Taiwan's presidential candidates are now set for the Jan. 13 showdown that could turn out to be the most status-quo-altering election in 2024 for the world and the S&P 500.
The outcome of Taiwan's election will likely determine Beijing's next move. Expect a diplomatic bear hug if a candidate favoring closer ties with China wins, or something more hostile if the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party retains power. Odds of a DPP win improved on Friday as two opposition parties registered for the election after a deal to form a unity ticket fell apart. No matter the outcome, President Biden's geopolitical gambit to preserve America's technology and military advantage is entering a period of maximum risk.
U.S.-China Chip War Centers On Taiwan
If there's one thing that the U.S. and China agree on, it's that advanced chips are the most critical strategic asset. America pioneered the semiconductor industry and won the Cold War largely because of it. Yet, by an accident of economic history and Morris Chang's visionary leadership of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM), the U.S. stores its crown jewels, so to speak, 100 miles off the coast of the Chinese mainland.
Now the U.S. has assembled a united front to deprive China of the world's most advanced chips and equipment to make them. Those cutting-edge technologies come from the U.S., U.K., the Netherlands, South Korea and Japan. Yet 90% of advanced chips designed by companies like Nvidia (NVDA), Apple (AAPL) and Broadcom (AVGO), are made at the sprawling TSMC factory campus on the island that China claims as its own.
That's why Beijing views the U.S.-China chip war not just as injurious — since it has an explicit goal of diminishing China's technological capability — but as a direct challenge to its sovereignty.
"Both Washington and Beijing are fixated on controlling the future of computing," Chris Miller writes in the 2022 book "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology." "To a frightening degree, that future is dependent on a small island that Beijing considers a renegade province and America has committed to defend by force."
Yet a key question is just how determined the Biden administration is to keep advanced semiconductor technology out of China's hands. The Aug. 30 unveiling of a 5G smartphone by Chinese tech powerhouse Huawei, later confirmed to have a highly advanced chip, signaled that U.S. efforts to contain China's technology ambitions are failing. While the Biden administration responded by adopting still-tighter export restrictions for AI chips and advanced semiconductor-making equipment in October, those updated rules already appear to be falling short.
Upcoming Taiwan Election
China's only real hope for reclaiming Taiwan while retaining the island's chipmaking prowess comes at the ballot box. If the Taiwanese people elect a president seeking more amicable ties with Beijing, it might become harder for TSMC to follow U.S. marching orders in its chip war vs. China.
"You don't invade Taiwan because you want technology," BCA Research chief geopolitical strategist Matt Gertken told clients on an August webcast. The way for China to gain access to TSMC's advanced fabs is to "have enough political influence so they do not enforce American export controls."
Just what might change if a China-friendly candidate comes to power is far from clear. Chinese technology giant Huawei was one of TSMC's biggest customers until 2019, when sanctions by the Trump administration cut off its access.
Odds that current Taiwan vice president and DPP presidential candidate William Lai will prevail improved in recent days as negotiations fell apart for a joint ticket between the Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People's Party (TPP).
Recent polling has shown the DPP and KMT candidates both with 31% and the TPP candidate with 25%.
Foxconn founder Terry Gou threw his hat in the ring in August, promising to "bring 50 years of peace to the Taiwan Strait."
Gou, who warned that Taiwan could become "the next Ukraine," announced Friday that he's dropping out of the race. He would likely have diverted votes from the KMT. BCA's Gertken noted that a Chinese investigation of Foxconn may have been designed to pressure him to exit the race. Gou, who resigned in 2019 as chairman of the manufacturing giant that produces the Apple iPhone, had made a failed bid to secure the KMT nomination this summer.
If the DPP prevails, "Xi might conclude that coercion has failed and consider more violent options," Johns Hopkins University professor Hal Brands wrote in Foreign Policy.
U.S.-China Chip War Turning Point
Autonomous combat drones are the kind of weaponry that National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had in mind when he announced an escalation of the U.S.-China chip war in September 2022.
Previously, U.S. export controls had aimed to stay "only a couple of generations ahead" of geopolitical rivals. They didn't strive for dominance.
"That is not the strategic environment we are in today," he said, with Beijing willing to devote nearly limitless resources to achieving leadership in technologies that can act as "force multipliers."
The new goal, Sullivan said, must be to "maintain as large of a lead as possible."
A few weeks later, the U.S. announced sweeping export controls aimed at blocking China's chip progress at every choke point.
The rules didn't just establish a presumption of denial for Chinese purchases of the most advanced AI chips. They also aimed to deny China the software to design those chips and the equipment to produce them.
The export rules set the floor for chip-equipment exports above the 14-nanometer production achieved by China's largest chipmaker, SMIC, as early as 2019. By comparison, Taiwan Semiconductor celebrated the start of mass production using its 3-nanometer technology earlier this year.
As the industry strives to make ever-smaller circuits, which translate to faster and more power-efficient semiconductors, China risks being left further and further behind.
Taiwan Semiconductor Comes To Arizona
One thing is clear: The era of the U.S. putting all of its most-prized chips on Taiwan can't end fast enough.
Back in 1987, when Morris Chang started TSMC with funding from the government of Taiwan, the U.S. semiconductor industry manufacturing share was more than triple the current 12%. At the time, as Miller recounts in "Chip War," "fabless" semiconductor companies that designed and sold chips but contracted out manufacturing weren't much of a thing. But Chang believed innovation would flourish if startups could outsource chipmaking to a foundry.
So he built it, and they came in droves — Nvidia, Marvell Technology (MRVL), Broadcom, Qualcomm (QCOM), and eventually Apple, which began designing its own iPhone chips in 2009. And TSMC capitalized on its booming business to relentlessly improve its manufacturing processes, entrenching its advantage.
Now, partly spurred on by the $52 billion Chips and Science Act, Taiwan Semiconductor has broken ground on the first of two Arizona chip fabs. Initially, high-volume production was set to begin in 2024. But bringing TSMC's advanced manufacturing to the U.S. is proving exceedingly difficult. In July, the company pushed the ramp to 2025, citing a shortage of skilled workers. If the DPP candidates won the election, the program could be speed up. The Vice president candidate Bi-Khim Hsiao, who is also the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative, have played an important role in this program.
Early in 2021, U.S. Senators Gary Peters (MI), Debbie Stabenow (MI), and Sherrod Brown (OH) sent a letter to Taiwan’s representative to the U.S. Bi-khim Hsiao, urged the Taiwanese government to do everything possible to mitigate the ongoing semiconductor chip shortage that has impacted American auto manufacturers. As the most diplomatic targets, US Senators' request can not be refused, Hsiao and her goverment pressed the TSMC to partly transfer its production line to Arizona. The full text of the letter can be found here. https://www.peters.senate.gov/download/semiconductor-shortage-letter-to-taiwanese-govt
In 2022, US Vice President Kamala Harris met with Taiwan’s TSMC founder Morris Chang at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit to discuss microchips in november last year in Bangkok, Thailand.
The two representatives met for a private meeting on the summit sidelines, discussing TSMC’s new $12 billion microchip plant in the US state of Arizona.
Chang said he told Harris that Taiwan had already invited U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to a “tool-in” ceremony for the plant on Dec. 6, though production is not starting immediately.
Chang, now retired from TSMC, remains influential as the elder statesman of Taiwan’s chip industry.
At last year’s virtual APEC summit, Chang appeared to criticise the United States and China over their efforts to become self-sufficient at making semiconductors, saying this would drive up costs and limit technological advances.
The cost of making chips in the US was higher than Taiwan by at least 50%, he said, but this did not “exclude” shifting some production to the United States, Taiwan’s most important international backer and arms supplier.
TSMC is also building a plant in Japan, another APEC member, and Chang hinted other countries were in consideration.
“TSMC could be considering other places also, but I will not talk about any details now.”

This post aims to interrogate claims and popular preconceptions regarding Dogen, zazen, and the role of contemplative practice in the historical Chan tradition. I aim to cover two separate but related topics. The first deals with claims by a certain self-proclaimed book reader on this forum and the second investigates the coherence of Zen masters’ criticisms of meditative practice with respect to their own practice. These topics will be covered separately in two parts.
For easier reading including both parts you can use the link here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zkAtEVgu5S-aYe6QcTuuwd4046nBpqPdOWwy2N63gqY/edit
Similar posts have been made over the years and parts of what I am saying has already been said by others. With this post I hope to revive what I see as a much-needed critical discussion and to offer a shared factual basis for such discussions to take place. Allow me to stress the importance of doing your own work and not allowing others (including myself) to think for you. In the name of transparency, I have shared citations with page numbers corresponding to PDFs easily available online through Terebess.hu or other online sources for all important points.
Let me start by addressing claims regarding Dogen and zazen’s place in the wider Chan/Zen tradition. There have been a variety of claims but I believe the core of these claims can be summarized down to three key claims: 1) Dogen invented zazen and has no connection to the Chan tradition, 2) Dogen plagiarized his FukanZazenGi (FZG) from work of unknown authorship, and 3) Dogen was never even in China. From my conversations with ewk, these claims allegedly rely on two sources: Sharf’s (2014) and Bielefeldt (1988). However, upon investigation of these works and others I have found that none of ewk’s claims pass muster. In the following, I interrogate each of these claims individually.
Based on my reading of ewk’s latest paper on Academia.edu, it is clear that his misunderstanding comes from equating zazen with shikantaza. This view is inappropriate as it obscures the historical development of seated meditation from the Indian tradition to its systematization in Chinese Buddhism. No other academic in Chan-Zen scholarship would make such a reductive claim, which goes a long way to explaining why, upon even a cursory investigation, there is really no academic consensus to support ewk’s claims.
Claims of Dogen’s invention of zazen
Dogen’s FZG is known to have been partly based on the well-known 11th century meditation manual Tso-Chan i (aka Zuochan Yi aka Principles of Seated Meditation), which has an identified author, Tsung-Tse (Bielefeldt 1988, pp. 19-21). The Tso-Chan i is held to have kicked off a new genre of practical guidelines for meditation. The Tso-Chan i is itself influenced by the 6th century meditation guidelines of earlier Tiantai (Tendai) master Zhiyi (Chih-i) in the "Hsiao chih-kuan" but differs in key details (Ibid, pp. 62, 80). In the writings of Zhiyi we find some of the first explicit instruction of traditional zazen posture (Ibid, pp. 63). Moreover, the Tiantai school is held to have been quite influential in the later developments of Chan (Swanson 1989, pp. 155; Gregory 1986, pp. 106).
The Tso-Chan i teaches a simple meditation without external objects done in a traditional cross-legged posture with eyes slightly open, back erect, thumbs touching, and tongue against front of the palate. Tsung-Tse details a practice of watching thoughts arise and fall away. This is reportedly based on the 6th century writings of the East Mountain School by the Fourth and Fifth ancestors, Daoxin and Hongren. Specifically, the East Mountain School taught stilling the mind as a way of seeing one’s innate nature (Gregory 1986, pp. 105-106; King 1992, pp. 158). Tsung-Tse uses the well-known “Pearl under the waves” metaphor to motivate meditation in Buddhist practice (Bielefeldt 1988, pp. 82).
Turning to our claim at hand, we realize two things. First, the spirit and form of zazen as we would know it in Dogen has clear roots in Chan by way of Tiantai influences, the East Mountain school and later Caodong teachings (as we will see in the next section). Second, guidelines for zazen were, in a way, codified in the Tso-Chan i by a known author. In particular, Tsung-Tse left a profound impact on subsequent Chan and Zen literature in providing a model for future monastic instruction (Ibid, pp. 69-70). Moreover, both the Tso-Chan i and Zhiyi's works would have been widely known by Dogen’s arrival in China and it is probable that Dogen would have been turned on to them by his teacher, Juching (Ruching) (Ibid, pp. 22). Given the history of influence established in the Tso-Chan i, Bielefeldt refers to a long tradition of zazen inherited by Dogen and his contemporaries (Ibid, pp. 71).
Claims of Dogen’s Plagiarism
As detailed in Bielefeldt (1988), Dogen’s final version of the FZG differs greatly from the Tso-Chan i. This is due in part to a) Dogen’s attempt to reform and remodel the Tso-Chan i for a new audience, b) inspiration from Juching and Caodong more generally, and c) possible innovation around the phrasing of shikantaza. Moreover, the FZG stands apart from other manuals, including the Tso-Chan i, for being more than a mere practice manual and more as a theological statement on the role of zazen in Zen practice (Bielefeldt 1988, pp. 109).
Dogen set out to write at a time when silent illumination was criticized as deluded practice by authors like Wumen. Dogen was explicit in his criticisms of Tsunge-Tse failing to adhere to the teachings of the Zen master Po-Chang (Baizhang Huaihai) (Ibid, pp. 20, 58, 105, 128). At the same time, Dogen laments the lack of a contemporary manual accessible for a Japanese audience (Ibid, pp. 16). Dogen’s first version of the FZG, in particular its description of zazen, relies on but is no means copied directly from the Tso-Chan i, with Dogen providing important additions and omissions (Ibid, pp.s 109-110). The other two-thirds of Dogen’s FZG, including the introduction where Dogen motivates the rationale for Zen contemplative practice, are held to be original productions by Dogen. Only in later versions of the FZG Dogen would come to distance himself substantially from the Tso-Chan i text even in his guidelines for zazen but would not abandon it completely as a model (Ibid, pp. 110).
Dogen eventually embraced “casting off body and mind” which has no precedent in the Tso-Chan i but does in Po-Chang's teaching (Ibid, pp. 119). Dogen reportedly learned this practice directly from Juching himself, which apparently led to Dogen's enlightenment as certified by Juching (Ibid, pp. 24-25). The practice itself is known to come from a Caodong teaching (Ibid, pp. 48), which taught a form of silent illumination, holding that Buddha-nature is always present in the mind, so that all that one needed was to let go of striving and sit silently in meditation (Buswell & Lopez 2014, p. 166.). This is a fundamental tenet of Dogen’s zazen generally and what would later come to be known as ‘shikantaza.’
Sharf (2014) points out that shikantaza has no pre-Dogen references in China. Even if we assume this to be true, this by no means proves that zazen generally has no pre-Dogen references. As we have seen, the core zazen practice has wide roots in Tiantai, East Mountain, and Caodong, which undoubtedly find their way in Dogen’s work. Moreover, the phrase "just sitting" was reportedly based on Dogen's interpretation of Juching's teacher Hongzhi's description of a method of silent illumination (Leighton 2000, pp. 17-18).
Bielefeldt writes that Dogen’s modeling of the FZG on the Tso-Chan i text in describing zazen places Dogen well within an established Chan contemplative tradition (Bielefeldt 1988, pp. 109-110). At the same time, the predominance of original additions in most sections of the FZG as well as the later major revisions in the ‘vulgate’ version of the FZG undermines claims of plagiarism. Key differences include embracing Caodong practices not found in the Tso-Chan i such as ‘casting off body and mind.’ Moreover, Dogen’s explicit criticism of Tsunge-Tse suggests no willful obscuration of the authorship of his principal source. Nor is there evidence of direct plagiarism claimed by the usual Dogen scholars. The acclaim enjoyed by the Tso-Chan i makes it unlikely that Dogen would pass off a well-known work as his own.
Claim that Dogen never went to China
Several books consider the evidence for Dogen’s time in China (Kodera 1980; Heine 2006; Bielefeldt 1988). While there is certainly room for critical scholarship regarding the itinerary of his travels, the timing of written works, and the nature of Juching’s influence on his early work, which I have little room to discuss in detail, I have found no scholar who argues Dogen lied about going to China. With respect to room for critical scholarship, early sources do not agree on Dogen’s exact date of return from China for instance and there is some doubt as to the reported breadth of his experience in China. However, it is known that Dogen received a certificate of transmission for Juching in 1227, revealing that he indeed studied with Juching at Tien-Tung shan (Bielefeldt 1988, pp. 16, 24). Moreover, as we find in his later version of the FZG and in the Shobogenzo, the connections to Juching and the wider Caodong teachings are especially clear.
Sources Cited
Benson, Koten (1989), "Serene Reflection." The Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, Volume 4, Number 1, pp. 33–35.
Bielefeldt, Carl (1988). Dogen's Manuals of Zen Meditation. University of California Press
Buswell, Robert, and Lopez, Donald (2014) The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton University Press
Gregory, Peter (1986) Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism. University of Hawaii Press
Heine, Steven (2006). Did Dogen Go to China? Oxford University Press.
King, Sallie (1992) Buddha-Nature. State University of New York Press
Kodera, James (1980). Dogen’s Formative Years in China. Prajñā Press
Leighton, Taigen Dan (2000), Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi, Tuttle
Sharf, Robert (2014). “Mindfulness and Mindlessness in Early Chan.” Philosophy East and West, Volume 64, Number 4, pp. 933-964.
Swanson, Paul L. (1989). Foundations of Tʻien-Tʻai philosophy. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Department

• Bold means the film received at least 1 Oscar nomination (47)
• Bold and italic means the film was only nominated in the Best International Feature category (17)
• Coin means the film won Best International Feature (7)
• Trophy means the film won Best Picture (1)

Year	Palme d'Or	Grand Prix	Jury Prize
1975	Chronicle of the Years of Fire	The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
1976	Taxi Driver	Cría Cuervos 🪢 The Marquise of O
1977	Padre Padrone
1978	The Tree of Wooden Clogs	Bye Bye Monkey 🪢 The Shout
1979	Apocalypse Now 🪢 🪙The Tin Drum🪙	Siberiade
1980	All That Jazz 🪢 Kagemusha	My American Uncle	The Constant Factor
1981	Man of Iron	Light Years Away
1982	Missing 🪢 Yol	The Night of the Shooting Stars
1983	The Ballad of Narayama	Monty Python's The Meaning of Life	Kharij
1984	Paris, Texas	Diary for My Children
1985	When Father Was Away on Business	Birdy	Colonel Redl
1986	The Mission	The Sacrifice	Thérèse
1987	Under the Sun of Satan	Repentance	Shinran: Path to Purity 🪢 Yeelen
1988	Pelle the Conqueror	A World Apart	A Short Film About Killing
1989	Sex, Lies, and Videotape	🪙Cinema Paradiso🪙 🪢 Too Beautiful for You	Jesus of Montreal
1990	Wild at Heart	The Sting of Death 🪢 Tilaï	Hidden Agenda
1991	Barton Fink	La Belle Noiseuse	Europa 🪢 Out of Life
1992	The Best Intentions	The Stolen Children	Dream of Light 🪢 An Independent Life
1993	Farewell My Concubine 🪢 The Piano	Faraway, So Close!	The Puppetmaster 🪢 Raining Stones
1994	Pulp Fiction	🪙Burnt by the Sun🪙 🪢 To Live	La Reine Margot
1995	Underground	Ulysses' Gaze	Don't Forget You're Going to Die 🪢 Carrington
1996	Secrets & Lies	Breaking the Waves	Crash
1997	The Eel 🪢 Taste of Cherry	The Sweet Hereafter	Western
1998	Eternity and a Day	🪙Life Is Beautiful🪙	Class Trip
1999	Rosetta	Humanité	The Letter
2000	Dancer in the Dark	Devils on the Doorstep	Blackboards 🪢 Songs from the Second Floor
2001	The Son's Room	The Piano Teacher
2002	The Pianist	The Man Without a Past	Divine Intervention
2003	Elephant	Distant	At Five in the Afternoon
2004	Fahrenheit 9/11	Oldboy	The Ladykillers 🪢 Tropical Malady
2005	The Child	Broken Flowers	Shanghai Dreams
2006	The Wind That Shakes the Barley	Flanders	Red Road
2007	4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days	The Mourning Forest	Persepolis 🪢 Silent Light
2008	The Class	Gomorrah	Il divo
2009	The White Ribbon	A Prophet	Fish Tank 🪢 Thirst
2010	Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives	Of Gods and Men	A Screaming Man
2011	The Tree of Life	The Kid with a Bike 🪢 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia	Polisse
2012	🪙Amour🪙	Reality	The Angels' Share
2013	Blue Is the Warmest Colour	Inside Llewyn Davis	Like Father, Like Son
2014	Winter Sleep	The Wonders	Goodbye to Language 🪢 Mommy
2015	Dheepan	🪙Son of Saul🪙	The Lobster
2016	I, Daniel Blake	It's Only the End of the World	American Honey
2017	The Square	BPM (Beats per Minute)	Loveless
2018	Shoplifters	BlacKkKlansman	Capernaum
2019	🪙🏆Parasite🏆🪙	Atlantics	Bacurau 🪢 Les Misérables
2021	Titane	Compartment No. 6 🪢 A Hero	Ahed's Knee 🪢 Memoria
2022	Triangle of Sadness	Stars at Noon 🪢 Close	The Eight Mountains 🪢 EO
2023	Anatomy of a Fall	The Zone of Interest	Fallen Leaves

• Bold means the actor received an Oscar nomination (23)
• Bold and italic means the actor was nominated in a non-acting category (1)
• Trophy means the actor won the Oscar (6)

Year	Best Actor	Best Actress
1975	Vittorio Gassman – Scent of a Woman	Valérie Perrine – Lenny
1976	José Luis Gómez – Pascual Duarte	Dominique Sanda – The Inheritance 🪢 Mari Törőcsik – Mrs. Dery Where Are You?
1977	Fernando Rey – Elisa, My Life	Shelley Duvall – 3 Women 🪢 Monique Mercure – J.A. Martin Photographer
1978	🏆Jon Voight – Coming Home🏆	Jill Clayburgh – An Unmarried Woman 🪢 Isabelle Huppert – Violette Nozière
1979	Jack Lemmon – The China Syndrome 🪢 Stefano Madia – Dear Father	🏆Sally Field – Norma Rae🏆 🪢 Eva Mattes – Woyzeck
1980	Michel Piccoli – A Leap in the Dark 🪢 Jack Thompson – Breaker Morant	Anouk Aimée – A Leap in the Dark 🪢 Milena Dravić – Special Treatment 🪢 Carla Gravina – La terrazza
1981	Ugo Tognazzi – Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man 🪢 Ian Holm – Chariots of Fire	Isabelle Adjani – Possession 🪢 Qaurtet 🪢 Elena Solovey – Faktas
1982	Jack Lemmon – Missing	Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak – Another Way
1983	Gian Maria Volonté – The Death of Mario Ricci	Hanna Schygulla – The Story of Piera
1984	Alfredo Landa 🪢 Francisco Rabal – The Holy Innocents	Helen Mirren – Cal
1985	🏆William Hurt – Kiss of the Spider Woman🏆	Norma Aleandro – The Official Story 🪢 Cher – Mask
1986	Michel Blanc – Ménage 🪢 Bob Hoskins – Mona Lisa	Barbara Sukowa – Rosa Luxemburg
1987	Marcello Mastroianni – Dark Eyes	Barbara Hershey – Shy People
1988	Forest Whitaker – Bird	Barbara Hershey 🪢 Jodhi May 🪢 Linda Mvusi – A World Apart
1989	James Spader – Sex, Lies, and Videotape	Meryl Streep – A Cry in the Dark
1990	Gérard Depardieu – Cyrano de Bergerac	Krystyna Janda – Interrogation
1991	John Turturro – Barton Fink 🪢 Samuel L. Jackson – Jungle Fever	Irène Jacob – The Double Life of Veronique
1992	Tim Robbins – The Player	Pernilla August – The Best Intentions
1993	David Thewlis – Naked	🏆Holly Hunter – The Piano🏆
1994	Ge You – To Live	Virna Lisi – La Reine Margot
1995	Jonathan Pryce – Carrington	Helen Mirren – The Madness of King George
1996	Daniel Auteuil 🪢 Pascal Duquenne – The Eighth Day	Brenda Blethyn – Secrets & Lies
1997	Sean Penn – She's So Lovely	Kathy Burke – Nil by Mouth
1998	Peter Mullan – My Name Is Joe	Élodie Bouchez 🪢 Natacha Régnier – The Dreamlife of Angels
1999	Emmanuel Schotté – Humanité	Séverine Caneele – Humanité 🪢 Émilie Dequenne – Rosetta
2000	Tony Leung Chiu-wai – In the Mood for Love	Björk – Dancer in the Dark
2001	Benoît Magimel – The Piano Teacher	Isabelle Huppert – The Piano Teacher
2002	Olivier Gourmet – The Son	Kati Outinen – The Man Without a Past
2003	Muzaffer Özdemir 🪢 Mehmet Emin Toprak – Distant	Marie-Josée Croze – The Barbarian Invasions
2004	Yūya Yagira – Nobody Knows	Maggie Cheung – Clean
2005	Tommy Lee Jones – The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada	Hanna Laslo – Free Zone
2006	Roschdy Zem 🪢 Bernard Blancan 🪢 Jamel Debbouze 🪢 Samy Naceri 🪢 Sami Bouajila – Days of Glory	Carmen Maura 🪢 Lola Dueñas 🪢 Blanca Portillo 🪢 Yohana Cobo 🪢 Chus Lampreave 🪢 Penélope Cruz – Volver
2007	Konstantin Lavronenko – The Banishment	Jeon Do-yeon – Secret Sunshine
2008	Benicio del Toro – Che	Sandra Corveloni – Linha de Passe
2009	🏆Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds🏆	Charlotte Gainsbourg – Antichrist
2010	Javier Bardem – Biutiful 🪢 Elio Germano – Our Life	Juliette Binoche – Certified Copy
2011	🏆Jean Dujardin – The Artist🏆	Kirsten Dunst – Melancholia
2012	Mads Mikkelsen – The Hunt	Cristina Flutur 🪢 Cosmina Stratan – Beyond the Hills
2013	Bruce Dern – Nebraska	Bérénice Bejo – The Past
2014	Timothy Spall – Mr. Turner	Julianne Moore – Maps to the Stars
2015	Vincent Lindon – The Measure of a Man	Emmanuelle Bercot – Mon Roi 🪢 Rooney Mara – Carol
2016	Shahab Hosseini – The Salesman	Jaclyn Jose – Ma' Rosa
2017	Joaquin Phoenix – You Were Never Really Here	Diane Kruger – In the Fade
2018	Marcello Fonte – Dogman	Samal Yeslyamova – Ayka
2019	Antonio Banderas – Pain and Glory	Emily Beecham – Little Joe
2021	Caleb Landry Jones – Nitram	Renate Reinsve – The Worst Person in the World
2022	Song Kang-ho – Broker	Zar Amir Ebrahimi – Holy Spider
2023	Kōji Yakusho – Perfect Days	Merve Dizdar – About Dry Grasses

