Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness (2019)

There really is a tv show, apparently, televised in Iran in which criminals get a chance on camera to be forgiven for transgressions sometimes as serious as murder, and this movie takes that concept as its basis and tells the story of Anar, a young woman seeking mass public forgiveness for murder - a bit melodramatic for me, but thriller-like tension arises from the fact the young woman is not as contrite about the crime as the show producers and the murdered man's wife would like.

★★★☆☆

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八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) ('Village of Eight Graves') (1977)

Author Seishi Yokomizo's convoluted mystery has thankfully been trimmed of several characters and the action streamlined in this ripper adaptation of his book, which connects sixteenth-century feudal events in Japan to a modern-day Japanese murder mystery in the village of Yatsuhakamura (Village of Eight Graves) and, though a mystery, it enthusiastically embraces horror — the body count is exorbitant, there's a chilling link to the real-life 1938 Tsuyama incident, and scenes of maniacal villains chasing victims through labyrinthine limestone caves amid ghastly 70s giallo stylings.

★★★★☆

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Your Name (君の名は) (きみのなは) (2016)

Japan's second highest grossing film of all time, this 2016 animated feature has a mindboggling story told especially mindbogglingly with the main characters, highschoolers Taki and Mitsuha, frequently swapping bodies and the action switching from past to present and back again, so it can be hard to know scene by scene who is who and when is when, but the animation is so spectacular, it doesn't matter — you are probaby going to be happy to marvel at the images all again to iron out in your mind the intricacies of the Back To The Future time travel slash Freaky Friday body swap plot.

★★★★☆

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You Were Never Really Here (2017)

This is just another one of those Taken, "don't worry, honey, I'm coming for you" thrillers where a father figure takes on criminals to emancipate a girl from unspeakable horror (child sex slavery), but unlike others, this one doesn't just focus on the sheer violent spectacle of the father's revenge spree but develops the psychology of the protagonist, Joe, played by the wonderful Joaquin Phoenix, whose backstory of childhood trauma, unhealthy coping mechanisms and palliative care affords the derivative story a bit more poetry, dreaminess, lyricism and theatricality.

★★★☆☆

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You're Next (2011)

There's a couple of lines at the start that sound like clues suggesting this might be something more than a mere home invasion slasher — perhaps an And Then There Were None-style mystery where family members gathered in a sprawling mansion are picked off one-by-bloody-one by a Mx X  — but the leaden dialogue never lets up, the acting remains wooden, we never feel even remotely interested in the victims, and as the body count increases without there being anything clever whatsoever in the bloodletting, you'll stop wondering which one of the dead might actually still be alive and abandon hopes for a sensible twist — that the heroine is in on it or that it is Muffy or Buffy's April Fool's Day prank — in the knowledge this 2011 movie is in fact just a low-budget and unimaginative home invasion slasher, nothing more.

★★☆☆☆

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You Only Live Twice (1967)

A shuttlejacking creates tension between world superpowers and unfortunately Sean Connery's James Bond has been shot dead, bundled up like an Egyptian mummy and buried at sea, but his death is all just a cunning ruse to allow the spy to secretly follow up leads in Japan where for the first time Blofeld shows his face and, thanks to an especially sleazy screenplay by Roald Dahl, 007 experiences all of the oriental delights the Land of the Rising Sun has to offer, including betrothal to a woman, Kissy Suzuki, who spends most of her time in a wet bikini.

★★☆☆☆

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You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Woody Allen movies, and perhaps especially his romantic comedies with their thrown-together ensemble casts, ad-libbed dialogue, seemingly made-up-on-the-spot characters, and voiceover narrations of questionnable value, can give the impression the director isn't even trying, and so it is here in this romantic comedy which in its first half rambles breezily on about the love lives of seven or eight Londoners, appears to jump the shark in the middle with a sudden 'plagiarist writer' development, but finally ties everything together with lots of belly laughs and the idea that the tall, dark stranger of the title is ourselves trying things on in desperate moments, and of course there is the renewed conviction that even though it can sometimes appear he is just churning them out, Woody Allen's movies are always worth a look.

★★★☆☆

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Your Highness (2011)

Perhaps lured to work with the team behind the popular Pineapple Express, Natalie Portman deigns to appear in this only very occasionally amusing fantasy comedy adventure, but the biggest star by far is the penis, which features in every scene and is the punchline of every joke, either because it is flaccid, erect, severed, worn as jewellery, missing or, in some misguided scenes-played-for-laughs, used to sodomise, rape, and child abuse.

★☆☆☆☆

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Young and Innocent (1937)

A man stumbles across a dead woman and his dash for help is mistaken by onlookers for the flight of a murderer in this 1937 Hitchcock thriller thematically very similar to The 39 Steps released two years earlier, also featuring a manhunt, a female abettor, humour, thrills and grand Hitchcock setpieces.

★★★★★

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Young Adult (2011)

This Jason Reitman black comedy has Charlize Theron playing a misguided woman-child intent on seducing her old high school flame now married with a child, but after the cracking dark potential of its opening scenes, the film loses momentum with the arrival too soon of Matt, the film's moral compass and sounding board.

★★★☆☆

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Rebirth (八日目の蝉) (2011)

I watched this on Shoudoshima, the island that features heavily in the latter part of the movie and despite its uneven story I was affected by the main character's search for the home of her childhood memories after discovering that the mother who raised her was in fact the person who kidnapped her in her infancy.

★★★★☆

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You Can Count On Me (2000)

This is a heartwarming drama about a brother and sister reunited in adulthood after the deaths of their parents in childhood, starring next gen Marlon Brando and future Bruce Banner, Mark Ruffalo, and Matthew Broderick, a Culkin, and the always enchanting Laura Linney. 

★★★★☆

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