Ana Torrent is back playing a weird little girl named Ana whose family is dealing with Francoist Spain in Carlos Saura's Cría Cuervos, a film that maybe pales in comparison to Spirit of the Beehive but also maybe stands on its own.

This week Pat and Adam get very lost in Luis Buñuel's The Milky Way (1969), wondering mostly who Buñuel was making the film for, as its philosophical elements are so esoteric as to be off-putting. The sword fight is pretty neat, though.

Jim Jarmusch explores humanity through the connections of taxi drivers and riders and emulating the film history of various places on "earth", which is to say New York, LA, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki.

Friend of the show and theme song composer Jonathan Hape joins us to celebrate Spine 400! Someday we may finish this!

The plot of David Mamet's House of Games is right up our alleys, even if Pat thinks it would be more appropriate to a USA channel original program. But there are certainly problems here.

Jean-Pierre Melville adapts a novel written by fellow French director Jean Cocteau, and Melville believes Cocteau, who was on set everyday, was trying to undermine him at every turn. Melville's all but disowned the film, which makes this possibly the first time our opinion on a Melville film matches the director's.

We've talked before about how it may be impossible to truly make an anti-war war film, but in showing the human toll on both sides of the fight Andrei Tarkovsky's entry into the seminal Soviet genre of post-WWII war films may come pretty close. 

This week I feel like Pat does his best to keep me from being blackpilled about journalism and I do my best to remind Pat that everything is stupid. Let’s strike the delicate balance between trusting experts and recognizing that manufactured consent, racist underpinnings in news spin, and yellow journalism are alive and well, and even plutacratized, as anyone with enough financial backing can create the right bias-confirmed headline and get a million shares.

We finish up the 3 Films by Teshigahara boxset with four more films. Aside from the three collaborations with surrealist novelist Kobo Abe on the Criterion release are four shorts, three documentaries on a variety of subjects, and Teshigahara’s portion of an international anthology on the lives of teenage girls:

The Face of Another seems to distill the political identity aspects we loved in the previous two films into a discussion on personal identity, and that’s disappointing. We really liked the political identity stuff, so we spend this week trying to come to a more political understanding of this film. This is one of those films where its hard to say what we think of it, as aside from the confused messaging in the context of the other films, it’s a beautiful and inventive movie, incredibly stylistically interesting.

This is the final film in the 3 Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara boxset, though we will spend one more week with the set as next week we discuss the four short films also included.