• Bold means the film received at least 1 Oscar nomination in a corresponding category (9)
• Bold and italic means only the film was nominated, but the awarded filmmaker wasn't (8)
• Coin means the film won Best International Feature (4)

Year	Best Director	Best Screenplay
1975	Michel Brault – Orders 🪢 Costa-Gavras – Special Section
1976	Ettore Scola – Down and Dirty
1977
1978	Nagisa Ōshima – Empire of Passion
1979	Terrence Malick – Days of Heaven
1980		La Terrazza – Furio Scarpelli, Agenore Incrocci, Ettore Scola
1981		🪙Mephisto🪙 – István Szabó
1982	Werner Herzog – Fitzcarraldo	Moonlighting – Jerzy Skolimowski
1983	Robert Bresson – L'Argent 🪢 Andrei Tarkovsky – Nostalgia	Voyage to Cythera – Thanassis Valtinos, Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra
1984	Bertrand Tavernier – A Sunday in the Country
1985	André Téchiné – Rendez-vous
1986	Martin Scorsese – After Hours
1987	Wim Wenders – Wings of Desire
1988	Fernando Solanas – Sur
1989	Emir Kusturica – Time of the Gypsies
1990	Pavel Lungin – Taxi Blues
1991	Joel Coen – Barton Fink
1992	Robert Altman – The Player
1993	Mike Leigh – Naked
1994	Nanni Moretti – Dear Diary	Dead Tired – Michel Blanc
1995	Mathieu Kassovitz – La Haine
1996	Joel Coen – Fargo	A Self Made Hero – Jacques Audiard, Alain Le Henry
1997	Wong Kar-wai – Happy Together	The Ice Storm – James Schamus
1998	John Boorman – The General	Henry Fool – Hal Hartley
1999	Pedro Almodóvar – All About My Mother	Moloch – Yuri Arabov
2000	Edward Yang – Yi Yi	Nurse Betty – James Flamberg, John C. Richards
2001	Joel Coen – The Man Who Wasn't There 🪢 David Lynch – Mulholland Drive	No Man's Land – Danis Tanović
2002	Paul Thomas Anderson – Punch-Drunk Love 🪢 Im Kwon-taek – Painted Fire	Sweet Sixteen – Paul Laverty
2003	Gus Van Sant – Elephant	🪙The Barbarian Invasions🪙 – Denys Arcand
2004	Tony Gatlif – Exils	Look at Me – Agnès Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri
2005	Michael Haneke – Caché	The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada – Guillermo Arriaga
2006	Alejandro González Iñárritu – Babel	Volver – Pedro Almodóvar
2007	Julian Schnabel – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly	The Edge of Heaven – Fatih Akin
2008	Nuri Bilge Ceylan – Three Monkeys	Lorna's Silence – Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne
2009	Brillante Mendoza – Butchered	Spring Fever – Mei Feng
2010	Mathieu Amalric – On Tour	Poetry – Lee Chang-dong
2011	Nicolas Winding Refn – Drive	Footnote – Joseph Cedar
2012	Carlos Reygadas – Post Tenebras Lux	Beyond the Hills – Cristian Mungiu, Tatiana Niculescu Bran
2013	Amat Escalante – Heli	A Touch of Sin – Jia Zhangke
2014	Bennett Miller – Foxcatcher	Leviathan – Andrey Zvyagintsev, Oleg Negin
2015	Hou Hsiao-hsien – The Assassin	Chronic – Michel Franco
2016	Olivier Assayas – Personal Shopper 🪢 Cristian Mungiu – Graduation	🪙The Salesman🪙 – Asghar Farhadi
2017	Sofia Coppola – The Beguiled	The Killing of a Sacred Deer – Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou 🪢 You Were Never Really Here – Lynne Ramsay
2018	Paweł Pawlikowski – Cold War	3 Faces – Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar 🪢 Happy as Lazzaro – Alice Rohrwacher
2019	Jean-Pierre 🪢 Luc Dardenne – Young Ahmed	Portrait of a Lady on Fire – Céline Sciamma
2021	Leos Carax – Annette	🪙Drive My Car🪙 – Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa Oe
2022	Park Chan-wook – Decision to Leave	Boy from Heaven – Tarik Saleh
2023	Tran Anh Hung – The Pot-au-Feu	Monster – Yuji Sakamoto

• Bold means the film received at least 1 Oscar nomination (47)
• Bold and italic means the film was only nominated in the Best International Feature category (17)
• Coin means the film won Best International Feature (7)
• Trophy means the film won Best Picture (1)

Year	Palme d'Or	Grand Prix	Jury Prize
1975	Chronicle of the Years of Fire	The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
1976	Taxi Driver	Cría Cuervos 🪢 The Marquise of O
1977	Padre Padrone
1978	The Tree of Wooden Clogs	Bye Bye Monkey 🪢 The Shout
1979	Apocalypse Now 🪢 🪙The Tin Drum🪙	Siberiade
1980	All That Jazz 🪢 Kagemusha	My American Uncle	The Constant Factor
1981	Man of Iron	Light Years Away
1982	Missing 🪢 Yol	The Night of the Shooting Stars
1983	The Ballad of Narayama	Monty Python's The Meaning of Life	Kharij
1984	Paris, Texas	Diary for My Children
1985	When Father Was Away on Business	Birdy	Colonel Redl
1986	The Mission	The Sacrifice	Thérèse
1987	Under the Sun of Satan	Repentance	Shinran: Path to Purity 🪢 Yeelen
1988	Pelle the Conqueror	A World Apart	A Short Film About Killing
1989	Sex, Lies, and Videotape	🪙Cinema Paradiso🪙 🪢 Too Beautiful for You	Jesus of Montreal
1990	Wild at Heart	The Sting of Death 🪢 Tilaï	Hidden Agenda
1991	Barton Fink	La Belle Noiseuse	Europa 🪢 Out of Life
1992	The Best Intentions	The Stolen Children	Dream of Light 🪢 An Independent Life
1993	Farewell My Concubine 🪢 The Piano	Faraway, So Close!	The Puppetmaster 🪢 Raining Stones
1994	Pulp Fiction	🪙Burnt by the Sun🪙 🪢 To Live	La Reine Margot
1995	Underground	Ulysses' Gaze	Don't Forget You're Going to Die 🪢 Carrington
1996	Secrets & Lies	Breaking the Waves	Crash
1997	The Eel 🪢 Taste of Cherry	The Sweet Hereafter	Western
1998	Eternity and a Day	🪙Life Is Beautiful🪙	Class Trip
1999	Rosetta	Humanité	The Letter
2000	Dancer in the Dark	Devils on the Doorstep	Blackboards 🪢 Songs from the Second Floor
2001	The Son's Room	The Piano Teacher
2002	The Pianist	The Man Without a Past	Divine Intervention
2003	Elephant	Distant	At Five in the Afternoon
2004	Fahrenheit 9/11	Oldboy	The Ladykillers 🪢 Tropical Malady
2005	L'Enfant	Broken Flowers	Shanghai Dreams
2006	The Wind That Shakes the Barley	Flanders	Red Road
2007	4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days	The Mourning Forest	Persepolis 🪢 Silent Light
2008	The Class	Gomorrah	Il divo
2009	The White Ribbon	A Prophet	Fish Tank 🪢 Thirst
2010	Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives	Of Gods and Men	A Screaming Man
2011	The Tree of Life	The Kid with a Bike 🪢 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia	Polisse
2012	🪙Amour🪙	Reality	The Angels' Share
2013	Blue Is the Warmest Colour	Inside Llewyn Davis	Like Father, Like Son
2014	Winter Sleep	The Wonders	Goodbye to Language 🪢 Mommy
2015	Dheepan	🪙Son of Saul🪙	The Lobster
2016	I, Daniel Blake	It's Only the End of the World	American Honey
2017	The Square	BPM (Beats per Minute)	Loveless
2018	Shoplifters	BlacKkKlansman	Capernaum
2019	🪙🏆Parasite🏆🪙	Atlantics	Bacurau 🪢 Les Misérables
2021	Titane	Compartment No. 6 🪢 A Hero	Ahed's Knee 🪢 Memoria
2022	Triangle of Sadness	Stars at Noon 🪢 Close	The Eight Mountains 🪢 EO
2023	Anatomy of a Fall	The Zone of Interest	Fallen Leaves

• Bold means the actor received an Oscar nomination (23)
• Bold and italic means the actor was nominated in a non-acting category (1)
• Trophy means the actor won the Oscar (6)

Year	Best Actor	Best Actress
1975	Vittorio Gassman – Scent of a Woman	Valérie Perrine – Lenny
1976	José Luis Gómez – Pascual Duarte	Dominique Sanda – The Inheritance 🪢 Mari Törőcsik – Mrs. Dery Where Are You?
1977	Fernando Rey – Elisa, My Life	Shelley Duvall – 3 Women 🪢 Monique Mercure – J.A. Martin Photographer
1978	🏆Jon Voight – Coming Home🏆	Jill Clayburgh – An Unmarried Woman 🪢 Isabelle Huppert – Violette Nozière
1979	Jack Lemmon – The China Syndrome 🪢 Stefano Madia – Dear Father	🏆Sally Field – Norma Rae🏆 🪢 Eva Mattes – Woyzeck
1980	Michel Piccoli – A Leap in the Dark 🪢 Jack Thompson – Breaker Morant	Anouk Aimée – A Leap in the Dark 🪢 Milena Dravić – Special Treatment 🪢 Carla Gravina – La terrazza
1981	Ugo Tognazzi – Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man 🪢 Ian Holm – Chariots of Fire	Isabelle Adjani – Possession 🪢 Qaurtet 🪢 Elena Solovey – Faktas
1982	Jack Lemmon – Missing	Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak – Another Way
1983	Gian Maria Volonté – The Death of Mario Ricci	Hanna Schygulla – The Story of Piera
1984	Alfredo Landa 🪢 Francisco Rabal – The Holy Innocents	Helen Mirren – Cal
1985	🏆William Hurt – Kiss of the Spider Woman🏆	Norma Aleandro – The Official Story 🪢 Cher – Mask
1986	Michel Blanc – Ménage 🪢 Bob Hoskins – Mona Lisa	Barbara Sukowa – Rosa Luxemburg
1987	Marcello Mastroianni – Dark Eyes	Barbara Hershey – Shy People
1988	Forest Whitaker – Bird	Barbara Hershey 🪢 Jodhi May 🪢 Linda Mvusi – A World Apart
1989	James Spader – Sex, Lies, and Videotape	Meryl Streep – A Cry in the Dark
1990	Gérard Depardieu – Cyrano de Bergerac	Krystyna Janda – Interrogation
1991	John Turturro – Barton Fink 🪢 Samuel L. Jackson – Jungle Fever	Irène Jacob – The Double Life of Veronique
1992	Tim Robbins – The Player	Pernilla August – The Best Intentions
1993	David Thewlis – Naked	🏆Holly Hunter – The Piano🏆
1994	Ge You – To Live	Virna Lisi – La Reine Margot
1995	Jonathan Pryce – Carrington	Helen Mirren – The Madness of King George
1996	Daniel Auteuil 🪢 Pascal Duquenne – The Eighth Day	Brenda Blethyn – Secrets & Lies
1997	Sean Penn – She's So Lovely	Kathy Burke – Nil by Mouth
1998	Peter Mullan – My Name Is Joe	Élodie Bouchez 🪢 Natacha Régnier – The Dreamlife of Angels
1999	Emmanuel Schotté – Humanité	Séverine Caneele – Humanité 🪢 Émilie Dequenne – Rosetta
2000	Tony Leung Chiu-wai – In the Mood for Love	Björk – Dancer in the Dark
2001	Benoît Magimel – The Piano Teacher	Isabelle Huppert – The Piano Teacher
2002	Olivier Gourmet – The Son	Kati Outinen – The Man Without a Past
2003	Muzaffer Özdemir 🪢 Mehmet Emin Toprak – Distant	Marie-Josée Croze – The Barbarian Invasions
2004	Yūya Yagira – Nobody Knows	Maggie Cheung – Clean
2005	Tommy Lee Jones – The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada	Hanna Laslo – Free Zone
2006	Roschdy Zem 🪢 Bernard Blancan 🪢 Jamel Debbouze 🪢 Samy Naceri 🪢 Sami Bouajila – Days of Glory	Carmen Maura 🪢 Lola Dueñas 🪢 Blanca Portillo 🪢 Yohana Cobo 🪢 Chus Lampreave 🪢 Penélope Cruz – Volver
2007	Konstantin Lavronenko – The Banishment	Jeon Do-yeon – Secret Sunshine
2008	Benicio del Toro – Che	Sandra Corveloni – Linha de Passe
2009	🏆Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds🏆	Charlotte Gainsbourg – Antichrist
2010	Javier Bardem – Biutiful 🪢 Elio Germano – Our Life	Juliette Binoche – Certified Copy
2011	🏆Jean Dujardin – The Artist🏆	Kirsten Dunst – Melancholia
2012	Mads Mikkelsen – The Hunt	Cristina Flutur 🪢 Cosmina Stratan – Beyond the Hills
2013	Bruce Dern – Nebraska	Bérénice Bejo – The Past
2014	Timothy Spall – Mr. Turner	Julianne Moore – Maps to the Stars
2015	Vincent Lindon – The Measure of a Man	Emmanuelle Bercot – Mon Roi 🪢 Rooney Mara – Carol
2016	Shahab Hosseini – The Salesman	Jaclyn Jose – Ma' Rosa
2017	Joaquin Phoenix – You Were Never Really Here	Diane Kruger – In the Fade
2018	Marcello Fonte – Dogman	Samal Yeslyamova – Ayka
2019	Antonio Banderas – Pain and Glory	Emily Beecham – Little Joe
2021	Caleb Landry Jones – Nitram	Renate Reinsve – The Worst Person in the World
2022	Song Kang-ho – Broker	Zar Amir Ebrahimi – Holy Spider
2023	Kōji Yakusho – Perfect Days	Merve Dizdar – About Dry Grasses

• Bold means the film received at least 1 Oscar nomination in a corresponding category (9)
• Bold and italic means only the film was nominated, but the awarded filmmaker wasn't (8)

Year	Best Director	Best Screenplay
1975	Michel Brault – Orders 🪢 Costa-Gavras – Special Section
1976	Ettore Scola – Down and Dirty
1977
1978	Nagisa Ōshima – Empire of Passion
1979	Terrence Malick – Days of Heaven
1980		La Terrazza – Furio Scarpelli, Agenore Incrocci, Ettore Scola
1981		🪙Mephisto🪙 – István Szabó
1982	Werner Herzog – Fitzcarraldo	Moonlighting – Jerzy Skolimowski
1983	Robert Bresson – L'Argent 🪢 Andrei Tarkovsky – Nostalgia	Voyage to Cythera – Thanassis Valtinos, Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra
1984	Bertrand Tavernier – A Sunday in the Country
1985	André Téchiné – Rendez-vous
1986	Martin Scorsese – After Hours
1987	Wim Wenders – Wings of Desire
1988	Fernando Solanas – Sur
1989	Emir Kusturica – Time of the Gypsies
1990	Pavel Lungin – Taxi Blues
1991	Joel Coen – Barton Fink
1992	Robert Altman – The Player
1993	Mike Leigh – Naked
1994	Nanni Moretti – Dear Diary	Dead Tired – Michel Blanc
1995	Mathieu Kassovitz – La Haine
1996	Joel Coen – Fargo	A Self Made Hero – Jacques Audiard, Alain Le Henry
1997	Wong Kar-wai – Happy Together	The Ice Storm – James Schamus
1998	John Boorman – The General	Henry Fool – Hal Hartley
1999	Pedro Almodóvar – All About My Mother	Moloch – Yuri Arabov
2000	Edward Yang – Yi Yi	Nurse Betty – James Flamberg, John C. Richards
2001	Joel Coen – The Man Who Wasn't There 🪢 David Lynch – Mulholland Drive	No Man's Land – Danis Tanović
2002	Paul Thomas Anderson – Punch-Drunk Love 🪢 Im Kwon-taek – Painted Fire	Sweet Sixteen – Paul Laverty
2003	Gus Van Sant – Elephant	🪙The Barbarian Invasions🪙 – Denys Arcand
2004	Tony Gatlif – Exils	Look at Me – Agnès Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri
2005	Michael Haneke – Caché	The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada – Guillermo Arriaga
2006	Alejandro González Iñárritu – Babel	Volver – Pedro Almodóvar
2007	Julian Schnabel – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly	The Edge of Heaven – Fatih Akin
2008	Nuri Bilge Ceylan – Three Monkeys	Lorna's Silence – Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne
2009	Brillante Mendoza – Butchered	Spring Fever – Mei Feng
2010	Mathieu Amalric – On Tour	Poetry – Lee Chang-dong
2011	Nicolas Winding Refn – Drive	Footnote – Joseph Cedar
2012	Carlos Reygadas – Post Tenebras Lux	Beyond the Hills – Cristian Mungiu, Tatiana Niculescu Bran
2013	Amat Escalante – Heli	A Touch of Sin – Jia Zhangke
2014	Bennett Miller – Foxcatcher	Leviathan – Andrey Zvyagintsev, Oleg Negin
2015	Hou Hsiao-hsien – The Assassin	Chronic – Michel Franco
2016	Olivier Assayas – Personal Shopper 🪢 Cristian Mungiu – Graduation	🪙The Salesman🪙 – Asghar Farhadi
2017	Sofia Coppola – The Beguiled	The Killing of a Sacred Deer – Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou 🪢 You Were Never Really Here – Lynne Ramsay
2018	Paweł Pawlikowski – Cold War	3 Faces – Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar 🪢 Happy as Lazzaro – Alice Rohrwacher
2019	Jean-Pierre 🪢 Luc Dardenne – Young Ahmed	Portrait of a Lady on Fire – Céline Sciamma
2021	Leos Carax – Annette	🪙Drive My Car🪙 – Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa Oe
2022	Park Chan-wook – Decision to Leave	Boy from Heaven – Tarik Saleh
2023	Tran Anh Hung – The Pot-au-Feu	Monster – Yuji Sakamoto

