Koboyashi's epically faithful adaptation of Junpei Gomikawa's six volume examination of Japan in World War 2 through the lens of a man who generally opposes war, or at least militarism, played by the great Tatsuya Nakadai.

The Human Condition is, in total, just shy of 10 hours long. But it's helpfully broken up into three films (each containing two sections) released between January 1959 and January 1961. We'll be similarly breaking down Spine 480 into three episodes.

We've seen a lot of great Louis Malle films in the Collection, and now we get one more. A very long conversation about art or something, and while it is itself quite good, we're very interested in the peripherals film about class.

Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad is an obviously influential movie that's nearly impossible to describe. Adam thinks it's a ghost story. Pat thinks it's an examination of the epistemological crisis. Both or neither are probably true. Truth is a game, and the game is rigged against you.

First released in 2004 as a series of television episodes, then recut into a feature length film for 2006, Marie Nyreröd’s Bergman Island is an intimate portrait of director Ingmar Bergman looking back on his life just after his final retirement from film making, and just a few years before his death.

It's our first David Fincher film in the Collection and what a choice. A tour du force of special effects that do not hold up, Benjamin Button updates and elongates the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story into whatever this is.

Nothing like a gangster movie to get us talking about the alienation and the lack of community under capitalism. But beside (and because of) that, this is just such a fantastically bleak movie. Peter Yates directs Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).

We close out the "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" boxset of Shohei Imamura films with Intentions of Murder, a tale in which Imamura apparently wants us to laugh an abused woman because she's fat. Hilarious! This is our last Imamura film in the Collection right now, and we're not mad about that.

We continue through the Imamura "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" boxset and continue to take issue with Imamura calling himself an anthropologist.  When we started this Criterion journey nearly a decade ago I had no idea it would lead to me ponder the question: can breastfeeding be an incestual act?