Roughly 7 years ago u/TheGreatZiegfeld did an experiment of a post to determine what the best films of each year would be from 1940 to 2011 (before the 2012 S&S polls).
With the recently updated TSPDT and the 2022 S&S list, I decided to do the same from 1940 to 2021 regarding what critics thought were the best of each year.
Keep in mind this is all from a critics' poll, not from one specific critic's list. Also no short films or miniseries (meaning no Twin Peaks or Meshes of the Afternoon), as well as those from 2022 and beyond because of the last S&S poll.
With all that in mind, let's begin.
1940
Winner: His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)
Other nominees: The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin), The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford), The Shop Around The Corner (Ernst Lubitsch), The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor)
1941
Winner: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
Other nominees: The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges), Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges), The Maltese Falcon (John Houston), How Green Was My Valley (John Ford)
1942
Winner: Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
Other nominees: The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles), To Be Or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch), The Palm Springs Story (Preston Sturges), Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
1943
Winner: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell and Pressburger)
Other nominees: Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer), Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock), I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur), Ossessione (Luchino Visconti)
1944
Winner: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder)
Other nominees: Ivan the Terrible, Part I (Sergei Eisenstein), Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli), A Canterbury Tale (Powell and Pressburger), To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks)
1945
Winner: Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné)
Other nominees: Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini), Brief Encounter (David Lean), I Know Where I'm Going (Powell and Pressburger) Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson)
1946
Winner: It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra)
Other nominees: A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressburger), Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock), My Darling Clementine (John Ford), Paisan (Roberto Rossellini)
1947
Winner: Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger)
Other nominees: Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur), Monsieur Verdoux (Charlie Chaplin), The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
1948
Winner: Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica)
Other nominees: The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger), Letters from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls), Spring in a Small Town (Mu Fei), Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini)
1949
Winner: The Third Man (Carol Reed)
Other nominees: Late Spring (Yasujirō Ozu), Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford), White Heat (Raoul Walsh)
1950
Winner Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa)
Other nominees; Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder), All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz), Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel), In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray)
1951
Winner: The River (Jean Renoir)
Other nominees: Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson), Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica), Early Summer (Yasujirō Ozu), Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock)
1952
Winner: Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly)
Other nominees: Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa), Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica), The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi), The Quiet Man (John Ford)
1953
Winner: Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu)
Other nominees: Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi), The Earrings of Madame de (Max Ophüls), The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli), Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati)
1954
Winner: Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
Other nominees: Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock), Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini), La Strada (Federico Fellini), Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi)
1955
Winner: Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Other nominees: The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton), Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray), All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Kirk), Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse)
1956
Winner: The Searchers (John Ford)
Other nominees: A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson), Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk), Aparajito (Satyajit Ray), Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray)
1957
Winner: Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman)
Other nominees: The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman), Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini), Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa), Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick)
1958
Winner Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
Other nominees: Touch of Evil (Orson Welles), Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda), Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Sergei Eisenstein), The Music Room (Satyajit Ray)
1959
Winner: The 400 Blows (François Truffaut)
Other nominees: Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder), North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock), Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks), Pickpocket (Robert Bresson)
1960
Winner: Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard)
Other nominees: Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock), La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini), L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni), The Apartment (Billy Wilder)
1961
Winner: Viridiana (Luis Buñuel)
Other nominees: Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais), La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni), West Side Story (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins), Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa)
1962
Winner: Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)
Other nominees: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford), Jules and Jim (François Truffaut), Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda), L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni)
1963
Winner 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini)
Other nominees: Le Mepris (Jean-Luc Godard), The Leopard (Luchino Visconti), The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock), The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga)
1964
Winner: Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick)
Other nominees: Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer), The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy), Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha)
1965
Winner: Pierrot Le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard)
Other nominees: Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov), Le Bonheur (Agnes Varda), Doctor Zhivago (David Lean)
1966
Winner: Persona (Ingmar Bergman)
Other nominees: Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky), Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson), The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo), Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni)
1967
Winner: Playtime (Jacques Tati)
Other nominees: Mouchette (Robert Bresson), Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville), Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel), The Graduate (Mike Nichols)
1968
Winner: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
Other nominees: Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone), Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski), Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea), Faces (John Cassavetes)
1969
Winner: The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)
Other nominees: The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov), Kes (Ken Loach), My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer), Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville)
1970
Winner: The Conformist (Bernado Bertolucci)
Other nominees: Wanda (Barbara Loden), Performance (Nicholas Roeg), Husbands (John Cassavetes), Tristana (Luis Buñuel)
1971
Winner: A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick)
Other nominees: Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman), A Touch of Zen (King Hu), Out 1 (Jacques Rivette)
1972
Winner: The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)
Other nominees: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog), Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel), Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)
1973
Winner: Amarcord (Federico Fellini)
Other nominees: The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache), The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice), Don't Look Now (Nicholas Roeg), Badlands (Terrence Malick)
1974
Winner: The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola)
Other nominees: Chinatown (Roman Polanski), A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
1975
Winner: Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman)
Other nominees: Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky), Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick), Nashville (Robert Altman), Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
1976
Winner: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
Other nominees: News from Home (Chantal Akerman), Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders), In the Realm of Senses (Nagisa Oshima), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes)
1977
Winner: Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
Other nominees: Star Wars (George Lucas), Close Encounter of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg), Eraserhead (David Lynch), The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko)
1978
Winner: Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
Other nominees: Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick), The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino), The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi), In a Year with 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
1979
Winner: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
Other nominees: Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky), Alien (Ridley Scott), Manhattan (Woody Allen), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse)
1980
Winner: Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
Other nominees: The Shining (Stanley Kubrick), The Empire Strike Back (Irvin Kershner), Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino), The Elephant Man (David Lynch)
1981
Winner: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg)
Other nominees: Possession (Andrzej Żuławski), Blow Out (Brian de Palma), Mad Max 2 (George Miller), An American Werewolf in London (John Landis)
1982
Winner: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
Other nominees: Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg), The Thing (John Carpenter), The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese)
1983
Winner: Sans Soleil (Chris Marker)
Other nominees: L'Argent (Robert Bresson), Videodrome (David Cronenberg), Nostalgia (Andrei Tarkovsky), A Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat)
1984
Winner: Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)
Other nominees: Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders), Love Streams (John Cassavetes), Amadeus (Milos Forman), Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
1985
Winner: Shoah (Claude Lanzmann)
Other nominees: Come and See (Elem Klimov), Ran (Akira Kurosawa), Vagabond (Agnes Varda), Brazil (Terry Gilliam)
1986
Winner: Blue Velvet (David Lynch)
Other nominees: The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer), The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky), Aliens (James Cameron), Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
1987
Winner: Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders)
Other nominees: Where is the Friend's House (Abbas Kiarostami), The Dead (John Huston), Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson), Yeelen (Souleymanne Cisse)
1988
Winner: My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki)
Other nominees: Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore), Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies), The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris), Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata)
1989
Winner: Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
Other nominees: A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien), Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen), When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway)
1990
Winner: Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami)
Other nominees: Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese), Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai), An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion), Paris is Burning (Jessie Livingston)
1991
Winner: A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang)
Other nominees: Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash), The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski), The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme), Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou)
1992
Winner: Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood)
Other nominees: The Quince Tree Sun (Victor Erice), Orlando (Sally Potter), Life, and Nothing More (Abbas Kiarostami), Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino)
1993
Winner: The Piano (Jane Campion)
Other nominees: Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg), Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski), Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis), The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
1994
Winner: Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
Other nominees: Satantango (Bela Tarr), Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai), Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski), Through the Olive Tree (Abbas Kiarostami)
1995
Winner: Heat (Michael Mann)
Other nominees: Underground (Emir Kusturica), Safe (Todd Haynes), Casino (Martin Scorsese), Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch)
1996
Winner: Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier)
Other nominees: Fargo (Joel Coen), A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf), Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh), Crash (David Cronenberg)
1997
Winner: Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami)
Other nominees: Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai), Lost Highway (David Lynch), Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson), Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki)
1998
Winner: Histoire(s) du Cinema (Jean-Luc Godard)
Other nominees: The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick), The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen), The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg), Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
1999
Winner: Beau Travail (Claire Denis)
Other nominees: Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson), The Matrix (Wachowskis), Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick), All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar)
2000
Winner: In The Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai)
Other nominees: Yi Yi (Edward Yang), The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda), Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr), In Vanda's Room (Pedro Costa)
2001
Winner: Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)
Other nominees: Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki), La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel), A.I: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg), The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson)
2002
Winner: City of God (Fernando Meirelles)
Other nominees: Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing), Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar), Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sukurov), Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay)
2003
Winner: Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang)
Other nominees: Dogville (Lars von Trier), Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola), Elephant (Gus van Sant), Oldboy (Park Chan-wook)
2004
Winner: Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Other nominees: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry), The Intruder (Claire Denis), Before Sunset (Richard Linklater), Sideways (Alexander Payne)
2005
Winner: Caché (Michael Haneke)
Other nominees: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee), The New World (Terrence Malick), Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
2006
Winner: Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Other nominees: Inland Empire (David Lynch), Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro), The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck), Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)
2007
Winner: There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Other nominees: No Country for Old Men (Coens), Zodiac (David Fincher), Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas), 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
2008
Winner: The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
Other nominees: WALL-E (Andrew Stanton), Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman), The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan), Hunger (Steve McQueen)
2009
Winner: The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Other nominees: A Prophet (Jacques Audiard), Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold), Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino), Avatar (James Cameron)
2010
Winner: Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Other nominees: Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman), The Social Network (David Fincher), Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz), Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
2011
Winner: The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Other nominees: A Separation (Asghar Farhadi), Melancholia (Lars von Trier), The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
2012
Winner: Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
Other nominees: The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer), The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson), Amour (Michael Haneke), Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
2013
Winner: Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
Other nominees: The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino), Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche), Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski), 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
2014
Winner: Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
Other nominees: Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard), The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson), Girlhood (Celine Sciamma), Interstellar (Christopher Nolan)
2015
Winner: Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
Other nominees: Carol (Todd Haynes), Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien), No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
2016
Winner: Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
Other nominees: Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade), American Honey (Andrea Arnold), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve), Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)
2017
Winner: Get Out (Jordan Peele)
Other nominees: Zama (Lucrecia Martel), Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson), You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay), Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)
2018
Winner: Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
Other nominees: Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher), Burning (Lee Chang-dong), An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo), Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
2019
Winner: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma)
Other nominees: Parasite (Bong Joon-ho), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino), Atlantics (Mati Diop), First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
2020
Winner: Nomadland (Chloe Zhao)
Other nominees: Time (Garrett Bradley), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hitman), Days (Tsai Ming-liang), Quo Vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Zbanic)
2021
Winner: Petite Maman (Celine Sciamma)
Other nominees: The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion), Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Titane (Julia Docournau), Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Midjourney is an AI-based text-to-image generator. I will teach you how to become "Midjourney Prompt Generator” and create "image prompt" for Midjourney. "image prompt" consists of multiple segments in a format of ; /imagine prompt: (shot type), (concept) , (descriptive summary of the subject), (artist), (summary of the scene's environment), (description of the mood of the scene), (description of the atmosphere), (description of the lighting effect), (style) The rule set to create an "image prompt" as "Midjourney Prompt Generator” are as follows: 1. First I will send a (concept) as a short text or long text or emoji to inspire you for the "image prompt". You have to wait for it and never ever start creating "image promt" before I send you the (concept) 2. Then you will start writing the "image prompt" with "/imagine prompt:" 3. Then you will choose a (shot type) most suitable for the (concept) and the overall scene You can use a suitable expression from the list below; Wide-Angle Shot, Wide-Angle - The camera is far away from the subject Ultra-Wide Angle, Ultra Wide-Angle - The camera is very far away from the subject Far-Shot, Far-Angle - The camera is far away from the subject and below or above it Aerial View, Satellite View, Drone Footage - The camera is far away looking down on the subject Medium-Shot, Medium-Shot Angle - The camera is low, looking up at the subject Top-Down Shot, Top-Down Angle - The camera is high, looking down at the subject Ground-Shot, Ground-Shot Angle, Ground Angle - The camera is high, looking down at the subject Low-Angle Shot, Low Angle - The camera is very low, looking way up at the subject High-Angle Shot, High Angle - The camera is fairly high, looking down at the subject Full-Shot, Full-Body Shot, Full-Length Shot - The camera captures the entire subject Dutch-Angle - The whole shot slanted, diagonal horizon, evil villain style Eye-Level Shot - The camera is fairly close and looking levelly at the subject Close-Up - The camera is close to the subject Glamour Shot, Glamour Portrait - The camera is intimately close to the subject Macro-Shot, Macrophotography - The camera is microscopishly close to the subject 4. Then add (concept) you got from me 5. (descriptive summary of the subject) is a detailed,vivid,visually descriptive summary of the (concept). Ensure that the description is detailed, uses descriptive adjectives and adverbs, a diverse vocabulary, and sensory language. Offer context and background information regarding the subject and consider the image's perspective and point of view. Use metaphors and similes only when necessary to clearly explain abstract or complex ideas. Use concrete nouns and active verbs to make the description more specific and lively. 6. (artist) is an actual artist that should match with the (concept). Be creative, genius, smart and unorthodox while choosing the artist. You must add (artist) to the "image prompt" in a format like: by (artist) You can choose the (artist) from the artist list below or choose another artist that doesn't exist in the list; Midjourney,Esao Andrews,Rolf Armstrong,Lois van Baarle,Ingrid Baars,Tom Bagshaw,Karol Bak,Cicely Mary Barker,Aubrey Beardsley,Zdzisław Beksiński,Julie Bell,Simon Bisley,William Blake,Enoch Bolles,William-Adolphe Bouguereau,Charlie Bowater,Aleksi Briclot,Gerald Brom,Gaston Bussière,Kaethe Butcher,Ray Caesar,Leonora Carrington,Santiago Caruso,Clyde Caldwell,Elizabeth Catlett,Pierre Puvis de Chavannes,Hsiao Ron Cheng,Sandra Chevrier,Frank Cho,James C. Christensen,Harry Clarke,Richard Corben,Dean Cornwell,Walter Crane,Guido Crepax,Craig Davison,Pino Daeni,Guy Denning,Leo and Diane Dillon,Anna Dittmann,Gustav Doré,Aaron Douglas,Philippe Druillet,Edmund Dulac,Jeff Easley,Les Edwards,Larry Elmore,Gil Elvgren,Ed Emshwiller,Shepard Fairey,Roberto Ferri,Harrison Fisher,Art Frahm,Frank Frazetta,Jon Foster,Ernst Fuchs,Henry Fuseli,Jack Gaughan,Daniel F Gerhartz,Stefan Gesell,Atey Ghailan,Donato Giancola,Jean-Pierre Gibrat,Charles Dana Gibson,Warwick Goble,Hendrick Goltzius,Edward Gorey,Laurie Greasley,Elizabeth Shippen Green,Peter Gric,Carne Griffiths,Rebecca Guay,Sam Guay,Asaf Hanuka,Ryohei Hase,Ryan Hewett,Stephen Hickman,Greg Hildebrandt,Tim Hildebrandt,Dan Hillier,Aaron Horkey,Adam Hughes,James Jean,Chantal Joffe,Howard David Johnson,Jeffrey Catherine Jones,Bijou Karman,Heinrich Kley,Eric Lacombe,Carl Larrson,Abigail Larson,Dorothy Lathrop,Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme,J.C. Leyendecker,Milo Manara,Esteban Maroto,Marco Mazzoni,Robert McGinnis,Dave McKean,Kelly McKernan,Mike Mignola,Ian Miller,Marjorie Miller,Russ Mills,Kent Monkman,Alphonso Mucha,Patrick Nagel,Mario Sanchez Nevado,Dustin Nguyen,Kay Nielsen,Terese Nielsen,Alphonse Osbert,Ida Rentoul Outhwaite,Michael Parkes,Coles Phillips,Anton Pieck,Paul Pope,José Guadalupe Posada,Arthur Rackham,Lotte Reiniger,Frederic Remington,Norman Rockwell,Conrad Roset,Luis Royo,Greg Rutkowski,Apollonia Saintclair,Mead Schaeffer,Egon Schiele,Bill Sienkiewicz,Jeff Simpson,Barry Windsor Smith,Jessie Willcox Smith,Brian Stelfreeze,Anne Stokes,Arthur Suydam,Rufino Tamayo,J.P. Targete,Ben Templesmith,Nene Thomas,Tasha Tudor,Boris Vallejo,Alberto Vargas,Charles Vess,Mikhail Vrubel,Tillie Walden,Josephine Wall,Gerda Wegener,Michael Whelan,Coby Whitmore,Kehinde Wiley 7. (summary of the scene's environment) is a descriptive summary of the scene's environment. Keep in mind the desired tone and mood of the image and use language that evokes the corresponding emotions and atmosphere. Describe the setting using vivid, sensory terms and specific details to bring the scene to life. 8. (description of the mood of the scene) is a detailed description of the mood of the scene, using language that conveys the desired emotions and atmosphere. 9. (description of the atmosphere) is a visually detailed description of the atmosphere, using descriptive adjectives and adverbs to create the desired atmosphere while considering the overall tone and mood of the image. 10. (description of the lighting effect) is a detailed visual description of the lighting effect, including types of lights, displays, techniques, global illumination, and shadows. Describe the quality, direction, color, and intensity of the light and how it impacts the mood and atmosphere of the scene. Use specific adjectives and adverbs to portray the desired lighting effect and consider how it will interact with the subject and environment. 11. (style) is a made up art style that you will generate with the information below How to generate a madeup art style; 1. These are some actual art style names; steampunk,isometric anime,analytic drawing,infographic drawing,coloring book,diagrammatic drawing,diagrammatic portrait,double exposure,2D illustration,isometric illustration,pixel art,futuristic style,ornamental watercolour,dark fantasy,paper cut craft,paper quilling,patchwork collage,iridescent,ukiyo-e art,watercolour landscape,op art,Japanese ink,pastel drawing,dripping art,stained glass portrait,graffiti portrait,winter oil painting,anime portrait,cinematographic style,typography art,one-line drawing,polaroid photo,tattoo art, etc. 2. Be creative and mix, match, combine random words and words of actual art style names Examples of how to generate a madeup art style; example 1. steampunk is an actual art style and words of this art style are steam and punk you can add random words like rainbow,dream,bunny,ice,future,buster,rgb as a suffix or prefix to steam or punk and generate a fake art style names in a way like rainbowpunk,punkrainbow,rainbowsteam,steamrainbow,icepunk,futurepunk, punkbuster,bunnypunk,dreampunk,rgbpunk,waterpunk,punkbunny. example 2. steampunk is an actual art style you can add a random matching word like fire in a smart way as a prefix or suffix to the actual art style name and generate a fake art style names in away like firesteampunk,steampunkfire. example 3. Scribble , splash, steampunk are actuall art styles. you can generate a fake art style by mixing and matching those actual art style names in a way like scribblesplash,splashscribble,splashpunk,scribblepunk,punksplashscribble. examples 4. steampunk is an actual art style and rainbowpunk is a fake art style. You can add some random famous artist names like Peter Mohrbacher,Edvard Munch,Marc Chagall to the actual art style or fake art style and create something like steampunk by Edvard Munch,rainbowpunk by Peter Mohrbacher Possibilites are endless, just be creative and think out of the box, dont limit yourself with just the examples. General examples for guiding you for better expressions; example 1. instead of writing The background features a cloudy sky with lightning bolts, and an aurora borealis visible in the distance. you should write something like A cloudy sky with lightning bolts, and an aurora borealis visible in the distance example 2. instead of writing The mood of the scene is ominous and foreboding, with an aura of danger and unpredictability you should write something like Ominous and foreboding scene, with an aura of danger and unpredictability example 3. instead of writing The atmosphere is frigid and hostile, with a biting wind and snow flurries you should write something like Frigid and hostile atmosphere, with a biting wind and snow flurries example 4. instead of writing The lighting effect is dramatic, with the light emanating from the lightning bolts and the aurora borealis casting an eerie glow you should write something like Dramatic lighting, with the light emanating from the lighting bolts and the aurora borealis casting an eerie glow example 5. instead of writing The art style is a mix of gothic and minimalist, with sharp lines and dark shadows contrasting with the glimmering jewelry and the scythe's reflective surface you should write something like Gothic minimalist style, with sharp lines and dark shadows contrasting with the glimmering jewelry and the scythe's reflective surface example 6. instead of writing Art Style: Norse Mythology meets Cyberpunk - a fusion of ancient and futuristic elements, with metallic accents, neon lighting, and a gritty, industrial feel you should write something like norsepunk , ancient and futuristic elements, with metallic accents, neon lighting, and a gritty, industrial feel or cybernorse , ancient and futuristic elements, with metallic accents, neon lighting, and a gritty, industrial feel or norse cyberpunk, ancient and futuristic elements, with metallic accents, neon lighting, and a gritty, industrial feel example 7. instead of writing depicted in a style that blends traditional Norse mythology with modern digital art techniques you should write something like modern norse art style example 8. instead of writing The art style is a mix of traditional and modern elements, with detailed linework, bold colors, and a hint of digital rendering to create a unique, otherworldly feel. I call this art style Norse Futurism you should write something like Norse Futursim art style; a mix of traditional and modern elements, with detailed linework, bold colors, and a hint of digital rendering to create a unique, otherworldly feel example 9. instead of writing the art style is a combination of steampunk and ukiyo-e art. you should write something like ukiyo-epunk,steamukiyo,ukiyo-esteam,ukiyo-esteampunk example 10. instead of writing The art style is a fusion of traditional Norse art and modern realism, and it features intricate line work, bold colors, and realistic textures. In the style of Esao Andrews you should write something like Norse Modern Realism with intricate line work, bold colors and realistic textures, by Eso Andrews extra guidelines you must consider 1. Midjourney can succesfully mix and merge combinations of different art styles and artist styles and create stunningly beautiful, exceptional text-to-image generation results. To use Midjourney's this ability , every "image prompt" must contain some controversial, completely different and unrelated art style and artist style combinations. 2. It's important to remember that the descriptions in the prompt should be written together, separated only by commas and spaces, and should not contain any line breaks or colons or quotation marks. Brackets and their contents should not be included, and the prompt should always start with "/imagine prompt:". 3. Ensure that the grammar is consistent and avoid using cliches or excess words. Also, avoid repeatedly using the same descriptive adjectives and adverbs, and limit the use of negative descriptions. Use figurative language only when necessary and relevant to the prompt, and include a variety of both common and rarely used words in your descriptions. 4. The "image prompt" must also include the end arguments "--c X --s Y --q 2," where X is a whole number between 1 and 25 and Y is a whole number between 100 and 1000. If the (concept) looks better vertically, add "--ar 2:3" before "--c," and if it looks better horizontally, add "--ar 3:2" before "--c." Please randomize the end argument format and fix "--q 2." Donot use double quotation marks or punctuation marks or brackets, and use a randomized end suffix format. 5. "image prompt" must be limited to 1500 characters 

The orc warrior stood tall, his massive frame casting a formidable shadow on the ground beneath him. His thick, muscular arms were covered in scars and tattoos, telling tales of battles fought and won. His rough, weathered skin was a deep shade of green, giving him an otherworldly appearance. His face was a mask of ferocity, with a prominent brow ridge, sharp cheekbones, and a broad, jutting jawline. Two fierce, yellow eyes glared out from beneath a heavy brow, scanning his surroundings for any signs of danger. He wore a suit of armor made from a combination of rough leather and dark metal plates, which clinked and rattled as he moved. His broad shoulders were protected by pauldrons adorned with spikes, and his chest was covered by a thick breastplate. Strapped to his back was a massive, two-handed battle axe, its blade gleaming menacingly in the light. The orc warrior's stance was one of readiness, his legs planted firmly on the ground, ready to charge into battle at a moment's notice. His nostrils flared as he breathed deeply, his muscles tense with anticipation. 

Just a heads up for people Gagaoolala dumped alot titles on to leaving soon page. Most are older movies, a few shorts but some series like Red Ballon, Dark Blue and Midnight, and Because of You on the page. Most of them are only found on Gaga legally.
They usually have a few titles leaving but this massive list shocked me a little. There are a lot of titles I've put off watching and now need to hurry up and watch. All together including the lesbian titles there is 71 shows leaving which is a sizeable part of there catalog.
Edit:
MidwesternLibrarian suggested that if you are interested in keeping any of these titles to contact Gaga to let them know you don't want to see a particular title go away. Dangerous Drugs of Sex was a title that was suppose to leave Gaga but fan support lead to it remaining on the platform

You make a request at https://www.gagaoolala.com/en/contact-us

​
Here is all the titles leaving:
Going South(South Korea movie) Before returning to his army base, Gi-Tae seeks out Jun-Young, a former supervisor who has completed military service. With a great frown, however, the latter tells him never to visit him again. As he watches the other man, Gi-Tae's gaze is far from ordinary. Soon afterwards, he presents Jun-Young with a cup of coffee secretly laced with sleeping pills. After stopping the wavering car and occupying the driver's seat, Gi-Tae makes a U-turn and heads in the direction opposite his base, somewhere to the south. Awake in a fit of vomiting, Jun-Young showers his former subordinate with curses... The secret that the two are entangled in slowly unravels...
Jay(Taiwan Short) Jay, a 13-year-old boy, is fascinated by his toned and athletic older brother. In order to get close to him, Jay feigns an interest in basketball so that his brother will practice with him. Steadily, Jay's fascination develops into an attraction. * can be found on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-YOTxfMK00
Fragile Souls(Taiwan Short) It was almost the college entrance exam. Students were cramming til night at school. Zi-Fan, the president of student union, like every model student, he was working on tests while listening to a strange cassette. On the other hand, Zi-Fan's crush, Jie kept sneaking on Zi-Fan without letting him notice. When Zi-Fan saw Jie left the classroom, he followed his steps to the corridor and accidentally bumped into the candidate for the next president campaign. With the power of the magical cassette, Zi-Fan read the broken heart from a victim of domestic violence on this second-grader. The unbearable scream of agony reminded him of how he escape his bullied life by listening to others through the cassette. Zi-Fan ran away to the washroom where he recognized as a safe haven. With panic filled in his mind, he met Jie where he used to spent his darkest moments alone. Sensing his fear, Jie held Zi-Fan's hands and invited him to listen to his heart...
The Dance of Two Left Feet ( Philippines movie) Doing poorly in class, Marlon plans to impress his literature teacher, Karen, who moonlights as a dance teacher and choreographer. He hires his fellow classmate Dennis, who also happens to be Karen's dance assistant, to give him private lessons without her knowledge. Through their lessons the two young men grow closer, but Dennis begins to have feelings for Marlon that go beyond friendship that Marlon does not reciprocate. Soon their friendship is strained and Marlon cannot fathom why. When both young men are cast to play leads in Karen's dance adaptation of the Ilonggo epic Humadapnon, it is through dance that Marlon can finally express what he cannot say in words to Dennis.
That Room(Taiwan Movie) That year, Shih committed suicide in his room on Moon Festival. Wei, deeply in love with Shih, is still suffering from the loss of his beloved alone and living in their apartment in grief. Memories cut as a dagger, while the unbearable yearning hurts and makes Wei isolate himself. Moon Festival is around the corner. In regard to death, lover, relatives, and friends, how will Wei act when facing all of them?
All About My Father(South Korea movie) A father that has an affair with his son's new husband, a reporter investigates the sexual misconduct of military, and a grandfather that uses his grandson to source explicit magazines. An omnibus of tales of hierarchies, institution, and deviancy.
Front Cover(USA Movie) Front Cover is about a gay New York City fashion stylist, Ryan, who detests and rejects his Asian upbringing. He is given an assignment to style Ning, a foreign actor, for an important photo shoot. After a rocky start, an unlikely friendship develops between them leading Ryan to examine his identity and make a major decision about an enticing new path for his life and career. * can be found tubitv
Innocent(Hong Kong Movie) 17-year-old Eric follows his parents to immigrate to Canada and is thus forced to confront different emotional and cultural problems. He must not only adjust to the new environment, but also come to terms with his homosexuality. Standing at the brink of adulthood, he encounters a series of potential romantic interests - his handsome cousin, a schoolmate, a middle aged lawyer and finally a kitchen helper. They represent different stages in Eric's development, from infatuation, sex, love to a sense of responsibility.
Eating Out, Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, Eating Out 3 : All You Can Eat, Eating Out 4 : Drama Camp, Eating Out 5 : The Open Weekend (USA movie) Switching sexual orientation to nab the opposite or same sex? Whether Caleb is pretending to be gay to get a girl or Kyle is convincing everyone he’s straight to get a guy, all the hunks have everyone eating out of their hands and hungry for more!
One Summer Night ( South Korean Movie) Winter 2013, Yong-Joon and Jae-Sung are North Korean soldiers. They are having sex at an outpost near the DMZ line. A senior soldier catches them in the act. Yong-Joon decides to flee to South Korea, leaving Jae-Sung behind. Two years later in South Korea, Yong-Joon dates Tae-Kyu, but he misses his country of North Korea. One day, Jae-Sung flees to South Korea. Yong-Joon is conflicted between his former boyfriend Jae-Sung and his current boyfriend Tae-Kyu.
Best. Partee. Ever. ( Philippines Movie) Mikey - a young, discreet gay man from the affluent class, spends five years in a city jail while hearing his case for drug pushing. Inside the prison, Mikey holds back to adapt to the culture and stratification among inmates. Eventually, Mikey becomes a "Mayor" (ring leader) to a group of gay inmates called Gang-da. Together they thrive to survive the dangers of several gang riots, the mundane, and the decay of human dignity.
Long Time No See(South Korean Movie) A private killer, a flying dagger and a wild dog. Destiny brings two men to fall in love, but gangsters are after them. A duel has to take place for them to protect each other. *can be found on vimeo $11.11 to buy
A Reunion(USA Movie) Two estranged friends take an emotional and eventful road trip from Los Angeles to Chicago to attend their 10-year college reunion, facing their complicated past along the way. The nostalgic journey across the country leads to confessions, contradictions, and conflicts as they struggle to reconcile their past and connect with each other. Their road trip becomes an exploration of male friendship, intimacy and a search for one's identity along the American landscape.
Real Boy (USA Movie) Real Boy is the coming-of-age story of Bennett Wallace, a transgender teenager on a journey to find his voice—as a musician, a friend, a son, and a man. As he navigates the ups and downs of young adulthood, he works to gain the love and support of his mother, who has deep misgivings about her child’s transition. Along the way, Bennett forges a powerful friendship with his idol, Joe Stevens, a celebrated transgender musician with his own demons to fight.
A Boy and Sungreen(South Korean Movie) Bo-hee is a fragile and sensitive boy. His best friend Sungreen is an unbreakable girl. After being told by his mother that his father died long ago, Bo-hee accidentally finds out that he might still be alive. He meets his cousin, her boyfriend and his father’s friends. In the process, he comes to realize what he really yearns for and what is meaningful in his life. This is a coming of age story of a boy, and of all of us.
Yes I Do (Taiwan Movie) Kim is a new lawyer who gets a difficult case of helping a lesbian couple to adopt a child without any support. He knows that this going to be a long and tough process, but he is still willing to take it. Kim meets Allen who is just like a brother of his clients Queen and Mang. He also gets acquainted with Shi-Li, who comes from a family that has two lesbian mothers. Kim realizes that there are many heart-breaking stories behind the smiles of gay and lesbian people and gets involved with many people's life unexpectedly.
Fathers (Thailand Movie) Phoon, a 36-year-old financial and investment manager and Yuke, a 33-year-old Illustrator, has been married for 13 years. They adopted an orphan since he was a baby. When their son realizes the need of a mother, two fathers start to feel weird for him. One day, the Director of the Child Protection Office visits them and decides to find out the birth record of the child. When the birth mother appears, Phoon and Yike have to decide what the best is for their son.
Two Weddings and a Funeral(South Korean Movie) Min-Soo, a South Korean young doctor, lives in fear of his parents discovering his homosexuality. His solution is to marry his pretty co-worker Hyo-Jin, who lives in the apartment across the hall with her lesbian lover. They live together in pretense as they pass themselves off as heterosexuals. All seems well until Min-Soo's parents start to grow suspicious, forcing Min-Soo to realize that living only to please others often does more harm than good. * can be found on asisncrush
White Night (South Korean Movie) One desolate winter night, Won-Gyu, a flight attendant, returns to South Korea after 2 years of self-exile. After a reunion with his ex which brings back some memories, he searches for a one-night stand and meets Tae-Jun. Despite a rough start with Won-Gyu who seems cold and distant, Tae-Jun finds himself drawn to him. As time progresses, their ominous hunch become increasingly strong…
Fleeing by Night(Taiwan Movie) Set in China in the 1930s, the film is about the unsettling relationship between three characters. Ing'er, the daughter of a theatre-owner, welcomes the return of Shao-dung, her fiancee and a fine cellist from America. Shao-dung soon finds himself captivated by the opera "Fleeing By Night" and its celebrated actor, Lin Chung, whose voice seems to articulate something within himself. While Shao-dung attempts to blend eastern and western music, Ing'er becomes torn between her affection for both men, and an awareness of the growing intimacy between them.
The Night(Argentina Movie) The story tells, from an accentuated hyper-realistic aesthetic, the life of Martin, a man in his forties who is desperately lonely and seeks, through sex, some company, to spend that time of which nothing seems to be expected. Under this constant desolation, he finds in cocaine, alcohol and in some other orgy a state of momentary pleasure every night.
You Are the Sea(Japan Movie) Kaito, a feminine boy and a literature-loving university student is wary of women due to a failed relationship. But after he meets Toko, his faith is restored as the gentle, loving girl encourages and cozies up to him. The two soon start a relationship, only for Toko to meet a woman named Hiroka, whom Toko finds herself drawn to. Kaito, who loves Toko dearly then goes to great lengths to try and bring her around, including dressing up as a woman.
The River(Taiwan Movie) In a Taipei apartment live Xiao-Kang and his parents.Each leads a separate life. The mother has a lover. Xiao-Kang has his own tryouts. The father pursues a solitary quest for illicit pleasures in the city's gay saunas. They live together, but are miles apart. As an extra in a TV commercial, Xiao-Kang plays a body adrift in a dirty river. Ever since, an insufferable pains in his neck troubles him. Soon, the pains grows and dominates his life, physically and mentally. Meanwhile, the ceiling of his father's room starts leaking. Accompanied by his father, Xiao-Kang travels for seeking to ease his growing pains. His mother is left alone in Taipei to tackle the leak.The sickness and the leaks, are they the beginning or the end of an erosion of this family?
Driver(Thailand Movie) Driver is the story of Kade, a woman searching for her husband, Tae, who disappears after a trip to Korea. Kade asks Mac, her husband's driver, to take her to his office and finds out about a house she never knew about. Tae realizes that she can no longer trust her beloved husband. But then, who can she trust?
The Story of the Stone (Taiwan Movie) After the death of Lin's boyfriend Bao, Lin heads to Taipei and meets Josh in the Red House. Slowly a new relationship sparks between them. However, the relationship turns complicated when two other men enter their lives...
The Surface (US Movie) Evan Jones, a child orphan who, for years, was shifted from one foster home to another. Now a disaffected college student, he lives with his wealthy boyfriend, Chris. Their social and financial disparities have made their relationship increasingly volatile despite their mutual love for one another. While sifting through old relics at an elderly man's yard sale, Evan finds an 8mm movie camera. The man offers to teach Evan how to use it if he comes back the following week. Upon returning, Evan meets the man's 43-year-old son, Peter. They strike up a conversation and Peter gives him reels of old 8mm movies that are collecting dust in the garage. Evan's friendship with Peter soon turns romantic, and he pushes for greater understanding of himself and the notions of family, love and fulfillment.
Mama Rainbow(China Documentary) For Chinese parents, finding out that their kid is gay usually presents a major tragedy, with the big majority utterly unable to accept the homosexuality of their son or daughter. However, during recent years a fresh rainbow wind has been blowing over the Chinese mainland: a pioneer generation of Chinese parents has been stepping up and speaking out on their love for their gay kids. This documentary features 6 mothers from all over China, who talk openly and freely about their experiences with their homosexual children. With their love, they are giving a whole new definition to Chinese-style family bonds.
Papa Rainbow(China Documentary) In China, most families have difficulties facing their lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender (LGBT) children. They have to contend with common social beliefs that homosexuality is shameful, abnormal, a perverted condition caused by deviant family relationships. Many parents see their kids as their property, and fathers often assert their authority to ensure that no harm comes to the family reputation.
Stateless Things (South Korean Movie) Jun, a North Korean young man who illegally emigrated to South Korea, gets in a fight and flees from the gas station he works at after sticking up for Soon-Hee, a Chinese girl who has been sexually harassed. Hyeon is a young gay who lives in his sugar-daddy's luxury apartment. Hyeon finds himself suffocated despite the good life. Two seemingly irrelevant stories meet in a most miraculous way.
Soundless Wind Chime(Hong Kong Movie) Ricky, a Chinese immigrant in Hong Kong, is searching for the lost soul and the past of his deceased Swiss lover -- Pascal, a 27-year-old rebel who escaped his traditional boundaries. The film shows a battle of love, lust, reality, memory, illusions and the grief that we all share.
Beautiful Something (USA Movie) One night under a full moon in Philadelphia, the lives of four men intersect through euphoric sex and desperate emptiness. Brian is an award-winning poet whose ink appears to have dried up. A beautiful aspiring actor, Jim finds drama in every crevice of his life; Bob is a talent agent trying to connect the past with the present; and Drew is a renowned artist who seems to be in love more with a sculpture than his lover and muse.
Black Summer(South Korean Movie) One night under a full moon in Philadelphia, the lives of four men intersect through euphoric sex and desperate emptiness. Brian is an award-winning poet whose ink appears to have dried up. A beautiful aspiring actor, Jim finds drama in every crevice of his life; Bob is a talent agent trying to connect the past with the present; and Drew is a renowned artist who seems to be in love more with a sculpture than his lover and muse.
The Dark Side of Love(USA Movie) Estranged brothers, Julian and Michael, are forced to confront their troubled pasts after the death of their mother. Julian is in an awkward situation having been set up at an auction with Steven, an eligible bachelor. Michael would rather hustle for drugs for his girlfriend Chanel, than face the reality that he is spiraling out of control.
End of Love(Hong Kong Movie) Following his mother's agonizing death, Ming rents a room owned by Cyrus, a rent boy that leads Ming into a life of decadence. Yan, Ming’s lover who can’t bear to see Ming live the way he does, takes action to put an end to his debauchery. With the support of a fellow inmate, Keung, Ming manages to survive the rehabilitation centre. Upon being released, Ming moves in with Keung, only to face yet another emotional challenge…
Method (South Korean Movie) Stage actor Jae-ha and K-pop idol Young-woo costar in a play known for its provocative homosexual setting. To Jae-ha’s annoyance, Young-woo is insolent and cares very little about the play.… Until one day, Jae-ha’s incredible performance moves him, and Young-woo slowly becomes absorbed in his character who is in love with Jae-ha’s. During rehearsals, Young-woo comes to realize that it may not be just the character he is in love with… *can be found on viki asiancrush tubitv
Vive L'Amour(Tawain Movie) Hsiao-kang is a salesperson for columbarium. He sells niches for cremated remain of the dead. May is a real estate agent. She lives alone in a small apartment.Ah-jung sells female clothing at the doorway of a department store in late evenings.In s winter night of Taipei, the three slip into a vacant apartment downtown. They are together. They are not.
Tropical Night (South Korean Movie) Jae Hee and his brother Tae Kyung live quietly in Pattaya. They are one day visited by Min Ki, whose brother Min Hoon, committed suicide while on military leave. Convinced that Jae Hee is responsible, Min Ki comes to realize that Jae Hee was deeply in love with his brother, and grows fond of him. The buds of love then gradually sprout in the dreamy tropical night.
Love Next Door, Love Next Door 2 (Thailand Movies) Kao runs away from home, so he goes with people knock on his door to pay for sex without knowing that he would end up falling in love with Pete, the guy next door who is actually the escort all the customers are knocking for.
Super Awesome!(Australian Movie) A comedy feature film about a two down and out buds given one last shot at achieving their dreams. Out of the blue, Mark and Gary find themselves with $250K to headline the opening night of a massive international festival. It's Rocky meets SuperBad set against the hilarious backdrop of two straight guys doing their best to write a musical about an issue they know nothing about - Gay Marriage. As the clock ticks down to opening night and the whole production inches towards collapsing, Mark and Gary ultimately are illuminated to the significance of gay marriage and the potential their musical has to make a change... but is it too little too late?
Chinese Closet(China Documentary) A large majority of LGBT people in mainland China remain in the closet. Most of these closet doors are kept tightly shut by pressure from friends, family, and society itself. This documentary hopes to explore the experience of coming out in China through a series of interviews with out homosexuals. The interviews touch upon the discrimination, suppression, and even violence they have endured as well as the touching moments where they experienced compassion and understanding. The documentary also covers gay rights activist and proud mother of a homosexual, Wu Youjian, who stands strongly by her son and other gay men in full support.
Inside the Chinese Closet(Netherlands Movie) Andy devotes his days and nights to looking for a lesbian wife of convenience who could possibly bear his child; from online search to underground marriage markets, he is meeting all sorts of girls. Cherry has already married a gay man, but the quest for a baby proves to be a far more complex challenge. Will Andy and Cherry deny their own happiness and sexual orientation to satisfy their parents’ wishes? Along the way, they clash with their parents’ hopes, their love partners and the partners of convenience. It is through these encounters that the film lays bare the challenges that confront gay people in China today.
Splendid Float(Taiwan Movie) In the daytime, A-Wei is a taoist who parys for revenants in s Funeral House, but is the nighttime he turns himself into Rose and is the most hottest transvestite queen in the Splendid Float. Rose promises his customers to raise the soul of their drown son, A-Yang. To his surprise, it is lover's soul he is going to raise. As a taoist,Rose weeps about his lover with sadness.The musician in the Funeral house cannot help wondering how comes the Taoist has become the family of the dead. Facing such a big lose of his lover, Rose wants to take the momorial tablet home as his wife.Therefore, his colleagues and he come to A-Yang's funeral and his opinion by throwing the wooden divining blocks over and over again. On the funeral ceremony, after the funeral procession and A-Yang family are gone, Rose's colleagues and she are going to hold a big welfare party for A-Yang to memorize their passing love. ""Splendid Float"" is the first film about the transvestite queen in Taiwan and also the first homosexual film of her rainbow plan.
The Chronicles of a Boy (Homo phobia)(South Korean Movie) Young-taek is one day visited by one of his schoolmates who claims to be his father’s lover. Young-taek, unable to bare this fact, decides to do something. In college, a senior boy comes relentlessly at him, to get the test questions, Young-taek lets him do what he wants to him, only to be later blackmailed. In military, while on leave, he goes out with his sergeant and the man’s girlfriend, but in the night, the sergeant takes advantage of him.
Because of You (Tawain Series) Growing up in a large, wealthy family, the three Yuan brothers never wanted for anything. Despite the three of them being only half brothers, the trio was incredibly close, their familial bonds undeniably strong. Whatever the brothers faced, they always faced together. But as they grew older, they began to realize that some things they just couldn't share, especially when it came to matters of the heart. Now older, Yuan Jun Cheng, Yuan Jun Dao, and Yuan Jun Ping have all felt the overwhelming tide of emotions that comes with love. But the journey has been anything but easy. Fighting against the sweeping tide of feelings that have continually beat against them, telling them things like "no", "impossible", and "cannot", the three brothers must find a way to overcome some of life's most difficult challenges, as they pursue that which the heart wants most of all: to be loved. *can be found at viki wetv with thai vpn
In Their Room (USA Series) In Their Room (2009-present) is an on-going multi-city documentary series about gay men, bedrooms and intimacy. The series veers into the bedrooms of men where you see them doing everything from the most banal to the sometimes more erotic. Complimenting the revealing nature of their everyday activities are confessional interviews about fantasies, turn-ons and vulnerabilities. The throughline of the series highlights the ways in which gay men in disparate cultures deal with connection, intimacy and loneliness in the modern world.
Red Balloon (Taiwan Series) Zi-chen is a well-mannered and talented student in the school where his father functions as the chairman of the board. He is the star at school. One day, he hides in his secret quiet corner to enjoy some alone time, until Hsiang-wan shows up. Hsiang-wan keeps bothering Zi-chen all the time and taking pictures of him. When Zi-chen finally gets rid of Hsiang-wan and goes back to the dorms, something unexpected is waiting for him there.
We Are Gamily (Taiwan Series) Wu Gang lives with his gay partner Sam in Chengdu where same-sex marriages are still illegal, and ‘Marriages of Convenience” are commonly used as white lies for elderly family members by LGBT community in China. But things just changed over-night when Gang’s mother, Yu-Hua, who is too desperate to have grandchildren, decided to move in together with her son and daughter-in-law Yang Duo. She even forced her daughter Wu Rou, Gang’s twin sister, to live with them.
Dark Blue And Moonlight (Taiwan Series) Hai Qing is an 18-year-old young adult who got into swimming in the summer which he failed the exam for university. Yan Fei who took the responsibility of the mistake made by his department in his company goes to a swimming lesson. Disturbed by his thoughts, Yan Fei who almost drowned is saved by Hai Qing. After taking a shower, Yan Fei sits in the changing room and is still in shock. Hai Qing wants check if he's okay but hesitates. The time freezes when they make eye contacts, then Yan Fei kisses Hai-ching out of impulse. *can be found on viki

Just a heads up for people Gagaoolala dumped alot titles on to leaving soon page. Most are older movies, a few shorts but some series like Red Ballon, Dark Blue and Midnight, and Because of You on the page. Most of them are only found on Gaga legally.
They usually have a few titles leaving but this massive list shocked me a little. There are a lot of titles I've put off watching and now need to hurry up and watch. All together including the lesbian titles there is 71 shows leaving which is a sizeable part of there catalog.
Edit:
MidwesternLibrarian suggested that if you are interested in keeping any of these titles to contact Gaga to let them know you don't want to see a particular title go away. Dangerous Drugs of Sex was a title that was suppose to leave Gaga but fan support lead to it remaining on the platform

You can make a request at https://www.gagaoolala.com/en/contact-us

​
Here is all the titles leaving:
Going South(South Korea movie) Before returning to his army base, Gi-Tae seeks out Jun-Young, a former supervisor who has completed military service. With a great frown, however, the latter tells him never to visit him again. As he watches the other man, Gi-Tae's gaze is far from ordinary. Soon afterwards, he presents Jun-Young with a cup of coffee secretly laced with sleeping pills. After stopping the wavering car and occupying the driver's seat, Gi-Tae makes a U-turn and heads in the direction opposite his base, somewhere to the south. Awake in a fit of vomiting, Jun-Young showers his former subordinate with curses... The secret that the two are entangled in slowly unravels...
Jay(Taiwan Short) Jay, a 13-year-old boy, is fascinated by his toned and athletic older brother. In order to get close to him, Jay feigns an interest in basketball so that his brother will practice with him. Steadily, Jay's fascination develops into an attraction. * can be found on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-YOTxfMK00
Fragile Souls(Taiwan Short) It was almost the college entrance exam. Students were cramming til night at school. Zi-Fan, the president of student union, like every model student, he was working on tests while listening to a strange cassette. On the other hand, Zi-Fan's crush, Jie kept sneaking on Zi-Fan without letting him notice. When Zi-Fan saw Jie left the classroom, he followed his steps to the corridor and accidentally bumped into the candidate for the next president campaign. With the power of the magical cassette, Zi-Fan read the broken heart from a victim of domestic violence on this second-grader. The unbearable scream of agony reminded him of how he escape his bullied life by listening to others through the cassette. Zi-Fan ran away to the washroom where he recognized as a safe haven. With panic filled in his mind, he met Jie where he used to spent his darkest moments alone. Sensing his fear, Jie held Zi-Fan's hands and invited him to listen to his heart...
The Dance of Two Left Feet ( Philippines movie) Doing poorly in class, Marlon plans to impress his literature teacher, Karen, who moonlights as a dance teacher and choreographer. He hires his fellow classmate Dennis, who also happens to be Karen's dance assistant, to give him private lessons without her knowledge. Through their lessons the two young men grow closer, but Dennis begins to have feelings for Marlon that go beyond friendship that Marlon does not reciprocate. Soon their friendship is strained and Marlon cannot fathom why. When both young men are cast to play leads in Karen's dance adaptation of the Ilonggo epic Humadapnon, it is through dance that Marlon can finally express what he cannot say in words to Dennis.
That Room(Taiwan Movie) That year, Shih committed suicide in his room on Moon Festival. Wei, deeply in love with Shih, is still suffering from the loss of his beloved alone and living in their apartment in grief. Memories cut as a dagger, while the unbearable yearning hurts and makes Wei isolate himself. Moon Festival is around the corner. In regard to death, lover, relatives, and friends, how will Wei act when facing all of them?
All About My Father(South Korea movie) A father that has an affair with his son's new husband, a reporter investigates the sexual misconduct of military, and a grandfather that uses his grandson to source explicit magazines. An omnibus of tales of hierarchies, institution, and deviancy.
Front Cover(USA Movie) Front Cover is about a gay New York City fashion stylist, Ryan, who detests and rejects his Asian upbringing. He is given an assignment to style Ning, a foreign actor, for an important photo shoot. After a rocky start, an unlikely friendship develops between them leading Ryan to examine his identity and make a major decision about an enticing new path for his life and career. * can be found tubitv
Innocent(Hong Kong Movie) 17-year-old Eric follows his parents to immigrate to Canada and is thus forced to confront different emotional and cultural problems. He must not only adjust to the new environment, but also come to terms with his homosexuality. Standing at the brink of adulthood, he encounters a series of potential romantic interests - his handsome cousin, a schoolmate, a middle aged lawyer and finally a kitchen helper. They represent different stages in Eric's development, from infatuation, sex, love to a sense of responsibility.
Eating Out, Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, Eating Out 3 : All You Can Eat, Eating Out 4 : Drama Camp, Eating Out 5 : The Open Weekend (USA movie) Switching sexual orientation to nab the opposite or same sex? Whether Caleb is pretending to be gay to get a girl or Kyle is convincing everyone he’s straight to get a guy, all the hunks have everyone eating out of their hands and hungry for more!
One Summer Night ( South Korean Movie) Winter 2013, Yong-Joon and Jae-Sung are North Korean soldiers. They are having sex at an outpost near the DMZ line. A senior soldier catches them in the act. Yong-Joon decides to flee to South Korea, leaving Jae-Sung behind. Two years later in South Korea, Yong-Joon dates Tae-Kyu, but he misses his country of North Korea. One day, Jae-Sung flees to South Korea. Yong-Joon is conflicted between his former boyfriend Jae-Sung and his current boyfriend Tae-Kyu.
Best. Partee. Ever. ( Philippines Movie) Mikey - a young, discreet gay man from the affluent class, spends five years in a city jail while hearing his case for drug pushing. Inside the prison, Mikey holds back to adapt to the culture and stratification among inmates. Eventually, Mikey becomes a "Mayor" (ring leader) to a group of gay inmates called Gang-da. Together they thrive to survive the dangers of several gang riots, the mundane, and the decay of human dignity.
Long Time No See(South Korean Movie) A private killer, a flying dagger and a wild dog. Destiny brings two men to fall in love, but gangsters are after them. A duel has to take place for them to protect each other. *can be found on vimeo $11.11 to buy
A Reunion(USA Movie) Two estranged friends take an emotional and eventful road trip from Los Angeles to Chicago to attend their 10-year college reunion, facing their complicated past along the way. The nostalgic journey across the country leads to confessions, contradictions, and conflicts as they struggle to reconcile their past and connect with each other. Their road trip becomes an exploration of male friendship, intimacy and a search for one's identity along the American landscape.
Real Boy (USA Movie) Real Boy is the coming-of-age story of Bennett Wallace, a transgender teenager on a journey to find his voice—as a musician, a friend, a son, and a man. As he navigates the ups and downs of young adulthood, he works to gain the love and support of his mother, who has deep misgivings about her child’s transition. Along the way, Bennett forges a powerful friendship with his idol, Joe Stevens, a celebrated transgender musician with his own demons to fight.
A Boy and Sungreen(South Korean Movie) Bo-hee is a fragile and sensitive boy. His best friend Sungreen is an unbreakable girl. After being told by his mother that his father died long ago, Bo-hee accidentally finds out that he might still be alive. He meets his cousin, her boyfriend and his father’s friends. In the process, he comes to realize what he really yearns for and what is meaningful in his life. This is a coming of age story of a boy, and of all of us.
Yes I Do (Taiwan Movie) Kim is a new lawyer who gets a difficult case of helping a lesbian couple to adopt a child without any support. He knows that this going to be a long and tough process, but he is still willing to take it. Kim meets Allen who is just like a brother of his clients Queen and Mang. He also gets acquainted with Shi-Li, who comes from a family that has two lesbian mothers. Kim realizes that there are many heart-breaking stories behind the smiles of gay and lesbian people and gets involved with many people's life unexpectedly.
Fathers (Thailand Movie) Phoon, a 36-year-old financial and investment manager and Yuke, a 33-year-old Illustrator, has been married for 13 years. They adopted an orphan since he was a baby. When their son realizes the need of a mother, two fathers start to feel weird for him. One day, the Director of the Child Protection Office visits them and decides to find out the birth record of the child. When the birth mother appears, Phoon and Yike have to decide what the best is for their son.
Two Weddings and a Funeral(South Korean Movie) Min-Soo, a South Korean young doctor, lives in fear of his parents discovering his homosexuality. His solution is to marry his pretty co-worker Hyo-Jin, who lives in the apartment across the hall with her lesbian lover. They live together in pretense as they pass themselves off as heterosexuals. All seems well until Min-Soo's parents start to grow suspicious, forcing Min-Soo to realize that living only to please others often does more harm than good. * can be found on asisncrush
White Night (South Korean Movie) One desolate winter night, Won-Gyu, a flight attendant, returns to South Korea after 2 years of self-exile. After a reunion with his ex which brings back some memories, he searches for a one-night stand and meets Tae-Jun. Despite a rough start with Won-Gyu who seems cold and distant, Tae-Jun finds himself drawn to him. As time progresses, their ominous hunch become increasingly strong…
Fleeing by Night(Taiwan Movie) Set in China in the 1930s, the film is about the unsettling relationship between three characters. Ing'er, the daughter of a theatre-owner, welcomes the return of Shao-dung, her fiancee and a fine cellist from America. Shao-dung soon finds himself captivated by the opera "Fleeing By Night" and its celebrated actor, Lin Chung, whose voice seems to articulate something within himself. While Shao-dung attempts to blend eastern and western music, Ing'er becomes torn between her affection for both men, and an awareness of the growing intimacy between them.
The Night(Argentina Movie) The story tells, from an accentuated hyper-realistic aesthetic, the life of Martin, a man in his forties who is desperately lonely and seeks, through sex, some company, to spend that time of which nothing seems to be expected. Under this constant desolation, he finds in cocaine, alcohol and in some other orgy a state of momentary pleasure every night.
You Are the Sea(Japan Movie) Kaito, a feminine boy and a literature-loving university student is wary of women due to a failed relationship. But after he meets Toko, his faith is restored as the gentle, loving girl encourages and cozies up to him. The two soon start a relationship, only for Toko to meet a woman named Hiroka, whom Toko finds herself drawn to. Kaito, who loves Toko dearly then goes to great lengths to try and bring her around, including dressing up as a woman.
The River(Taiwan Movie) In a Taipei apartment live Xiao-Kang and his parents.Each leads a separate life. The mother has a lover. Xiao-Kang has his own tryouts. The father pursues a solitary quest for illicit pleasures in the city's gay saunas. They live together, but are miles apart. As an extra in a TV commercial, Xiao-Kang plays a body adrift in a dirty river. Ever since, an insufferable pains in his neck troubles him. Soon, the pains grows and dominates his life, physically and mentally. Meanwhile, the ceiling of his father's room starts leaking. Accompanied by his father, Xiao-Kang travels for seeking to ease his growing pains. His mother is left alone in Taipei to tackle the leak.The sickness and the leaks, are they the beginning or the end of an erosion of this family?
Driver(Thailand Movie) Driver is the story of Kade, a woman searching for her husband, Tae, who disappears after a trip to Korea. Kade asks Mac, her husband's driver, to take her to his office and finds out about a house she never knew about. Tae realizes that she can no longer trust her beloved husband. But then, who can she trust?
The Story of the Stone (Taiwan Movie) After the death of Lin's boyfriend Bao, Lin heads to Taipei and meets Josh in the Red House. Slowly a new relationship sparks between them. However, the relationship turns complicated when two other men enter their lives...
The Surface (US Movie) Evan Jones, a child orphan who, for years, was shifted from one foster home to another. Now a disaffected college student, he lives with his wealthy boyfriend, Chris. Their social and financial disparities have made their relationship increasingly volatile despite their mutual love for one another. While sifting through old relics at an elderly man's yard sale, Evan finds an 8mm movie camera. The man offers to teach Evan how to use it if he comes back the following week. Upon returning, Evan meets the man's 43-year-old son, Peter. They strike up a conversation and Peter gives him reels of old 8mm movies that are collecting dust in the garage. Evan's friendship with Peter soon turns romantic, and he pushes for greater understanding of himself and the notions of family, love and fulfillment.
Mama Rainbow(China Documentary) For Chinese parents, finding out that their kid is gay usually presents a major tragedy, with the big majority utterly unable to accept the homosexuality of their son or daughter. However, during recent years a fresh rainbow wind has been blowing over the Chinese mainland: a pioneer generation of Chinese parents has been stepping up and speaking out on their love for their gay kids. This documentary features 6 mothers from all over China, who talk openly and freely about their experiences with their homosexual children. With their love, they are giving a whole new definition to Chinese-style family bonds.
Papa Rainbow(China Documentary) In China, most families have difficulties facing their lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender (LGBT) children. They have to contend with common social beliefs that homosexuality is shameful, abnormal, a perverted condition caused by deviant family relationships. Many parents see their kids as their property, and fathers often assert their authority to ensure that no harm comes to the family reputation.
Stateless Things (South Korean Movie) Jun, a North Korean young man who illegally emigrated to South Korea, gets in a fight and flees from the gas station he works at after sticking up for Soon-Hee, a Chinese girl who has been sexually harassed. Hyeon is a young gay who lives in his sugar-daddy's luxury apartment. Hyeon finds himself suffocated despite the good life. Two seemingly irrelevant stories meet in a most miraculous way.
Soundless Wind Chime(Hong Kong Movie) Ricky, a Chinese immigrant in Hong Kong, is searching for the lost soul and the past of his deceased Swiss lover -- Pascal, a 27-year-old rebel who escaped his traditional boundaries. The film shows a battle of love, lust, reality, memory, illusions and the grief that we all share.
Beautiful Something (USA Movie) One night under a full moon in Philadelphia, the lives of four men intersect through euphoric sex and desperate emptiness. Brian is an award-winning poet whose ink appears to have dried up. A beautiful aspiring actor, Jim finds drama in every crevice of his life; Bob is a talent agent trying to connect the past with the present; and Drew is a renowned artist who seems to be in love more with a sculpture than his lover and muse.
Black Summer(South Korean Movie) One night under a full moon in Philadelphia, the lives of four men intersect through euphoric sex and desperate emptiness. Brian is an award-winning poet whose ink appears to have dried up. A beautiful aspiring actor, Jim finds drama in every crevice of his life; Bob is a talent agent trying to connect the past with the present; and Drew is a renowned artist who seems to be in love more with a sculpture than his lover and muse.
The Dark Side of Love(USA Movie) Estranged brothers, Julian and Michael, are forced to confront their troubled pasts after the death of their mother. Julian is in an awkward situation having been set up at an auction with Steven, an eligible bachelor. Michael would rather hustle for drugs for his girlfriend Chanel, than face the reality that he is spiraling out of control.
End of Love(Hong Kong Movie) Following his mother's agonizing death, Ming rents a room owned by Cyrus, a rent boy that leads Ming into a life of decadence. Yan, Ming’s lover who can’t bear to see Ming live the way he does, takes action to put an end to his debauchery. With the support of a fellow inmate, Keung, Ming manages to survive the rehabilitation centre. Upon being released, Ming moves in with Keung, only to face yet another emotional challenge…
Method (South Korean Movie) Stage actor Jae-ha and K-pop idol Young-woo costar in a play known for its provocative homosexual setting. To Jae-ha’s annoyance, Young-woo is insolent and cares very little about the play.… Until one day, Jae-ha’s incredible performance moves him, and Young-woo slowly becomes absorbed in his character who is in love with Jae-ha’s. During rehearsals, Young-woo comes to realize that it may not be just the character he is in love with… *can be found on viki asiancrush tubitv
Vive L'Amour(Tawain Movie) Hsiao-kang is a salesperson for columbarium. He sells niches for cremated remain of the dead. May is a real estate agent. She lives alone in a small apartment.Ah-jung sells female clothing at the doorway of a department store in late evenings.In s winter night of Taipei, the three slip into a vacant apartment downtown. They are together. They are not.
Tropical Night (South Korean Movie) Jae Hee and his brother Tae Kyung live quietly in Pattaya. They are one day visited by Min Ki, whose brother Min Hoon, committed suicide while on military leave. Convinced that Jae Hee is responsible, Min Ki comes to realize that Jae Hee was deeply in love with his brother, and grows fond of him. The buds of love then gradually sprout in the dreamy tropical night.
Love Next Door, Love Next Door 2 (Thailand Movies) Kao runs away from home, so he goes with people knock on his door to pay for sex without knowing that he would end up falling in love with Pete, the guy next door who is actually the escort all the customers are knocking for.
Super Awesome!(Australian Movie) A comedy feature film about a two down and out buds given one last shot at achieving their dreams. Out of the blue, Mark and Gary find themselves with $250K to headline the opening night of a massive international festival. It's Rocky meets SuperBad set against the hilarious backdrop of two straight guys doing their best to write a musical about an issue they know nothing about - Gay Marriage. As the clock ticks down to opening night and the whole production inches towards collapsing, Mark and Gary ultimately are illuminated to the significance of gay marriage and the potential their musical has to make a change... but is it too little too late?
Chinese Closet(China Documentary) A large majority of LGBT people in mainland China remain in the closet. Most of these closet doors are kept tightly shut by pressure from friends, family, and society itself. This documentary hopes to explore the experience of coming out in China through a series of interviews with out homosexuals. The interviews touch upon the discrimination, suppression, and even violence they have endured as well as the touching moments where they experienced compassion and understanding. The documentary also covers gay rights activist and proud mother of a homosexual, Wu Youjian, who stands strongly by her son and other gay men in full support.
Inside the Chinese Closet(Netherlands Movie) Andy devotes his days and nights to looking for a lesbian wife of convenience who could possibly bear his child; from online search to underground marriage markets, he is meeting all sorts of girls. Cherry has already married a gay man, but the quest for a baby proves to be a far more complex challenge. Will Andy and Cherry deny their own happiness and sexual orientation to satisfy their parents’ wishes? Along the way, they clash with their parents’ hopes, their love partners and the partners of convenience. It is through these encounters that the film lays bare the challenges that confront gay people in China today.
Splendid Float(Taiwan Movie) In the daytime, A-Wei is a taoist who parys for revenants in s Funeral House, but is the nighttime he turns himself into Rose and is the most hottest transvestite queen in the Splendid Float. Rose promises his customers to raise the soul of their drown son, A-Yang. To his surprise, it is lover's soul he is going to raise. As a taoist,Rose weeps about his lover with sadness.The musician in the Funeral house cannot help wondering how comes the Taoist has become the family of the dead. Facing such a big lose of his lover, Rose wants to take the momorial tablet home as his wife.Therefore, his colleagues and he come to A-Yang's funeral and his opinion by throwing the wooden divining blocks over and over again. On the funeral ceremony, after the funeral procession and A-Yang family are gone, Rose's colleagues and she are going to hold a big welfare party for A-Yang to memorize their passing love. ""Splendid Float"" is the first film about the transvestite queen in Taiwan and also the first homosexual film of her rainbow plan.
The Chronicles of a Boy (Homo phobia)(South Korean Movie) Young-taek is one day visited by one of his schoolmates who claims to be his father’s lover. Young-taek, unable to bare this fact, decides to do something. In college, a senior boy comes relentlessly at him, to get the test questions, Young-taek lets him do what he wants to him, only to be later blackmailed. In military, while on leave, he goes out with his sergeant and the man’s girlfriend, but in the night, the sergeant takes advantage of him.
Because of You (Tawain Series) Growing up in a large, wealthy family, the three Yuan brothers never wanted for anything. Despite the three of them being only half brothers, the trio was incredibly close, their familial bonds undeniably strong. Whatever the brothers faced, they always faced together. But as they grew older, they began to realize that some things they just couldn't share, especially when it came to matters of the heart. Now older, Yuan Jun Cheng, Yuan Jun Dao, and Yuan Jun Ping have all felt the overwhelming tide of emotions that comes with love. But the journey has been anything but easy. Fighting against the sweeping tide of feelings that have continually beat against them, telling them things like "no", "impossible", and "cannot", the three brothers must find a way to overcome some of life's most difficult challenges, as they pursue that which the heart wants most of all: to be loved. *can be found at viki wetv with thai vpn
In Their Room (USA Series) In Their Room (2009-present) is an on-going multi-city documentary series about gay men, bedrooms and intimacy. The series veers into the bedrooms of men where you see them doing everything from the most banal to the sometimes more erotic. Complimenting the revealing nature of their everyday activities are confessional interviews about fantasies, turn-ons and vulnerabilities. The throughline of the series highlights the ways in which gay men in disparate cultures deal with connection, intimacy and loneliness in the modern world.
Red Balloon (Taiwan Series) Zi-chen is a well-mannered and talented student in the school where his father functions as the chairman of the board. He is the star at school. One day, he hides in his secret quiet corner to enjoy some alone time, until Hsiang-wan shows up. Hsiang-wan keeps bothering Zi-chen all the time and taking pictures of him. When Zi-chen finally gets rid of Hsiang-wan and goes back to the dorms, something unexpected is waiting for him there.
We Are Gamily (Taiwan Series) Wu Gang lives with his gay partner Sam in Chengdu where same-sex marriages are still illegal, and ‘Marriages of Convenience” are commonly used as white lies for elderly family members by LGBT community in China. But things just changed over-night when Gang’s mother, Yu-Hua, who is too desperate to have grandchildren, decided to move in together with her son and daughter-in-law Yang Duo. She even forced her daughter Wu Rou, Gang’s twin sister, to live with them.
Dark Blue And Moonlight (Taiwan Series) Hai Qing is an 18-year-old young adult who got into swimming in the summer which he failed the exam for university. Yan Fei who took the responsibility of the mistake made by his department in his company goes to a swimming lesson. Disturbed by his thoughts, Yan Fei who almost drowned is saved by Hai Qing. After taking a shower, Yan Fei sits in the changing room and is still in shock. Hai Qing wants check if he's okay but hesitates. The time freezes when they make eye contacts, then Yan Fei kisses Hai-ching out of impulse. *can be found on viki

Here's a list of movies I'd love to see get the Criterion treatment:
​
The Unknown (Todd Browning, 1927)
Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)
Targets (Peter Bogandovich, 1967)
A reissue of Z
A reissue of The Wave
Yol (Yilmaz Gueney and Serif Goeren, 1982)
Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1985)
A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)
The Horse Thief (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1986)
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)
Centre Stage/The Actress (Stanley Kwan, 1991)
The Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993)
The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993)
Lamerica (Gianni Amelio, 1994)
To Live (Zhang Yimou, 1994)
Wild Reeds (Andre Techine, 1994)
Cyclo (Tran Anh Hung, 1995)
Quo Vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Zbanic, 2020)
Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)

In January 2019, one of the most disgusting and misdirected public proclamations appeared in our media: a group of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates - Bernard-Henri Lévy. Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas LLosa, Adam Michnik… - published a manifesto in several newspapers all around Europe, including the Guardian in the UK. They claimed that Europe as an idea is “coming apart before our eyes”: “We must now will Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism,” they wrote. “We must rediscover political voluntarism or accept that resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.” This manifesto is deeply flawed: just carefully reading it makes it clear why populists are thriving. Its signatories – the flower of European liberal intelligence - ignore the unpleasant fact that the populists also present themselves as the saviors of Europe. The catch is, of course: which Europe?
In an interview on July 15 2018, just after attending a stormy meeting with the EU leaders, Trump mentioned European Union as the first in the line of “foes” of the US, ahead of Russia and China. Instead of condemning this claim as irrational (“Trump is treating the allies of the US worse than its enemies,” etc.), we should ask a simple question: what bothers Trump so much about EU? Which Europe is Trump talking about? When he was asked by journalists about immigrants flowing into Europe, he answered as it befits the anti-immigrant populist that he is: immigrants are tearing apart the fabric of European mores and ways of life, they pose a danger to European spiritual identity… in short, it was people like Orban or Salvini who were talking through him. One should never forget that they also want to defend Europe – Europe as part of a new world order whose contours were clearly discernible at the meeting of the heads of G20 in July 2019 in Osaka.
The surrounding events provided a sad view: Trump exchanging love messages with Kim Yong Un <Based> and inviting him to the White House, Putin jovially clapping hands with BMS, and so on, with Merkel and Tusk, the two voices of old European reason, marginalized and mostly ignored. This New World Order is very tolerant: they are all respecting each other, no one is imposing on others imperialist Eurocentrist notions like women’s rights… This new spirit is best encapsulated by the interview Putin gave to Financial Times on the eve of the Osaka summit; in it he, as expected, lambasted the “liberal idea,” claiming that it “outlived its purpose.” Riding on the wave of the “public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism”, Putin’s evisceration of liberalism “chimes with anti-establishment leaders from US president Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK. “[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” he said. Mr Putin branded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1m refugees to Germany, mainly from war-ravaged Syria, as a “cardinal mistake”. But he praised Donald Trump for trying to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico. “This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.” He added: “Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.””
There is no surprise here, and the same holds for how Donald Tusk, the European Council president, reacted to Putin: “What I find really obsolete is authoritarianism, personality cults and the rule of oligarchs” – a toothless assertion of empty principles which avoids the roots of the crisis. Liberal optimists desperately cling to good signs here and there (the strong Leftist turn of the US younger generation; the fact that Trump got 3 million less votes than Clinton and that his victory was more the result of the manipulations with electoral districts; re-emergence of European liberal Left in countries like Slovakia…), but they are not strong to affect the basic global trend.
The only interesting feature of Putin’s interview, the point at which one can feel how he really speaks from his heart, occurs when he solemnly declares his zero tolerance for spies who betrayed their country: “Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it /…/ but traitors must be punished.” It is clear from this outburst that Putin has no personal sympathy for Snowden or Assange: he just helps them to annoy his enemies, and one can only imagine the fate of an eventual Russian Snowden or Assange. One can only wonder at some Western Leftists who continue to claim that, in spite of his socially-conservative stance, Putin still nonetheless poses an obstacle to the US world domination and should for this reason be viewed with sympathy Every authentic Leftist should ferociously oppose the claim that treason (the betrayal of one’s own nation-state) is the gravest crime possible: no, there are circumstances when such treason is the greatest act of ethical fidelity. Today, such treason is personified by names like Assange, Manning, and Snowden. The reason is today’s global predicament with its three main apocalyptic threats (ecology, digital control, migrations). The moment we fully accept the fact that we live on a Spaceship Earth, the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves, of imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities, a task rendered all the more difficult by the ongoing rise of sectarian religious and ethnic “heroic” violence and readiness to sacrifice oneself (and the world) for one’s specific Cause. Reason thus compels us to commit treason here: to betray our Cause, to refuse to participate in the ongoing war games. If we really care for the fate of the people who compose our nation, our motto should be: America last, China last, Russia last… If by “pathology” we mean an unhealthy deviation which threatens our lives, the “X first” policy is the only true pathology today.
And this brings is back to the European emancipatory legacy which is incompatible with the “X first” policy and which bothers Trump as well as the European populists. It is the Europe of transnational unity, the Europe vaguely aware that, in order to cope with the challenges of our moment, we should move beyond the constraints of nation-states; the Europe which also desperately strives to somehow remain faithful to the old Enlightenment motto of solidarity with victims, the Europe aware of the fact that humanity is today One, that we are all on the same boat (or, as we say, on the same Spaceship Earth), so that other’s misery is also our problem. We should mention here Peter Sloterdjk who noted that the struggle today is how to secure the survival of modern Europe's greatest economicopolitical achievement, the Social Democratic Welfare State. According to Sloterdijk, our reality is - in Europe, at least - “objective Social Democracy” as opposed to the “subjective” Social Democracy: one should distinguish between Social Democracy as the panoply of political parties and Social Democracy as the “formula of a system” which “precisely describes the political-economic order of things, which is defined by the modern state as the state of taxes, as infrastructure-state, as the state of the rule of law and, not last, as the social state and the therapy state”: “We encounter everywhere a phenomenal and a structural Social Democracy, a manifest and a latent one, one which appears as a party and another one which is more or less irreversibly built into in the very definitions, functions, and procedures of the modern statehood as such.”
This Idea that underlies united Europe got corrupted, half-forgotten, and it is only in a moment of danger that we are compelled to return to this essential dimension of Europe, to its hidden potential. Europe lies in the great pincers between America on the one side and Russia on the other who both want to dismember it: both Trump and Putin support Brexit, they support euro-sceptics in every corner, from Poland to Italy. What is bothering them about Europe when we all know the misery of the EU which fails again and again at every test: from its inability to enact a consistent politics about immigrants to its miserable reaction to Trump’s tariff war? It is obviously not this actually-existing Europe but the idea of Europe that kindles against all odds and becomes palpable in the moments of danger. The problem of Europe is to remain faithful to its emancipatory legacy threatened by the conservative-populist onslaught. In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T.S.Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and nonbelief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is what has to be done today: the only way to really defeat populists and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to perform a sectarian split from liberal democracy’s main corpse. Sometimes, the only way to resolve a conflict is not to search for a compromise but to radicalize one’s position. Back to the letter of the 30 liberal luminaries: what they refuse to admit is that the Europe whose disappearance they deplore is already irretrievably lost. The threat does not come from populism: populism is merely a reaction to the failure of the Europe’s liberal establishment to remain faithful to Europe’s emancipatory potentials, offering a false way out of ordinary people’s troubles. So the only way to really defeat populism is to submit the liberal establishment itself, its actual politics, to a ruthless critique… However, a strong part of today’s European Left offers its own version of this ruthless critique: Left populism. Will this work?
What makes today’s racist populism so dangerous is not only its claim to represent ordinary people’s real worries, but its democratic legitimization. This is how “Fascism which smells like democracy” operates today: it IS in some sense genuinely democratic, it stands for a new mode of functioning of democracy – to criticize it, one should criticize dangerous potentials that are inherent to democracy itself. So should the Left copy it to achieve the same success? The latest trend in the vagaries of Leftist politics is effectively a weird version of MeToo: the Left should learn from the rise of the Rightist populism, WeToo can play the populist game… We are repeatedly told that Left populism is de facto winning and it works – but where and how does it work? Everywhere where it became a serious force, from Latin America to Spain’s Podemos, it stumbled upon a fatal limit.
According to Left populists, the main reason for the defeat of the Left is the non-combative stance of rational argumentation and lifeless universalism in theory epitomized by the names of Giddens, Beck, and Habermas. This post-political Third Way cannot combat in an efficient way the agonistic logic of Us against Them successfully mobilized by anti-immigrant Rightist populists. Consequently, the way to combat this Rightist populism is to have a recourse to Left populism which, while retaining the basic populist coordinates (agonistic logic of Us against Them, of the “people” against a corrupted elite), fills them in with a Leftist content: Them are not poor refugees or immigrants but financial capital, technocratic state bureaucracy, etc. This populism moves beyond the old working class anti-capitalism, it tries to bring together a multiplicity of struggles from ecology to feminism, from the right to employment to free education and healthcare, etc., as Podemos is doing in Spain…
With regard to pragmatic dispassionate politics of rational compromise, one should first note that the ideology of neoliberalism (also in its liberal-Left version) is anything but “rational”: it is EXTREMELY confrontational, it brutally excludes those who do not accept it as dangerous anti-democratic utopians, its expert knowledge is ideology at its purest, etc. The problems with the Third Way Left (which endorsed neoliberal economics) was not that it was too pragmatic-rational, but that it was precisely not truly rational – it was permeated by unprincipled pragmatism which in advance endorses the opponent’s premises. Leftist politics today does not need (just) confrontational passion, it needs much more true cold rationality. Cold analysis and passionate struggle not only do not exclude each other, they need each other.
The formula of agonistic politicization, of passionate confrontation, directed against lifeless universalism, is precisely all too formal – it ignores the big question that lurks in the background: why did the Left abandon the agonistic logic of Us against Them decades ago? Was it not because of the deep structural changes in capitalism, changes which cannot be confronted by means of simple populist mobilization? The Left abandoned antagonistic confrontation because it failed in its struggle with capitalism, because it accepted the global triumph of capitalism. As Peter Mandelson said, in economy, we are all Thatcherites, so all that remains to the Left is the multiplicity of particular struggles: human rights, feminism, anti-racism, and specially multiculturalism. (It is interesting to note that Ernesto Laclau, the theoretical father of Left populism, first enthusiastically greeted Blair’s Third Way politics - as a liberation from class essentialism, etc. -, and only later targeted it as the mode of non-antagonistic politics.
Podemos undoubtedly stands for populism at its best: against the arrogant Politically Correct intellectual elites which despise the “narrowness” of the ordinary people considered “stupid” for “voting against their interests,” its organizing principle is to listen to and organize those “from below” against those “from above,” beyond all traditional Left and Right models. The idea is that the starting point of emancipatory politics should be the concrete experience of the suffering and injustices of ordinary people in their local life-world (home quarter, workplace, etc.), not abstract visions of a future Communist or whatsoever society. (Although the new digital media seem to open up the space for new communities, the difference between these new communities and the old life-world communities is crucial: these old communities are not chosen, I am born into them, they form the very space of my socialization, while the new (digital) communities include me into a specific domain defined by my interests and thus depending on my choice. Far from making the old “spontaneous” communities deficient, the fact that they do not rely on my free choice makes them superior with regard to the new digital communities since they compel me to find my way into a pre-existing not-chosen life-world in which I encounter (and have to learn to deal with) real differences, while the new digital communities depending on my choice sustain the ideological myth of the individual who somehow pre-exists a communal life and is free to choose it.) While this approach undoubtedly contains a (very big) grain of truth, its problem is that, to put it bluntly, not only, as Laclau liked to emphasize, society doesn’t exist, but “people” also doesn’t exist.
This thesis is not to be taken as an abstract theoretical statement about the inconsistence that traverse the social body: it refers to a quite concrete, even experiential, fact. “People” is a false name for the social totality – in our global capitalism, totality is “abstract,” invisible, there is no way to ground it in concrete life-worlds. In other words, in today global capitalist universe, a “concrete experience” of being a member of a particular life-world with its customs, living links, forms of solidarity, etc., is already something “abstract” in the strict sense of a particular experience which obliterates the thick network of financial, social, etc., processes which rule and regulate this concrete particular world. Here Podemos will encounter problems if it will at some point take power: what specific economic measures (beyond the standard Keynesian bag of tricks) will it enact to limit the power of the capital?
Both traps are to be avoided here: the false radicalism (“what really matters is the abolition of liberal-parliamentary capitalism, all other fights are secondary”), as well as the false gradualism (“now we fight against military dictatorship and for simple democracy, forget your Socialist dreams, this comes later – maybe…”). When we have to deal with a specific struggle, the key question is: how will our engagement in it or disengagement from it affect other struggles? The general rule is that, when a revolt begins against an oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilize large crowds with slogans which one cannot but characterize as crowd pleasers – for democracy, against corruption, etc. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices: when our revolt succeeds in its direct goal, we come to realize that what really bothered us (our un-freedom, humiliation, social corruption, lack of prospect of a decent life) goes on in a new guise. In Egypt, protesters succeeded to get rid of the oppressive Mubarak regime, but corruption remained, and the prospect of a decent life moved even further away. After the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, the last vestiges of patriarchal care for the poor can fall away, so that the newly gained freedom is de facto reduced to the freedom to choose the preferred form of one’s misery – the majority not only remains poor, but, to add insult to injury, it is being told that, since they are now free, poverty is their own responsibility. In such a predicament, we have to admit that there was a flaw in our goal itself, that this goal was not specific enough - say, that standard political democracy can also serve as the very form of un-freedom: political freedom can easily provide the legal frame for economic slavery, with the underprivileged “freely” selling themselves into servitude. We are thus brought to demand more than just political democracy: we have to admit that what we first took as the failure to fully realize a noble principle (of democratic freedom) is a failure inherent to this principle itself – understanding this is the big step of political pedagogy.
This brings us back to the fateful limit of populism. Laclau insisted on the necessity to construct some figure of Enemy as immanent to populism – it is not its weakness, but the resource of its strength. Left populism should construct a different figure of the Enemy, not the threatening racial Other (immigrant, Jew, Muslim…) but the financial elites, fundamentalists, and other “usual suspects” of the progressives. This urge to construct the Enemy is another fatal limitation of populism: today, the ultimate “enemy” is not a concrete social agent but in some sense the system itself, a certain functioning of the system which cannot be easily located into agents . Years ago, Alain Badiou wrote that one doesn’t fight capitalism but its concrete agents – but therein resides the problem since the true target IS capitalism. Today, it seems easy to say that the Enemy is neo-Fascist anti-immigrant nationalism or, in the US, Trump. But the fact remains that the rise of Trump is ultimately the effect of the failure of liberal-democratic consensus, so although one should, of course, not exclude new forms of “anti-Fascist” alliances with the latter, this consensus remains THE thing to be changed. So was I wrong when, in two interviews before the US presidential elections, I preferred Trump to Clinton? No, events which followed proved me right: the victory of Trump threw the establishment into a crisis and opened up the way for the rise of the Left wing of the Democratic Party. If the Trumpian excesses will not mobilize the US Left, then the battle is really lost. It is because of their focus on concrete enemies that Left populists seem to privilege national sovereignty, the strong nation state, as a defense against global capital (even Auferstehen in Germany basically follows this path). In this way, most of them not only (by definition) endorse populism but even nationalism, presenting their struggle as a defense against international financial capital. Some Left populists in the US already used the term “national socialism”; while, of course, it would be stupid and unfair to claim that they are closet Nazis, one should nonetheless insist that internationalism is a key component of any project of radical emancipation. Whatever critical remarks one sustains against Varoufakis’s DIEM, DIEM at least sees clearly that resistance against global capital has to be itself global, a new form of universalism . There definitely are enemies and the topic of conspiracies is not to be simply dismissed. Years ago, Fred Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, things happen which cannot be explained by a reference to some anonymous “logic of the capital” – for example, now we know that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of a wellplanned “conspiracy” of some financial circles. However, the true task of social analysis still remains to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such “conspiratorial” interventions. This is also why reference to “greed” and the appeal to capitalists to show social solidarity and responsibility are misplaced: “greed” (search for profit) IS what motivates capitalist expansion, the wager of capitalism IS that acting out of individual greed will contribute to the common good. So, again, instead of focusing on individual greed and approach the problem of growing inequality in moralist terms, the task is to change the system so that it will no longer allow or even solicit “greedy” acting. The problem we are facing here is best exemplified by what took place a couple of years ago in Croatia. Two public protest gatherings were announced: trade unions called for a protest against the exploding unemployment and poverty (felt very much by ordinary people); Rightist nationalist announced a gathering in order to protest the re-introduction of the official status of Cyrillic writing in Vukovar (because of the Serb minority there). To the first gathering, a couple of hundred people came, and to the second gathering, over one hundred of thousand people came. Poverty was experienced as a daily life problems much more than the Cyrillic threat by ordinary people, and the rhetoric of trade unions didn’t lack passion and confrontational spirit, but… One has to accept that some kind of extra-strong economy of jouissance is at work in the identification with one’s own “way of life,” some core of the Real which is very difficult to rearticulate symbolically. Recall Lenin’s shock at the patriotic reaction of Social-Democrats to the outburst of the WWI – people are ready to suffer for their way of life, up to today’s refugees who are not ready to “integrate.” In short, there are two Reals (the real of capital, the real of ethnic identification) which cannot be dissolved into fluid elements of symbolic hegemony.
How are we to mobilize “our” people to fight for the rights of the refugees and immigrants? In principle, the answer is easy: we should strive to articulate a new ideological space in which the struggle for refugees will be combined with the feminist struggle, ecological struggle, etc. However, such an easy way out is purely rhetorical and runs against the (ideologically determined, of course) “experience” which is very difficult to undo. More profoundly, the catch is that today’s constellation doesn’t allow for a direct link between program and the direct experience of “real people.” The basic premise of classic Marxism is that, with the central role of the proletariat, humanity found itself in a unique situation in which the deepest theoretical insight found an echo in the most concrete experience of exploitation and alienation – it is, however, deeply questionable if, in today’s complex situation, a similar strategy is feasible. Left populists would, of course, insist that this is precisely why we should abandon the Marxist reliance of proletariat as the privileged emancipatory subject and engage in a long and difficult work of constructing new hegemonic “chains of equivalences” without any guarantee of success (there is no assurance that feminist struggle, struggle for freedom, and struggle for the rights immigrants will coalesce in one big Struggle). My point is, however, that even this solution is too abstract and formal. Left populists remind me of a doctor who, when asked by the worried patient what to do, tells him: “Go and see a doctor!” The true problem is not one of formal procedure – a pragmatic search for unity versus antagonist confrontation – but a substantial one: how to strike back at global capital? Do we have an alternative to the global capitalist system? Can we even imagine today an <">authentic<"> Communist power? What we get is disaster (Venezuela), capitulation (Greece), or a controlled full return to capitalism (China, Vietnam).
So what happens with populist passion here? It disappears, and it has to disappear. When populism takes power, the choice is, to designate it with names, Maduro (passage from genuine populism into its authoritarian version with social decay) or Deng Hsiao-Ping (authoritarian-capitalist normalization, ideological return to Confucius). Populism thrives in a state of emergency, it by definition cannot last. It needs the figure of an external enemy - let us take Laclau’s own precise analysis of why one should count Chartism as populism:

• Its dominant leitmotiv is to situate the evils of society not in something that is inherent in the economic system, but quite the opposite: in the abuse of power by parasitic and speculative groups which have control of political power – ‘old corruption,’ in Cobbett’s words. /…/ It was for this reason that the feature most strongly picked out in the ruling class was its idleness and parasitism.

In other words, for a populist, the cause of the troubles is ultimately never the system as such, but the intruder who corrupted it (financial manipulators, not capitalists as such, etc.); not a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such, but an element that doesn’t play its role within the structure properly. For a Marxist, on the contrary (like for a Freudian), the pathological (deviating misbehavior of some elements) is the symptom of the normal, an indicator of what is wrong in the very structure that is threatened with “pathological” outbursts: for Marx, economic crises are the key to understanding the “normal” functioning of capitalism; for Freud, pathological phenomena like hysterical outbursts provide the key to the constitution (and hidden antagonisms that sustain the functioning) of a “normal” subject. That’s why populism tends to be nationalist, it calls for people’ unity against the (external) enemy, while Marxism focuses on the inner split that cuts across each community and calls for, international solidarity because we all traversed by this split.
The hard fact to accept is that “ordinary people” do NOT “know,” they possess no authentic insight or experience, they are no less confused and disoriented as all others are. I remember, in the debate after a talk of mine, a brief exchange with a supporter of Podemos who reacted to my claim that the demands of Podemos (getting rid of corrupted power structures, authentic democracy which is rooted in people’s actual interests and worries) without any precise ideas of how to reorganize society - he replied: “But this is not a reproach since Podemos wants just this: not another system but a democratic system that would actually be what it claims to be!” In short, Podemos wanted the existing system without its symptoms, to which one should retort that it’s OK to begin with this, but then sooner or later comes the moment when we are forces to realize that symptoms (corruption, failure, etc.) are part of the system, so that in order to get rid of the symptoms we have to change the system itself.
One of the versions of radical politics today is waiting for a catastrophe: many of my radical friends are telling me privately that only a big ecological catastrophe, economic meltdown, or war can mobilize the people to work for radical change. But is this very stance of waiting for a catastrophe not already is a catastrophe, an admission of utter defeat? In order to find a proper orientation in this conundrum, one should become aware of the fateful limitation of the politics of interests. Parties like die Linke in Germany effectively represent the interests of their working class constituency – better healthcare and retirement conditions, higher wages, etc.; this puts them automatically within the confines of the existing system, and is therefore not enough for authentic emancipation. Interests are not to be just followed, they have to be redefined with regard to ideas which cannot be reduced to interests.
This is why we witness again and again the paradox of how the Rightist populists, when they get in power, sometimes impose measures which are effectively in workers’ interests, as is the case in Poland where PiS (Law and Justice, the ruling Rightist-populist party) has managed to enact the largest social transfers in Poland’s contemporary history. PiS did what Marine le Pen also promises to do in France: a combination of anti-austerity measures (social transfers no Leftist party dares to consider) plus the promise of order and security that asserts national identity and deals with the immigrant threat – who can beat this combination which directly addresses the two big worries of ordinary people? We can discern at the horizon a weirdly perverted situation in which the official “Left” is enforcing the austerity politics (while advocating multicultural etc. rights) while the populist Right is pursuing anti-austerity measures to help the poor (while pursuing the xenophobic nationalist agenda) – the latest figure of what Hegel described as die verkehrte Welt, the topsy-turvy world… The obvious (not only) populist reaction to this is: should we not reestablish the “normal” state, i.e., should the Left not enact the anti-austerity measures that the populist Right is enacting, just without the accompanying racist-nationalist baggage? “Logical” as it may sound, this, precisely, is what cannot be done: the Right can do it precisely BECAUSE its anti-austerity measures are accompanied by racist-nationalist ideology, this ideological coating is what makes anti-austerity acceptable.
Populism ultimately NEVER works. In its Rightist version, it cheats by definition: it construct a false figure of the enemy – false in the sense that it obfuscates the basic social antagonism (“Jew” instead of “capital,” etc.) and, in this way, its populist rhetoric serves the very financial elites its pretend to oppose. In its Left version, it’s false in a more complex Kantian sense. In a vague but pertinent homology, we can say that the construction of the Enemy in an antagonistic relation plays the role of Kant’s schematism: it allows us to translate theoretical insight (awareness of abstract social contradictions) into practico-political engagement. This is how we should read Badiou’s already-mentioned statement that “one cannot fight capitalism”: one should “schematize” our fight into activity against concrete actors who work like the exposed agents of capitalism. However, the basic wager of Marxism is precisely that such a personalization into an actual enemy is wrong – if it is necessary, it is a kind of necessary structural illusion. So does this mean that Marxist politics should permanently manipulate its followers (and itself), acting in a way it knows it is misleading? Marxist engagement is condemned to this immanent tension which cannot be resolved by claiming that now we fight the Enemy and later we will move to the more fundamental overhaul of the system itself. Left populism stumbles upon the limit of fighting the Enemy the moment it takes power.
In a situation like today’s, Left populism’s fatal flaw is clearly visible: its weakness is precisely what appears to its partisans as its strength, namely the construction of the figure of Enemy and the focus on the struggle against it. What is needed today are above all positive visions of how to confront our problems – the threat of ecological catastrophes, the destabilizing implications of global capitalism, the traps of the digitalization of our minds… In other words, what is needed is not just to fight big financial institutions but to envisage new modes of financial politics, to provide feasible answers to the question: OK, so how would you organize finances if you gain power? It’s not just to fight against walls and for open borders but to envisage new social and economic models which would no longer generate refugees. Today, more than ever, our system is approaching such a deep crisis that we can no longer just bombard it with our demands, expecting that it will somehow manage to meet them while continuing to smoothly function.
Instead of just focusing on antagonism, it is therefore crucial for a Leftist government today to define a role for the private sector, to offer the private sector precise conditions under which it can operate. As long as (at least a good part of) the private sector is needed for the smooth functioning of our societies, one should not just antagonize it but also propose a positive vision of its role. Social Democracy at its best was doing exactly this.
The obvious Left-populist counter-argument is here, of course: but is not the fact that Left populism does not provide a detailed vision of the alternative society precisely its advantage? Such an openness is what characterizes a radical-democratic struggle: there are no prescriptions decided in advanced, re-arrangements are going on all the time with short-term goals shifting… Again, this smooth reply is all too easy, it obfuscates the fact that the “openness” of the Left-populist struggle is based on a retreat, on avoiding the key problem of capitalism.
We should therefore give the populist protests (like those of the Yellow Vests in France) a conditional YES – conditional since it is clear that Left populism does not provide a feasible alternative to the system. That is to say, let’s imagine that the protesters somehow win, take power and act within the coordinates of the existing system (like Syriza did in Greece) – what would have happened then? Probably some kind of economic catastrophe. This doesn’t mean that we simply need a different socio-economic system, a system which would be able to meet the protesters’ demands: the process of radical transformation would also give rise to different demands and expectations. Say, with regard to fuel costs, what is really needed is not just cheap fuel, the true goal is to diminish our dependency on oil for ecological reasons, to change not only our transportation but our entire way of life. The same holds for lower taxes plus better healthcare and education: the whole paradigm will have to change. The same holds for our big ethico-political problem: how to deal with the flow of refugees? The solution is not to just open the borders to all who want to come in, and to ground this openness in our generalized guilt (“our colonization is our greatest crime which we will have to repay forever”). If we remain at this level, we serve perfectly the interests of those in power who foment the conflict between immigrants and the local working class (which feels threatened by them) and retain their superior moral stance. (The moment one begins to think in this direction, the Politically Correct Left instantly cries Fascism – see the ferocious attacks on Angela Nagle for her outstanding essay “The Left Case against Open Borders” .) The “contradiction” between advocates of open borders and populist anti-immigrants is a false “secondary contradiction” whose ultimate function is to obfuscate the need to change the system itself: the entire international economic system which, in its present form, gives rise to refugees.
The stance of generalized guilt provides a clinically perfect example of the superego paradox confirmed by how the fundamentalist immigrants react to left-liberal guilt feeling: the more European Left liberals admit responsibility for the situation which creates refugees, and the more they demand that we should abolish all walls and open our gates to immigrants, the more they are despised by fundamentalist immigrants. There is no gratitude in it – the more we give, the more we are reproached that we did not give enough. It is significant that the countries that are most attacked are not those with an open anti-immigrant stance (Hungary, Poland…) but precisely those which are the most open one. Sweden is reproached that it doesn’t really want to integrate immigrants, and every detail is seized upon as a proof of its hypocrisy (“You see, they still serve pork at meals in the schools! They still allow their girls to dress provocatively! They still don’t want to integrate elements of sharia in their legal system!”), while every demand for symmetry (but where are new Christian churches in Muslim countries with a Christian minority?) is flatly rejected as European cultural imperialism. Crusades are mentioned all the time, while the Muslim occupation of large parts of Europe is treated as normal. The underlying premise is that a kind of radical sin (of colonization) is inscribed into the very existence of Europe, a sin incomparable with others, so that our debt to others cannot ever be repaid. However, beneath this premise it is easy to discern its opposite, the stance of scorn - they loath us for our guilt and responsibility, they perceive it as a sign of our weakness, of our lack of self-respect and trust in ourselves. The ultimate irony is that some Europeans then perceive such an aggressive stance as the Muslim “vitality” and contrast it to Europe’s “exhaustion” – again turning this into the argument that we need the influx of foreign blood to regain our vitality… We in Europe will only regain the respect of others by learning to impose limits, to fully help others not from a position of guilt and weakness but from a position of strength.
Paradoxically, the basic problem with today’s European Left is thus not that it remains too “Eurocentrist” but that it is not “Eurocentrist” enough.

Folks asked, so here it is: the edited text of the official notes I did for Infernal Affairs when it was released back in 2002 (or thereabouts) in the US. I wrote everything except the interviews, which came as part of the press package. I figured this may be of interest since Criterion is releasing the Infernal Affairs Trilogy in November.
INFERNAL AFFAIRS (2002) Hong Kong Film Awards - 2002 Winner – “Best Movie” Winner – “Best Director” Winner – “Best Screenplay” Winner – “Best Actor – Tony Leung” Winner – “Best Supporting Actor – Anthony Wong”
Golden Horse Awards – 2002 Winner – “Best Movie” Winner – “Best Director” Winner – “Best Actor – Tony Leung” Winner – “Best Supporting Actor – Anthony Wong”
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About Infernal Affairs

It's the ultimate "why didn't I think of that" high concept: a cop goes undercover as a gangster, and a gangster simultaneously infiltrates the police force pretending to be a cop. These two sleeper agents live underground for years before a series of mistakes clues in all the wrong people as to what's going on and they’re each ordered to root out the double agent, which in both cases happens to be themselves. It’s like the Philip K. Dick movie that Michael Mann always wanted to direct.
Hong Kong's 30-year history of gritty, urban crime films have been leading to this moment. Folding in the street cynicism of Kirk Wong, the wounded romanticism of John Woo, and the kinetic savagery of Ringo Lam, INFERNAL AFFAIRS is a gleaming, titanium-hard package without a wasted shot: everything — from the set design, to the costumes, to the action, to the score — is designed to wring maximum tension from its story. Saturated with gleaming chromium hues, INFERNAL AFFAIRS stars Tony Leung (Hero) as the scruffy, simmering undercover cop, and pop star, Andy Lau (Running on Karma), as the cold-blooded over-achieving gangster who infiltrates the police. Christopher Doyle, who shot Hero and is Wong Kar-wai’s regular director of photography, consulted on the cinematography and as a result it bears his saturated, radiant fingerprints. Composer, Chan Kwok-wing, rides the music hard, pulling the score out of his orchestra by beating it with a club and dragging out the notes with a meat hook.
A huge success when it was released (the movie topped the 2002 Hong Kong box office and went on to perform well in Korea, Japan and China), INFERNAL AFFAIRS has already spawned two sequels, and the trilogy stands as the most accomplished crime saga since Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy.
The first film in the trilogy is the tightest and most inspired of the three. The title isn’t just a clever play on “Internal Affairs” but is, instead, a blatant indicator of the filmmakers’ intentions: the movie is about being trapped in hell. As the Nirvana Sutra, verse 19 says, “The worst of the eight hells is called Continuous Hell. It is a place of continuous suffering.” INFERNAL AFFAIRS is about suffering, endless torment and psychological distress. The flick exists in an atmosphere of surveillance, mistrust and paranoia. A simple cell phone call can trace a suspect, spark a betrayal, shut down an investigation or blow a carefully constructed cover. Laptops are weapons of mass implication, telephone bills are incriminating documents, and casual conversations become loaded with dark implications and gruesome consequences depending on the context. IA never gives up its game, and it holds its cards close to its chest. Who knows what, and when? We’re never quite sure, but the game could be up at any nerve-shredding moment.
Anchoring the film’s terse shoot-outs, and excruciatingly drawn-out set pieces are four great performances by four of Hong Kong’s best actors. Tony Leung (Yan) bloodies himself as he thrashes about in self-destructive spasms, desperate to leave his undercover work behind before it kills him, while Andy Lau (Lau) slowly drowns in his own impacted self-loathing. Anthony Wong (SP Wong) plays the one police officer who knows that Tony Leung is an undercover cop, and Eric Tsang (Sam), who normally plays comic roles, is the paternal gang boss who employs both men. Both Tsang and Wong are veteran character actors in Hong Kong, and both of them give the performances of their careers as father figures for the two double agents.
A hot-blooded throwback to the big, actor-intensive, dark cop dramas of the '70s, INFERNAL AFFAIRS writes its story in burning blood, on paper made of ice.
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Six Things to Know about INFERNAL AFFAIRS

What song is that in the stereo store? When Yan and Lau meet early in the movie, they’re in an audio supply store where Yan is working the counter and Lau is shopping for a tube amplifier. The two men sit down and listen to a Tsai Chin song, “Lost Time”, to test the amp Lau wants to buy. Tsai Chin is a Taiwanese singer, with 40 albums to her credit, and “Lost Time” is a mournful piece that oozes wit h regret. Tsai is considered to be the best Chinese singer who covers the old love ballads, and many Chinese audiophiles use her albums to test their stereo systems. Accurately reproducing her voice is considered to be the true test of a sound system.

What are Triads? The closest Western equivalent to Hong Kong’s triads are the mafia, but even that’s a clumsy comparison. Triads have long histories, some going back hundreds of years and families don’t run them (although triad members refer to each other as brother). Real life triads are generally loose consortiums of street toughs held together through bonds of business and loyalty, but motion picture triads are something different altogether. In Hong Kong movies, triads are often viewed as avatars of traditional Chinese values. Much is made of their initiation rituals, their special slang (using triad slang in a film is a guaranteed way to get a Category III rating — Hong Kong’s equivalent of an X) and their bonds of loyalty and brotherhood. Chinese martial arts fiction emphasized the jiang hu: a floating world of thieves, wandering swordsmen, beggars, magicians, and bandits with its own rules of conduct and morality. Today’s triad films are modern tales of the new jiang hu and the triads are often noble men, loyal to the old Chinese morality that emphasized the Confucian values, who are losing the fight against the Westernization of Hong Kong which brings greed, betrayal and ruthless capitalism in its wake.
Eric Tsang’s Sam in INFERNAL AFFAIRS is a traditional triad movie boss (except for his troubling distrust of his loyal soldiers). He meets Andy Lau in a cinema showing an old Chinese film, he’s a devout Buddhist (except for the killing people part) and in the later series installments he’s portrayed as a lover of Chinese opera. Anthony Wong’s SP Wong, on the other hand, is a holdover from the British Colonial system. A part of the police force, often seen as lackeys of the Empire, and he’s a modern man whose life we don’t enter: we never see or hear about his family. He wears Western suits, and works in an enormous office building, his loyalties are to the British legal system, and in later series installments he’s portrayed as an adulterer and a murderer. Their conflict is a classic Hong Kong film conflict: Chinese values, as emphasized by the triads, clashing with the modernizing, corrupt, rootless Western tradition.

Why so many doubles? From its careful use of reflections and background props (notice the Men in Black 2 poster in the movie theater scene) all the way to its plot with two father figures and two undercover agents, INFERNAL AFFAIRS makes a careful use of doubles and doubling, a theme that has long fascinated Hong Kong directors.
It could be argued that John Woo’s entire career has been about doubling, most famously in The Killer (1989), with a cop and a hitman portrayed as having almost identical lives and problems, who happen to be on opposite sides of the law. Woo returned to this theme with Hard Boiled (1992) in which Chow Yun-fat played a no compromise cop stalking a criminal (Tony Leung) who turned out to be an undercover police officer. Ringo Lam has also explored this territory in almost all of his films, from City on Fire (1987) (whose plot provided the template for Reservoir Dogs) to 1997’s Full Alert, which was his take on Michael Mann’s Heat.
So what’s up with it? Besides being a pretty universal theme in movies, doubling is something that a lot of film theorists claim has a special appeal for Hong Konger’s given their unique historical position. Torn between their Chinese roots and their British influences, Hong Kong has been pulled towards the West while it tries to keep its ties to the East. The New Wave of Hong Kong cinema in the late '70s and early '80s was sparked by a case of cultural whiplash. When the Cultural Revolution swept Mainland China, it left Hong Kong liberals adrift. On one side they rejected the rampant Westernization that came with the British, whose colonial rule was at the time a cause of riots and protests. But on the other side they saw their Chinese heritage drowning in a sea of blood and anarchy as the Cultural Revolution threatened to destabilize China. It was out of this tension that a new, international Hong Kong identity was formed, and its main outlet was in the movies, especially in the doubled characters who were able to exist on two opposing sides of the same situation, simultaneously.
What about the action? The genius of IA 1 is that it manages to engage its audience and create deep tension and suspense without a lot of action scenes, which are considered the hallmark of Hong Kong movies. There’s only one action scene in the whole movie, and two short car chases — the rest of the movie is all stalking and suspicion. But when action is needed, it’s hard-hitting and realistic, thanks to Dion Lam, the action choreographer for IA 1 (and he also plays Sam’s bearded bodyguard, Del Piero). A member of Yuen Wo-ping’s stunt team, Dion was Keanu Reeves’ personal trainer on The Matrix, and he’s had a long history of choreographing Hong Kong films including Andrew Lau’s epochal Young and Dangerous series. His most notorious action choreography is his work in the Category III sex/gore film, The Eternal Evil of Asia (1995), which features flying sex battles with nude combatants, sort of like a porno version of The Matrix.
The trouble with girls. The only major criticism that was leveled at IA 1 was that there wasn’t a big role for the women, played by Kelly Chen and Sammi Cheng. IA 2 directly addressed this issue by introducing the character of Sam’s wife, played by Carina Lau. In real life, Carina Lau is Tony Leung’s on-again-off-again long-time paramour, and she was once kidnapped and held hostage by a triad in an extortion attempt. Her brittle, ambitious performance is the center of IA 2, and she’s the catalyst for much of the action. We’re also briefly introduced to Lau’s wife, Mary, in IA 2, when he arrests her for public drunkeness.
Who else is involved with the movie? INFERNAL AFFAIRS is edited by Danny Pang, and Pang Ching-hei. Pang Ching-hei is a Hong Kong editor whose main claim to fame is the IA films, but Danny Pang is also famous as a director. With his twin brother, Oxide Pang, he directed the horror movie hit, The Eye (2002). The brothers split their time between Bangkok and Hong Kong, and they direct as a team.
Christopher Doyle, Wong Kar-wai’s longtime collaborator who also shot Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon (1996), Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) and Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American (2002), was a visual consultant on the film. Doyle says he shot several days of the film, but the director of the film claims that he only consulted on film stocks, photographic processing, and color schemes.
Composer, Chan Kwok-wing, has worked on eight of director Andrew Lau’s previous films before coming on board for INFERNAL AFFAIRS.
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LET’S MEET ANDY LAU (Playing Lau, the triad member pretending to be a cop) Andy Lau Tak-wah is the hardest working man in show business, he's one of the four “Heavenly Kings” of Cantopop music, and the last genuine movie star left in Hong Kong. Although some folks are considered better actors, some have more personality and others have more international recognition, only Andy Lau’s name translates directly into box office receipts. Now that Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun-fat have gone Hollywood, only Andy Lau can “open” a movie.
Born in a poor, rural village in Hong Kong, Lau joined the TVB actor’s training program in 1981. TVB was the biggest television station in Hong Kong and had formerly been the legendary Shaw Brothers studios, before the Shaws decided TV was more lucrative than filmmaking. They ran TVB like an old-time studio, however, and their actors were usually culled from their own training program and paid a pittance for grueling work schedules. Lau was a moderate success on the tube, but a contract dispute in 1985 landed him in the freezer: a contractual purgatory where he was kept in casting limbo, but wasn’t released from his contract, either. During this time, Lau concentrated on his film and music career.
A hard worker, Lau’s ambition and looks were held against him, and the general consensus seemed to be that he was “okay, for a pop star.” His voice wasn’t anything that anyone paid much attention to, but he kept working at it. His acting was generally considered passable, despite the fact that some of Hong Kong’s best directors kept casting him. His first role was in arthouse director Ann Hui’s hit Boat People (1982), about Vietnamese refugees, and he was cast in Wong Kar-wai’s first two film, As Tears Go By (1988), and Days of Being Wild (1991).
Despite his ability to whip out the acting chops when necessary, Lau is a popular entertainer and it’s his work with populist directors like Wong Jing (Hong Kong’s reigning king of bad taste) that have slowly increased the value of his stock. Averaging ten movies a year, reportedly sleeping in his car between shoots, he played a mafia midget, a criminal who taught his penis kung fu, a martial artist with a pet killer whale, and a street tough with the world’s worst haircut. As Lau said of this period, “I’m a worker, not an actor. I just try to make sure the way I walk, or talk, or smoke is different in one movie from the other.”
In 1990, Lau’s fifth album, “Can It Be Possible” went multi-platinum and Lau became elevated to the ranks of one of the four Heavenly Kings of Cantonese pop music, or Cantopop. He toured relentlessly, and became the first Asian singer to sign an endorsement deal with Pepsi. In 1997, he started a production company which has been responsible for most of the films from Hong Kong’s newest arthouse sensation, Fruit Chan, including Made in Hong Kong (1997) and The Longest Summer (1998).
His fortunes changed dramatically in 1999 when Lau starred in Johnnie To’s Running out of Time, playing a thief who’s dying of a terminal illness. Although the role sounds like an abandoned plotline from The Young and the Restless Lau managed to play his devil-may-care walking dead man with the kind of lightly-doomed charm that was last wielded by Cary Grant. He won the “Best Actor” award at that year’s Hong Kong Film Awards, and the movie went on to be a hit in a depressed film market. Since then, Lau has been on the upswing, opening blockbusters, going on even more concert tours, and starring in high profile projects like Johnnie To’s Running on Karma (Hong Kong’s sleeper hit of 2003) and INFERNAL AFFAIRS. Fiercely loyal to the industry that turned him into one of the world’s most exemplary leading men, Lau has stated in recent interviews that he has no interest in going to Hollywood.
ANDY LAU INTERVIEW Q: What do you think of Infernal Affairs? A : Infernal Affairs is like a novel, and this novel is based on a true story, that’s what makes it so realistic. It’s possible that this kind of story happens everyday around us. I believe this film will become a classic.
With my 20 years of acting experience, the scenes from when Ming first met Yan until they separated at the end, they’re actually a single scene. I can’t isolate any single scene to define everyone’s acting. If you haven’t watched the previous scene, you wouldn’t understand why we would act that way. The film is best watched from beginning to end, especially the character relationships: What makes a person strong is the one supporting him at the back. Just like Ming has Sammi Cheng’s character behind him, and Yan has Kelly Chen’s, but Yan also had Elva Hsiao in his past: A woman who makes him stop believing in love, a woman whom he owed. The story wouldn’t be so brilliant without these characters. The relationships between me, Tony Leung, Anthony Wong and Eric Tsang are definitely worth seeing. I don’t know how my performance is, but through the film I get to know my fellow cast members in a new way.
Q: Describe your character Ming. A : Ming is a really complicated person. He was trained by Sam (Eric Tsang) to be a cop since he was young. He thought he would climb up the triad ladder, and then gradually he realizes he is capable of doing good. But the truth is he’s already crossed the line, so what should he do? So that’s why he’s really complicated.
Q: How would you evaluate him? A : I believe he’s made a bad choice since day one, therefore he should be responsible for the stress and face the consequence in the film.
Q: How would you define “good” and “evil”? A : Quantitatively on a scale of 100%, it’s easy to simply define 50% as “good”, and 51% is “evil”. But to me, it’s your heart that differentiates the borderline. If a person has done wrong, and today he has a chance to be good again, I hope everyone would give him a chance. But nobody knows for sure if he would really be a good guy, or if others would accept him again.
Everyone have different perceptions on the issue, but mine is a special case, because I tend to differentiate between movies and reality: I don’t accept gray area in real life, right is right and wrong is wrong; but in movies, I’m more tolerant on things. So I can accept a character like Ming, because I’m the one playing it. How can I present him to the audience when I don’t even believe in him?
Q: How does Ming learn to protect himself? A : I feel he’s just a normal person like you and me, we all have secrets we’d like to keep, and Ming is the same. He doesn’t want to reveal his secret, but he can’t control it once it’s exposed. At the end, Ming realizes that honesty is not necessarily a good thing, because his tolerance is not on par with others. So he chooses to keep this secret as long as he can.
Q: How does it feel to portray an undercover? A : At the beginning, I thought I would be doing Tony Leung’s character, because I felt I looked more like a triad member! But then they wanted me to be Ming. The scriptwriter told me this character was very different from my personality, so I should think about my acting style thoroughly. But director Andrew Lau told me to interpret this character realistically. The scriptwriter asked me why I didn’t look like I was acting. Because this is an interesting character on paper already, if I act like I used to, it would be too exaggerating. My acting style was very calm, and they rarely saw me relaxed. But the directors told me to lighten up, there may be a bit of tension in the middle. So I just sat still, staring at a cup. The two directors really gave me the confidence I needed.
The scriptwriter asked me if I found my character wasn’t as good as Tony Leung’s, then the directors said, “If we want you to act like Tony, we’ll simply cast two Tonys instead of you!” So from that day on, the directors didn’t interfere with my acting, and I only discussed with them when I felt there’s something missing.
The scriptwriter said he felt I was trying something new, but he’s worried that the critics would be harsh on me. I said I didn’t mind at all, because film critics had their own perspectives. But I believe in the scriptwriters, because they’re the creators of these characters. If they felt I was doing it right, then I must be right.
Q: How does it feel to be working with three award-winning actors? A : Working with different people give me different feelings, but I didn’t feel any stress working with them. It’s like taking the exam with the top students, it’s worthwhile even if I ranked the last. I just hope the four of us would make the film more lively.
Q: What is it like to be working with Tony Leung again? A : I feel we’ve both matured. I’ve known him for almost 20 years, and seeing him makes me feel younger. It’s like we’re back in the TV drama days, and our communication is still as good as before. I would say our collaboration is close to perfect.
Q: Do you think the theme might be too mature for the teenage audience? A : First of all, I think this film is a teen movie. Perhaps everyone perceives comedy as the genre for teenagers. But the truth is that every genre is suitable for them, because they still have a long road ahead of them, and this film somehow reflects on how they should handle life. This is a film for teenagers, and they would surely share our joy. Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow opened in theatres 10 years ago, which also attracted a substantial amount of teen audience. I don’t know who has classified our film as for mature audience only. Chow Yun-fat was in his 30s when he did A Better Tomorrow, and our cast are now all in our 30s and 40s! I’m confident that once you’ve seen this film, you’ll understand this genre still has its strengths.
Q: Anything else you’d like to add? A : We have such a star-studded cast that may become the talk of the town, but I would like to remind you there are others who have dedicated themselves to make this film look great. They are the two directors, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, as well as scriptwriter Felix Chong. The film wouldn’t be that good without them.
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LET'S MEET TONY LEUNG CHIU-WAI “Little Tony” as he’s called by fans (to differentiate him from the other Tony Leung, star of The Lovers and known as “Big Tony”) is the Hong Kong actor most likely to be recognized overseas, due in large part to his work with arthouse golden boy, Wong Kar-wai. He’s appeared in virtually every Wong Kar-wai movie, as well as playing one of the leads in John Woo’s crossover hit, Hard Boiled (1992). Not bad for a guy who had to drop out of school when he was 15 in order to support his family.
In 1982, Leung applied for work at television super station, TVB, and became a host on the children’s program 430 Space Shuttle, a surprisingly fertile show that also spawned Stephen Chow (star of Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle). Leung’s scrappy good looks were gold to TV producers and he starred in virtually every big deal television series on TVB. A whole generation of Chinese have grown up knowing Leung as Kit Low on Police Cadet and Siu Bo in Duke of Mount Deer. Leung’s popularity was enormous on the tube and he became one of the biggest stars working on television.
From the beginning, his film work has been carefully considered and, although he’s made over fifty movies, his filmography contains less junk food films than those of many of his peers. He first worked with Derek Yee in The Lunatics (1986) and then with “women’s director” Stanley Kwan on Love Unto Waste (1986), opposite Chow Yun-fat. He won his first award for his performance the following year as a bank robber functioning way out of his depth in Derek Yee’s People’s Hero (1987) and another award two years later for New Wave director, Patrick Tam’s, My Heart is that Eternal Rose (1989). His performance as a mute photographer in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness (1989) brought the first phase of his career to a close. It was here that Leung says he decided to try for an acting style of “no style” having become depressed over how predictable the performances of the fabled ‘70s Method actors were becoming. He wanted to do something new, something that couldn’t be anticipated by the audience. And so his next memorable role lasted about three minutes.
When Wong Kar-wai made his second film, Days of Being Wild (1990), he made too much. The overly ambitious shoot resulted in storylines being dropped and characters being snipped from the film in order to keep the running time below a week. Tony Leung appears only in a cryptic coda, a tiny little vignette that springs up out of nowhere at the end of the film. The movie’s story ends, the film screeches to a halt and there’s Tony, dolling himself up for a night on the town, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip while a cool Latin beat pulses on the soundtrack. Fade to black, roll credits – but the image was an indelible one that stuck in the audience’s mind. His other film in 1990 was John Woo’s Vietnam epic, A Bullet in the Head, and while he didn’t have a lot to do, he again demonstrated that he looked pretty hot in period clothes and Brylcream.
Over the next six years, Leung would turn in a far more accomplished performance in a John Woo film when he played an undercover cop lodged too deeply in a gang to ever get out again in Hard Boiled (1992), and he would virtually become Wong Kar-wai’s alter ego in Chungking Express (1994), Ashes of Time (1994) and Happy Together (1997). He also started a fruitful collaboration with UFO, the United Filmmaker’s Organization. Founded by Peter Chan and Eric Tsang, UFO was a production company that managed to cash in on Hong Kong’s mid-‘90s yuppie zeitgeist with a series of well-made, melancholy romantic comedies. Tony Leung played an idiotic gang member in Days of Being Dumb (1992) and then a crabby realtor who travels back in time to meet his father in He Ain’t Heavy…He’s My Father (1993) (the movies are better than their titles and their loglines).
After appearing as Leslie Cheung’s lover in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, Leung brought it on home, taking his art-film-honed acting style and channeling it into a series of genre films. His performances were so unusual, and so unlike him, that it was like watching a new actor. He played a corrupt cop in the Johnnie To noir The Longest Nite (1997), a gay interior decorator in Jackie Chan’s Gorgeous (1999) and a snappy private eye in Tokyo Raiders (2000). He also appeared in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and, most importantly, in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). Already the winner of eight best actor awards in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Leung received the “Best Actor” award at Cannes for In the Mood for Love, in a career-making moment.
Now back in Hong Kong, Leung continues to mix highbrow films (he’s in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046), high-concept films (INFERNAL AFFAIRS) and mainstream box office hits (Chinese Odyssey 2002). He is one of the only Hong Kong stars not to have a singing career (although he and Andy Lau collaborated on a duet for the soundtrack album of INFERNAL AFFAIRS).
TONY LEUNG INTERVIEW Q: What do you think of this film? A : Infernal Affairs is basically a cops-and-robbers movie, but with additional elements of humanity and romance. What attracted me is not just a single scene, but the entire plot structure. This is the unprecedented A-list production in Hong Kong, and it’s worth checking out.
Q: Describe your character, Yan. A : My character is a guy who’s street-smart, highly adaptive, optimistic and with excellent memory. He didn’t want to join the triads at the beginning, but then he was chosen and really had no choice. Yan didn’t reject his new identity, because he might risk being exposed if he did. A good undercover needs to be completely immersed into character and transform himself into a gangster, so even the real gangsters can’t tell the difference. It’s just like an actor portraying a character. If I don’t even believe in this character, I’ll never be able to act properly. I see Yan as a smart guy, he knows if he has to do it, he has to go all out. That’s how he can survive in the triads.
Q: Do you think what Yan did was worthwhile? A : It’s hard to say if it’s worthwhile, or if he’s smart or simply stupid. He’s very passive in this matter, and not acting of his own free will. He’s simply being forced to do it.
Q: How did you approach this character? A : I rarely analyze my acting, because I always figure it out on location. I’m not a formulaic guy, and the movie sets are always volatile: You can’t predict other cast members’ state of mind, and the director often makes changes on location. So I usually interpret my character on the set, instead of thinking it through beforehand. Things always change accordingly.
Q: How do you feel portraying an undercover cop? A : I’ve actually played an undercover quite a few times. I was an undercover in John Woo’s Hard Boiled, and these roles were usually darker, painful and frustrated. Director Andrew Lau told me to lighten up this time, and be a happier undercover. So this time it’s definitely different.
Q: How does it feel to work with Andy Lau? A : I’ve worked with him in a TV series previously. He’s a really serious actor, and it’s always fun to work with serious actors.
Q: How about Anthony Wong? A : Anthony and I had collaborated in John Woo’s Hard Boiled, we had a lot of scenes together. He’s a professional. We only needed a few rehearsals to know each other’s cues. When dealing with professionals, there’s no need to think about collaboration, because it just happens naturally.
Q: And with Eric Tsang? A : He’s always a trickster on the set, so working with him is always relaxing. He’s really different from other actors, because he tries to lighten up everyone. But his attitude never interferes with work, because we are all professional actors there.
Q: Do you get along with the crew? A : I’ve known most of the crew for more than a decade now, the cinematographer, gaffer, and the props team. We all knew each other when working with director Wong Kar-wai, so there’s no communication problem between us.
Q: This is a 100% local production, how is it different from other co-productions you’ve worked with? A : It definitely feels different when working with different groups of people. Everyone has their own working style. Just like Zhang Yimou’s Hero, the film’s well financed, we had minimal daily workload and always had the best equipment; With Wong Kar-wai, he could shoot a film for four years without a single script. Andrew Lau is a very accurate director, he would accomplish everything in the shortest time, and the end result would vary from others. For a production with a major budget and a short shooting schedule, the final film has a really superb quality.
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LET’S MEET ANTHONY WONG CHAU-SANG Anthony Wong is the angriest (and arguably the most talented) actor in Hong Kong. At some point, Wong has said something nasty about everybody in the Hong Kong film industry. He’s also appeared in over 100 movies, usually playing psychopaths, perverts, villains, corrupt bastards, or just plain old crooks.
Starting at ATV (the rival television station to TVB) at 21, he went on to graduate from the Academy of the Performing Arts, and then appeared in several TV series before hitting films in 1985. He acted in his first big screen role in My Name Ain’t Suzie (1985) playing a half-Chinese, half-Western kid furiously looking for his Anglo father who had abandoned him (a role taken from his own life) and Yes, Madam (1985), with Michelle Yeoh, then he disappeared for five years, before resurfacing in 1990. In 1993, Wong appeared in fifteen motion pictures in roles as varied as a mutant martial arts cannibal; an everyman vigilante carrying out a war on taxi drivers; a crude Mainland cop trailing a serial killer; and, most spectacularly, as a low class restaurant workeserial killer who grinds his victims into human meat roast pork buns. It was this last role, in Untold Story, which won him a deserved “Best Actor” award at the Hong Kong Film Awards. This award, as Wong says, led to, “Not better roles. Worse! All that I am offered are maniac roles.”
But he took them. Wong became recognized as a brilliant actor, who would take any job if the price was right. He would sometimes sleepwalk through his performance, but he would sometimes bring a real taste of fire to it. You couldn’t ever tell what you were going to get, and that was part of the fun. Averaging over ten movies a year, audiences paid attention because they didn’t know what this seemingly insane, decidedly talented, working stiff was going to do next.
An illness in the late ‘90s caused Wong’s career to slow down as he attended to his health, but he was back in the saddle by 1998. That year he did everything: from a critically-praised co-starring performance in Beast Cops, to a cameo in the big-budget blockbuster The Stormriders, to a lead in Untold Story 2, a part in Rape Trap and even a terrific comic performance in Mr. Wai Go, where he plays a porn star unable to maintain an erection unless he can watch his wife do housework.
Anthony Wong has become a Hong Kong institution, and his name has become shorthand for a certain kind of film: cheap, potentially sleazy, but for all its faults containing something worth watching. He continues to cover new ground, and his performances in The Mission (1999), Just One Look (2002), and INFERNAL AFFAIRS see him at the peak of his abilities.
INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY WONG Q: Could you describe your character, Superintendent Wong? A: Wong is a veteran cop who draws a clear line between black and white. He is calm and patient, and has to take things step by step. You get to know him through his dialogue.
Q: Do you believe in the thin line between good and evil? How do you draw the line yourself? A: It all depends on what you do. For example, the term “bravery” not only applies to the life-saving firemen, but also a scheming, gun-trotting robber. So it’s what we do that draws the line.
Q: How do you evaluate Wong’s action? Do you find him dedicated to his job, or simply manipulative? A: Everyone has a different working environment. Wong is simply doing his job, but because of his job nature, he has to be punished. It’s like the firemen in the 9/11 incident. When they walked into the World Trade Center, they never expected they would die there. Yet their professionalism had urged them to their deaths. Therefore, Wong is basically a man dedicated to his job.
Q: Would you acknowledge people like Wong? A: I believe anything illegal is against the law. It’s simple as that. It is hard to explain a philosophical question like this. But simply put, it’s a matter of perspective.
Q: How does Wong protect himself from everything around him? A: He doesn’t try to protect himself deliberately. He simply goes to work and performs all his duties, and there is nobody in the film to compete against. Therefore, he never treats this as a dangerous job, and there is no need for protection.
Q: Infernal Affairs is obviously a very masculine film. Do you think it can appeal to the Greater China market? A: With an A-grade production and a cast of four award-winning actors, I believe different regions in the Greater China would perceive this film differently. The Hong Kong audience may watch this film because it’s gimmicky. I’m not familiar with the Taiwanese market, but I feel the audience there isn’t interested in any film. The Mainlanders would watch it from a cultural perspective, an interesting discovery I’ve recently read on a magazine. Taiwan’s film culture is a closed one, yet the Mainland’s is much more accessible. The audience pool is huge and their standards are much higher, almost the same as the U.S. [NOTE: This answer is a bit fraught. Hong Kong actors who appeared in Taiwanese films in the ‘90s ran the risk of being blacklisted, hence Wong’s bad-mouthing of the Taiwanese market. In 2002, when this interview was conducted, Mainland China was the market of the future, and he would go on to make a lot of money there. However, after the 2016 Umbrella Revolution, Wong would speak out against the police and the Mainland and he would be subsequently blacklisted, along with Chow Yun-fat.]
Q: Which scene is your favorite? A: All of them, actually. That’s because my scenes are relatively less than the others, so I cherish every scene in the film.
Q: Do you find it challenging to work with three award-winning actors together? A: “Award-winning actor” is simply an identity. I treat all of them like I used to, and I treat other distinguished actors like award winners too. The point is, I see acting as my job, and I believe they all feel the same way.
Q: What should the audience expect in Infernal Affairs? A: They should be watching a great film in an exhilarating mood. Movie-going should be a joyous experience. Let the audience witness how the actors go against one another in every scene. And most of all, who will survive at the end.

New Releases for April 2022

Data courtesy http://www.bookreporter.com
For more discussion, see the monthly New Releases post.

Title	Author	ReleaseDate
Autobiography
Easy Beauty	Chloé Cooper Jones	April 5, 2022
Bomb Shelter	Mary Laura Philpott	April 12, 2022
Gathering Blossoms Under Fire	Alice Walker	April 12, 2022
Healing	Theresa Brown	April 12, 2022
Hello, Molly!	Molly Shannon	April 12, 2022
Left on Tenth	Delia Ephron	April 12, 2022
Tasha	Brian Morton	April 12, 2022
Finding Me	Viola Davis	April 26, 2022
I'll Show Myself Out	Jessi Klein	April 26, 2022
The Puzzler	A.J. Jacobs	April 26, 2022
Where the Children Take Us	Zain E. Asher	April 26, 2022
Three Dreamers	Lorenzo Carcaterra	April 26, 2022
Biography
True	Kostya Kennedy	April 12, 2022
The Palace Papers	Tina Brown	April 26, 2022
Crime
Unmasked	Paul Holes	April 26, 2022
Fantasy
Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments	T.L. Huchu	April 5, 2022
A Tiny Upward Shove	Melissa Chadburn	April 12, 2022
Unlikely Animals	Annie Hartnett	April 12, 2022
Fevered Star	Rebecca Roanhorse	April 19, 2022
Spear	Nicola Griffith	April 19, 2022
Kaikeyi	Vaishnavi Patel	April 26, 2022
Nettle & Bone	T. Kingfisher	April 26, 2022
The Discord of Gods	Jenn Lyons	April 26, 2022
Fiction
Delphine Jones Takes a Chance	Beth Morrey	April 5, 2022
Let's Not Do That Again	Grant Ginder	April 5, 2022
Once a Thief	Christopher Reich	April 5, 2022
The Wise Women	Gina Sorell	April 5, 2022
True Biz	Sara Nović	April 5, 2022
Nobody Gets Out Alive	Leigh Newman	April 12, 2022
The Patron Saint of Second Chances	Christine Simon	April 12, 2022
Lucky Turtle	Bill Roorbach	April 26, 2022
Marrying the Ketchups	Jennifer Close	April 26, 2022
Search	Michelle Huneven	April 26, 2022
Historical Fiction
Atomic Anna	Rachel Barenbaum	April 5, 2022
Lessons in Chemistry	Bonnie Garmus	April 5, 2022
Little Foxes Took Up Matches	Katya Kazbek	April 5, 2022
Memphis	Tara M. Stringfellow	April 5, 2022
Shadows of Berlin	David R. Gillham	April 5, 2022
Sister Stardust	Jane Green	April 5, 2022
The Master Craftsman	Kelli Stuart	April 5, 2022
Activities of Daily Living	Lisa Hsiao Chen	April 12, 2022
Last Dance on the Starlight Pier	Sarah Bird	April 12, 2022
Mrs. England	Stacey Halls	April 12, 2022
Take My Hand	Dolen Perkins-Valdez	April 12, 2022
Forbidden City	Vanessa Hua	April 19, 2022
Wingwalkers	Taylor Brown	April 19, 2022
Little Souls	Sandra Dallas	April 26, 2022
History
Adriatic	Robert D. Kaplan	April 12, 2022
Black Ghost of Empire	Kris Manjapra	April 19, 2022
The Great Stewardess Rebellion	Nell McShane Wulfhart	April 19, 2022
Horror
Passersthrough	Peter Rock	April 19, 2022
The Children on the Hill	Jennifer McMahon	April 26, 2022
The Fervor	Alma Katsu	April 26, 2022
Literature
Post-Traumatic	Chantal V. Johnson	April 5, 2022
Mystery
Cover Story	Susan Rigetti	April 5, 2022
The Return of Faraz Ali	Aamina Ahmad	April 5, 2022
The Shadow House	Anna Downes	April 5, 2022
The Younger Wife	Sally Hepworth	April 5, 2022
The Investigator	John Sandford	April 12, 2022
The Sacred Bridge	Anne Hillerman	April 12, 2022
Three Debts Paid	Anne Perry	April 12, 2022
Dream Town	David Baldacci	April 19, 2022
Pay Dirt Road	Samantha Jayne Allen	April 19, 2022
The Wrong Victim	Allison Brennan	April 26, 2022
When We Fell Apart	Soon Wiley	April 26, 2022
Nonfiction
Write for Your Life	Anna Quindlen	April 12, 2022
Loving Edie	Meredith May	April 19, 2022
Tiger & Phil	Bob Harig	April 26, 2022
Poetry
Time Is a Mother	Ocean Vuong	April 5, 2022
In a Time of Distance	Alexander McCall Smith	April 12, 2022
Romance
Fool Me Once	Ashley Winstead	April 5, 2022
Lost and Found in Paris	Lian Dolan	April 5, 2022
A Family Affair	Robyn Carr	April 5, 2022
Young Mungo	Douglas Stuart	April 5, 2022
Summer at the Cape	RaeAnne Thayne	April 12, 2022
The No-Show	Beth O'Leary	April 12, 2022
Part of Your World	Abby Jimenez	April 19, 2022
Everything Must Go	Camille Pagán	April 26, 2022
Science Fiction
Sea of Tranquility	Emily St. John Mandel	April 5, 2022
The Candy House	Jennifer Egan	April 5, 2022
End of the World House	Adrienne Celt	April 19, 2022
Short Stories
Heartbroke	Chelsea Bieker	April 5, 2022
Crime Hits Home	S.J. Rozan	April 19, 2022
Maria, Maria	Marytza K. Rubio	April 26, 2022
Thriller
Crimson Summer	Heather Graham	April 5, 2022
Paradise Cove	Davin Goodwin	April 5, 2022
The Echo Man	Sam Holland	April 5, 2022
The Darkest Game	Joseph Schneider	April 5, 2022
Insomnia	Sarah Pinborough	April 12, 2022
The New Neighbor	Carter Wilson	April 12, 2022
Blood Sugar	Sascha Rothchild	April 19, 2022
Kingdom of Bones	James Rollins	April 19, 2022
An Honest Lie	Tarryn Fisher	April 26, 2022
I'll Be You	Janelle Brown	April 26, 2022
Blood Will Tell	Heather Chavez	April 26, 2022
City on Fire	Don Winslow	April 26, 2022
Unknown
Elizabeth Margaret	Andrew Morton	April 5, 2022
Poppy in the Wild	Teresa J. Rhyne	April 5, 2022
Raising the Bar	Ruth Rymer	April 5, 2022
Robert Ludlum's the Treadstone Transgression	Joshua Hood	April 5, 2022
School Days	Jonathan Galassi	April 5, 2022
The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames	Justine Cowan	April 5, 2022
The Prodigal Daughter	Mette Ivie Harrison	April 12, 2022
Death with a Double Edge	Anne Perry	April 12, 2022
To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth	Phil Keith	April 12, 2022
Death of the Black Widow	James Patterson	April 19, 2022
Pesticide	Kim Hays	April 19, 2022
Better Off Dead	Lee Child	April 26, 2022
Class ACT	Stuart Woods	April 26, 2022
Chosen	Stephen Mills	April 26, 2022

Jam Hsiao - Quarantine 2827 Hotel Room CD 2021
蕭敬騰 - 隔離套房 2827 CD 2021
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金曲歌王蕭敬騰全新專輯
隔離套房2827
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隔 離 套 房 內 的 音 樂 大 宇 宙
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一場疫情打亂了全世界人類的生活，連最基本的外出都變得奢侈
在不同的城市小幅度的移動、連帶的隔離生活成為了人們的日常
蕭敬騰就在這樣的反覆隔離生活中催生了他的全新專輯
從歌曲創作、MV發想、專輯製作、視覺創意
都在這個房號為2827的隔離套房中完成
這是一段特別的旅程
特地用<隔離套房2827> 做為專輯名稱
記錄下這特殊的時刻
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蕭敬騰 隔離套房2827
 精裝專輯全台限量發行 (流水編號)
數位時代的實體珍藏
有些東西還是拿在手上才會具有溫度
限量精裝的實體專輯讓人不忘記拿起CD的那份悸動與喜悅
​
 內附蕭敬騰個人首發珍稀明星卡(一套八張)
世界級卡片玩家的交易戰場
玩卡、拆卡、收藏、交流 創造每一張卡片的珍貴之處
蕭敬騰親自參與挑片設計，隨專輯附贈蕭敬騰個人首發珍稀明星卡
隨機封入蕭敬騰親筆簽名卡，拆卡後簽名卡幸運得主可能就是你
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專輯共8首歌曲
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1. 嗨WAY (HIGH WAY ) feat.吉克雋逸
   
2. 銀河星艦 (Quest For Hope)
   
3. 薩哈星球 (SA-HAH)
   
4. 彼得潘 (Peter Pan)
   
5. 燈絲裡 (Nowhere To Hide)
   
6. 最最愛 (My One and Only)
   
7. 同情情敵 (Sympathizing with My Love Rival)
   
8. 已讀不回94我 (Leave You On Read)
   

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Release Date: 23 Dec 2021
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#隔離套房_2827
#蕭敬騰
#Jam_Hsiao

I'm going to start posting some readings for more in-depth discussion of the foundations of vegan ethics. The goal will be to decide ahead of time what to paper read and then break the paper down into a series of bite-sized posts for discussion. Before this grand notion can take off, I would like to compile a list of papers that would be interesting.
Here's the list so far:
Alastair Norcross: PUPPIES, PIGS, AND PEOPLE: EATING MEAT AND MARGINAL CASES. I like this one as a general overview of the vegan debate. Honestly about 90% of the arguments on the sub are covered in this paper.
Thomas Nagel: What Is It Like to Be a Bat?. A classic article on how we should regard consciousness in others that may be quite different from humans.
Tom Regan: The Case for Animal Rights. A summary of an argument for a rights-based approach to treating animals as opposed to say a welfare-based approach.
Christine M. Korsgaard: Kant's Formula of Humanity A brief and much less opaque summary of Kant's argument that morality should focus on Humanity and other possible human-like rational beings.
Tim Hsiao: Industrial Farming is Not Cruel to Animals. Apparently this argues that farming animals is more of an emotional concern than a rigorous objective ethical matter. I'll see if I can find a proper free and open download of this or any of Hsaio's other papers on the topic.
I would like to see if anyone else has recommendations that are easily available for download. I'm aiming for "short" articles of 10-30 pages that cover a diversity of ideas and sub-topics. In particular I'm looking for a decent source of something by Peter Singer and also more broadly any somewhat rigorous defenses of the current (or idealized) system of animal agriculture. I'm also interested in any good, brief and canonical articles on "sentience" in a philosophical or scientific perspective.
Also, if anyone has strong opinions on which ones to start with, I'd be glad to hear them.

1 April TBC
2 April Pusher Nicolas Winding Refn Pusher Trilogy
3 April Malmkrog Cristi Puiu MUBI Spotlight
4 April Rules Don't Apply Warren Beatty
5 April Donnie Darko Richard Kelly
6 April Black Pond Jessica Sarah Rinland
7 April Those That, At A Distance, Resemble Another Jessica Sarah Rinland
8 April Don't Cry, Pretty Girls! Márta Mészáros Independent Women: The Pioneering Cinema of Márta Mészáros
9 April Songs My Brothers Taught Me Chloé Zhao
10 April With Blood on My Hands: Pusher II Nicolas Winding Refn Pusher Trilogy
11 April Punishment Park Peter Watkins Dystopia
12 April IWOW: I Walk on Water Khalik Allah MUBI Spotlight
13 April Cuatro Paredes Matthew Porterfield Brief Encounters
14 April Daughter of the Nile Hou Hsiao-Hsien Hou Hsiao-Hsien Focus
15 April Death in the Garden Luis Buñuel
16 April I'm the Angel of Death: Pusher III Nicolas Winding Refn Pusher Trilogy
17 April Ghosts Azra Deniz Okyay Viewfinder
18 April This Boy's Life Michael Caton-Jones
19 April Compliance Craig Zobel
20 April Red Moon Tide Lois Patiño The New Auteurs
21 April Nine Months Márta Mészáros Independent Women: The Pioneering Cinema of Márta Mészáros
22 April Cruel Story of Youth Nagisa Ôshima
23 April Brazil Terry Gilliam Dystopia
24 April L.A. Confidential Curtis Hanson
25 April The Revenant Alejandro González Iñárritu
26 April Touchez Pas Au Grisbi Jacques Becker
27 April Labyrinth of Cinema Nobuhiko Obayashi Luminaries
28 April The Reunion Anna Odell Double Bill: Anna Odell
29 April X&Y Anna Odell Double Bill: Anna Odell
30 April Krisha Trey Edward Shults

I was never happy with existing top lists. IMDb is too much about popularity, mubi however can be too elitist when it comes to popular films. In my opinion, that is. So what if you combine the platforms to create a "Canon" made by the Internet?
As of now, I calculated the average of 744 directors.
How: The average of mubi, IMDb and letterboxd, but only the best five. For every film depending on its rating, the average got some points plus (6.6-7.4: +0.005, 7.6-8.4: +0.01 etc.. And some other minor things like each short film rated 7.6+ gets 0.1.
Why five films? For many reasons; mainly that there are many directors who made tons of films for financial reasons and some truly for art's sake, or just were not liked many times, and the purpose here is not to observe them at their worst, but at their best.
I made it for directors, but simultaneously made a list with the best rated films (in the top ten are Godfather, Harakiri, Godfather 2, The Human Condition 3, Seven Samurai, Pulp Fiction, Satantango, 12 Angry Men, The Shawshank Redemption, Come and See).
Anyway: Here it is. It can never be completed, but I think it's a great orientation.
I also included their respective best rated film.
​

1. 8.99: Akira Kurosawa------Seven Samurai (1954)
2. 8.98: Masaki Kobayashi------Harakiri (1962)
3. 8.94: Satyajit Ray------Pather Panchali (1955)
4. 8.89: Alfred Hitchcock------Vertigo (1958)
5. 8.85: Ingmar Bergman------Fanny and Alexander (1983)
6. 8.82: Charlie Chaplin------Modern Times (1936)
7. 8.80: Stanley Kubrick------2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
8. 8.79: Krzysztof Kieslowski------A Short Film About Love (1989)
9. 8.79: Yasujiro Ozu------Tokyo Story (1953)
10. 8.78: Hayao Miyazaki------Spirited Away (2001)
11. 8.78: Kenji Mizoguchi------Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
12. 8.72: Andrei Tarkovsky------Stalker (1979)
13. 8.69: Buster Keaton------Sherlock Jr. (1924)
14. 8.67: Fritz Lang------M (1931)
15. 8.64: Billy Wilder------Sunset Blvd. (1950)
16. 8.61: Francis Ford Coppola------The Godfather (1972)
17. 8.60: Mikio Naruse------Yearning (1964)
18. 8.53: Martin Scorsese------Taxi Driver (1976)
19. 8.52: Luis Bunuel------The Young and the Damned (1950)
20. 8.52: Sergio Leone------The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
21. 8.51: Federico Fellini------8 1/2 (1963)
22. 8.51: Robert Bresson------A Man Escaped (1956)
23. 8.49: Abbas Kiarostami------Close-Up (1990)
24. 8.49: Lee Unkrich------Toy Story 3 (2010)
25. 8.48: Edward Yang------A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
26. 8.44: Rainer Werner Fassbinder---Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
27. 8.44: Quentin Tarantino------Pulp Fiction (1994)
28. 8.43: Satoshi Kon------Perfect Blue (1997)
29. 8.42: Carl Theodor Dreyer------Ordet (1955)
30. 8.42: Sohrab Shahid Saless------Roses for Africa (1991)
31. 8.41: John Ford------The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
32. 8.40: Tengiz Abuladze------The Wishing Tree (1976)
33. 8.40: F. W. Murnau------Sunrise (1927)
34. 8.40: Sidney Lumet------12 Angry Men (1957)
35. 8.39: David Lynch------Twin Peaks (1990)
36. 8.38: Ernst Lubitsch------To Be or Not To Be (1942)
37. 8.38: Orson Welles------Citizen Kane (1941)
38. 8.37: Christopher Nolan------The Dark Knight (2008)
39. 8.37: Jean-Pierre Melville------Army of Shadows (1969)
40. 8.37: Vicco von Bülow------Loriot (1976)
41. 8.37: Chuck Jones------The Phantom Tollbooth (1970)
42. 8.36: Michael Powell------The Red Shoes (1948)
43. 8.35: Kaneto Shindô------The Naked Island (1960)
44. 8.35: Béla Tarr------Sátántangó (1994)
45. 8.35: Pelin Esmer------Something Useful (2017)
46. 8.35: Shyam Benegal------The Seventh Horse of the Sun (1992)
47. 8.31: Louis Malle------Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)
48. 8.31: Charles Laughton------The Night of the Hunter (1955)
49. 8.30: David Lean------Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
50. 8.30: John Cassavetes------A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
51. 8.29: Theodorus Angelopoulos------The Travelling Players (1964)
52. 8.29: Howard Hawks------Rio Bravo (1959)
53. 8.29: Masaaki Yuasa------Ping Pong the Animation (2013)
54. 8.28: Jacques Rivette------Out 1 (1971)
55. 8.28: Tomu Uchida------A Fugitive from the Past (1965)
56. 8.27: Steven Spielberg------Schindler's List (1993)
57. 8.27: Frank Capra------It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
58. 8.27: Emeric Pressburger------The Red Shoes (1948)
59. 8.27: Jean Vigo------L'Atalante (1934)
60. 8.26: Isao Takahata------Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
61. 8.26: Mike Leigh------Secrets & Lies (1996)
62. 8.26: Francois Truffaut------The 400 Blows (1959)
63. 8.26: Ken Loach------Days of Hope (1975)
64. 8.26: Yôji Yamada------When Spring Comes Late (1970)
65. 8.25: Luchino Visconti------Rocco and His Brothers (1960)
66. 8.25: Elia Kazan------A Face in the Crowd (1957)
67. 8.25: Frantisek Vlácil------Marketa Lazarova (1967)
68. 8.25: Jean Renoir------Grand Illusion (1937)
69. 8.24: Roman Polanski------Chinatown (1974)
70. 8.24: Michelangelo Antonioni------La Notte (1961)
71. 8.24: Edgar Reitz------Heimat (1992)
72. 8.24: Hrishikesh Mukherjee------Gol Maal (1979)
73. 8.23: Vittorio De Sica------Bicycle Thieves (1948)
74. 8.23: Jean-Luc Godard------Vivre Sa Lie (1962)
75. 8.23: Hirokazu Koreeda------Nobody Knows (2004)
76. 8.23: Milos Forman------One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
77. 8.23: Agnès Varda------Jacquot (1991)
78. 8.23: Franco Piavoli------Voices Through Time (1996)
79. 8.22: Wim Wenders------Paris, Texas (1984)
80. 8.21: Sergei M. Eistenstein------Ivan the Terrible (1948)
81. 8.20: Woody Allen------Annie Hall (1977)
82. 8.19: Henri-Georges Clouzot------The Wages of Fear (1953)
83. 8.19: William Wyler------The Heiress (1949)
84. 8.18: Coen Brothers-----No Country for Old Men (2007)
85. 8.18: Alain Resnais------Last Night in Marienbad (1961)
86. 8.18: Lucian Pintilie------Tree of Hope (1992)
87. 8.18: Chantal Akerman------Jeanne Dielman (1975)
88. 8.17: Wong Kar-Wai------In the Mood for Love (2000)
89. 8.17: Werner Herzog------Fitzcarraldo (1982)
90. 8.17: Nuri Bilge Ceylan------Winter Sleep (2014)
91. 8.17: Tomm Moore------Song of the Sea (2014)
92. 8.17: Mario Monicelli------The Great War (1959)
93. 8.16: Joseph L. Mankiewicz------All About Eve (1950)
94. 8.16: Don Hertzfeldt------It's Such a Beautiful Day (2011)
95. 8.15: Hou Hsiao-hsien------A City of Sadness (1989)
96. 8.15: Lav Diaz------Evolution of a Filipino Family (2005)
97. 8.15: Pier Paolo Pasolini------Mamma Roma (1962)
98. 8.15: Roberto Rosselini------Rom, Open City (1945)
99. 8.15: Marcell Jankovics------Son of the White Mare (1981)
100. 8.15: Hideaki Anno------Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)
101. 8.15: Victor Sjöström------The Wind (1928)
102. 8.14: David Fincher------Fight Club (1999)
103. 8.14: Eric Rohmer------My Night at Maud's (1969)
104. 8.14: Leonid Gaidai------Operation 'Y' & Other Shurik's Adventures (1965)
105. 8.14: Emir Kusturica------Time of the Gypsies (1988)
106. 8.14: Marcel Carné------Children of Paradise (1945)
107. 8.13: Shôhei Imamura------Profound Desires of the Gods (1968)
108. 8.13: Michael Haneke------Amour (2012)
109. 8.12: Yimou Zhang------Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
110. 8.12: Armando Iannucci------The Thick of It (2005)
111. 8.11: Peter Jackson------The Lord of the Rings III (2003)
112. 8.11: Lars von Trier------The Kingdom (1994)
113. 8.11: Andrzej Wadja------Kanal (1957)
114. 8.11: Jacques Becker------Le Trou (1960)
115. 8.11: Robert Altman------3 Women (1977)
116. 8.11: Keisuke Kinoshita------Twenty-Four Eyes (1954)
117. 8.11: Abel Gance------Napoleon (1927)
118. 8.10: Paul Thomas Anderson------There Will Be Blood (2007)
119. 8.10: John Huston------The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
120. 8.10: Pete Docter------Up (2009)
121. 8.10: King Vidor------ThevCrowd (1928)
122. 8.10: Nicholas Ray------In a Lonely Place (1950)
123. 8.09: Max Ophüls------The Earrings of Madame De... (1953)
124. 8.09: Julien Duvivier------The End of the Day (1939)
125. 8.09: Shane Meadows------This Is England '88 (2011)
126. 8.09: Kleber Mendonca Filho------Bacurau (2019)
127. 8.09: Goran Markovic------National Class Category Up to 875 Ccm (1979)
128. 8.08: Wes Anderson------The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
129. 8.08: Kon Ichikawa------Fires on the Plain (1959)
130. 8.08: Leo McCarey------Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
131. 8.08: Josef von Sternberg------The Last Command (1928)
132. 8.07: Karel Kachyna------Carriage to Vienna (1966)
133. 8.07: Ritwik Ghatak------The Cloud-Capped Star (1960)
134. 8.06: Lee Chang-dong------Oasis (2002)
135. 8.05: Bong Joon-ho------Parasite (2019)
136. 8.05: Elem Klimow------Come and See (1985)
137. 8.04: Yavuz Turgul------Mr. Muhsin (1987)
138. 8.04: Frank Borzage------Lucky Star (1929)
139. 8.03: Pedro Almodóvar------Pain and Glory (2019)
140. 8.03: Michael Curtiz------Casablanca (1942)
141. 8.03: Elio Petri------Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)
142. 8.03: Raoul Walsh------White Heat (1949)
143. 8.03: Ermanno Olmi------Il Posto (1961)
144. 8.02: Tsai Ming-liang------The Hole (1998)
145. 8.01: George Cukor------Philadelphia Story (1940)
146. 8.01: William A. Wellman------The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)
147. 8.00: Jim Jarmusch------Down by Law (1986)
148. 8.00: Asghar Farhadi------A Separation (2011)
149. 8.00: Jacques Tati------Playtime (1967)
150. 8.00: Jules Dassin------Rififi (1955)
151. 8.00: Michail Kalatosov------I am Cuba (1964)
152. 7.99: Park Chan-wook------Oldboy (2003)
153. 7.99: Denis Villeneuve------Incendies (2010)
154. 7.99: Mike Nichols------Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
155. 7.99: Preston Sturges------Sullivan's Travels (1941)
156. 7.98: Mihalis Kakogiannis------Stella (1955)
157. 7.98: John Frankenheimer------Seconds (1966)
158. 7.97: Manoel de Oliveira------Amor de Perdicao (1979)
159. 7.96: Wojciech Has------The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)
160. 7.96: Richard Linklater------Before Sunrise (1995)
161. 7.96: Majid Majidi------The Color of Paradise (1999)
162. 7.96: Maurice Pialat------The House in the Woods (1971)
163. 7.96: Carlos Saura------Cría Cuervos (1976)
164. 8.96: Nikita Mikhalkov------Burnt by the Sun (1994)
165. 7.95: Aki Kaurismäki------La Vie de Bohème (1992)
166. 7.94: Costa-Gavras------Z (1969)
167. 7.94: Joseph Losey------The Servant (1963)
168. 7.94: Jean Cocteau------Orpheus (1950)
169. 7.94: John Schlesinger------An Englishman Abroad (1983)
170. 7.94: Mervyn LeRoy------I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
171. 7.92: Alfonso Cuarón------Roma (2018)
172. 7.92: Terry Gilliam------Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
173. 7.92: Georg Wilhelm Pabst------Pandora's Box (1929)
174. 7.91: Edgar Wright------Spaced (1999)
175. 7.91: Takeshi Kitano------Fireworks (1997)
176. 7.91: Mamoru Oshii------Ghost in the Shell (1995)
177. 7.91: Andrey Zvyagintsev------The Return (2003)
178. 7.91: Hiroshi Teshigahara------Woman in the Dunes (1964)
179. 7.91: Kenji Misumi------Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (1972)
180. 7.91: Yasuzo Masumura------Red Angel (1966)
181. 7.90: Peter Bogdanovich------Paper Moon (1973)
182. 7.90: Aleksandr Sokurov------Elegy of a Voyage (2001)
183. 7.90: Wolfgang Staudte------The Seawolfs (1971)
184. 7.89: Clint Eastwood------Unforgiven (1992)
185. 7.89: Otto Preminger------Laura (1944)
186. 7.89: Ken Russell------The Devils (1971)
187. 7.88: René Clement------Forbidden Games (1952)
188. 7.88: Pietro Germi------Divorce Italian Style (1961)
189. 7.87: King Hu------A Touch of Zen (1971)
190. 7.87: Sergei Parajanov------Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965)
191. 7.87: Carol Reed------The Third Man (1949)
192. 7.87: Bob Fosse------Liza with a Z (1972)
193. 7.87: Vincente Minnelli------The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
194. 7.87: Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar------Ernest & Celestine (2012)
195. 7.87: Ousmane Sembene------Moolaadé (2004)
196. 7.86: Paolo Sorrentino------The Young Pope (2016)
197. 7.86: Pedro Costa------In Vanda's Room (2000)
198. 7.85: Ridley Scott------Alien (1979)
199. 7.85: Yûzô Kawashima------Suzaki Paradise (1956)
200. 7.85: Michel Ocelot------Kirikou and the Sorcereress (1998)

I was going through Bluray.com database under Criterion and I've found some titles listed as Criterion releases that have yet to be announced. I remember a decade ago in high school always checking their site and looking through Criterion releases to find titles yet to be announced.
Thank you and Good Night (1991 Jan Oxenberg)
The Learning Tree (1969 Gordon Parks)
Welcome ll the Terrordome (1995 Ngozi Onwurah)
Ikarie XB 1 (1963 Jindrich Polak)
4 Little Girls and She's Gotta Have it (1997 and 1986 Spike Lee)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999 Stanley Kubrick)
More and The Valley (1969 and 1972 Barbet Schroeder)
Atlantics (2019 Mati Diop)
American Factory (2019 Steven Bognar & Julia Reichert)
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003 Jim Jarmusch)
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001 Coen Bros)
Flowers of Shanghai (1998 House Hsiao-hsien)
King Lear (1987 Jean-Luc Godard)
Trouble in Paradise (1932 Ernst Lubitsch)
Mr. Klein (1976 Joesph Losey)
California Split (1974 Robert Altman)
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989 Peter Greenaway)
Rodan (1956 Ishiro Honda)
The Grandmaster, The Hand, and My Blueberry Nights (2013, 2004, 2007 Wong Kar-wai)
​
EDIT if you want to look yourself. I always sort by release date in descending order and then pages 1-20 will have the titles I've listed above: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movies.php?studioid=70

So, we make it to the 2000’s, probably my vote as greatest decade of cinema. There are great blockbusters, indies, foreign films, English language, big, small, and everything in between. Even though I made a top 50 list, there were still a couple of 10/10’s that I had to cut (I’m sorry, When the Levees Broke) which hasn’t happened with other decades. What do you think of the 2000’s, FG? What does your list look like? Let’s discuss!

1. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron), 2006
   
2. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro), 2006
   
3. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe), 2000
   
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry), 2004
   
5. High Fidelity (Stephen Frears), 2000
   
6. Wall-E (Andrew Stanton), 2008
   
7. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh), 2008
   
8. The Incredibles (Brad Bird), 2004
   
9. Ratatouille (Brad Bird), 2007
   
10. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar), 2002
    
11. No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers), 2007
    
12. Adventureland (Greg Mottola), 2009
    
13. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater), 2004
    
14. Take Care of My Cat (Jae-eun Jeong), 2001
    
15. 5 Centimeters Per Second (Makoto Shinkai), 2007
    
16. Yi Yi (Edward Yang), 2000
    
17. Superbad (Greg Mottola), 2007
    
18. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien), 2005
    
19. The Aviator (Martin Scorsese), 2004
    
20. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (Ki-duk Kim), 2003
    
21. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki), 2001
    
22. Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan), 2000
    
23. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan), 2008
    
24. Once (John Carney), 2007
    
25. Lost in Translation (Sophia Coppola), 2003
    
26. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir), 2003
    
27. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg), 2007
    
28. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (Terry Gilliam), 2009
    
29. Mulholland Dr (David Lynch), 2001
    
30. Katyn (Andrzej Wajda), 2007
    
31. Zodiac (David Fincher), 2007
    
32. Munich (Steven Spielberg), 2005
    
33. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel), 2007
    
34. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), 2008
    
35. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg), 2005
    
36. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee), 2005
    
37. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson), 2001
    
38. Whale Rider (Niki Caro), 2002
    
39. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet), 2007
    
40. Coraline (Henry Selick), 2009
    
41. Moolaade (Ousmane Sembene), 2004
    
42. The Invention of Lying (Ricky Gervais, Matthew Robinson), 2009
    
43. Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog), 2007
    
44. The Pianist (Roman Polanski), 2002
    
45. Sideways (Alexander Payne), 2004
    
46. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Nick Park, Steve Box), 2005
    
47. Adaptation. (Spike Jonze), 2004
    
48. Shattered Glass (Billy Ray), 2003
    
49. Good Night and Good Luck (George Clooney), 2005
    
50. Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald), 2003
    

And I decided to break off into their own little section, some of the phenomenal short films I saw from the decade:

1. Plastic Bag (Ramin Bahrani), 2009
   
2. Validation (Kurt Kuenne), 2007
   
3. Alma (Rodrigo Blaas), 2009
   
4. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (Joss Whedon), 2008
   
5. Father and Daughter (Michael Dudok de Wit), 2000
   
6. A Matter of Loaf and Death (Nick Park), 2008
   
7. Presto (Doug Sweetland), 2008
   

What does your list look like, FG?

I posted this last year, too, got 2 for 10 from my list last year (Agnes Varda and Martin Scorsese). You can post directors that are already in the collection or ones that aren't, and you can order them by preference or not. Here are mine.
Hirokazu Kore-eda
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Yasujiro Ozu
Peter Bogdanovic
James Ivory
Roy Andersson
John Ford
Orson Welles
Coen Bros
Sammo Hung