A collection of Ari Aster’s favourite arthouse movies
Celebrated filmmaker Ari Aster was exposed to the cinematic wonder of horror, the most disturbing yet enticing movie genre, from a very young age. He became particularly enamoured with the tension-wielding style of Stanley Kubrick in his 1980 classic starring Jack Nicholson, The Shining. As a fellow New Yorker, Aster also fell in love with another of the city’s Hollywood heavyweights, Martin Scorsese.
Aster, 36, has risen to widespread critical acclaim over the past five years with the release of two unrelentingly disturbing and cinematically original movies, Hereditary and Midsommar. On May 19th, Aster adds another movie to his oeuvre, Beau Is Afraid. The Joaquin Phoenix-starring movie has so far divided critics but promises to make a similarly idiosyncratic dent in the cinematic landscape.
Aster’s unique filmmaking style is the result of avid film-watching. His inspiration comes from far and wide, whether it’s well-known titans of the industry like Martin Scorsese or cult heroes of international cinema like Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
In 2020, applause from his burgeoning fanbase was perhaps topped by the words of one of his biggest heroes. “A couple of years ago, I watched a first film called Hereditary by a director named Ari Aster,” Martin Scorsese said in praise of Aster’s 2018 directional debut. “Right from the start, I was impressed. Here was a young filmmaker that obviously knew cinema. The formal control, the precision of the framing and the movement within the frame, the pacing of the action, the sound — it was all there, immediately evident.”
In a recent interview feature with Criterion, Aster was tasked with selecting his favourite arthouse movies. In total, the director picked out 21 movies, including picks from Michael Haneke, Steven Soderbergh, Karel Zeman and Paul Schrader, the screenwriter responsible for Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
Picking out his first selection, Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, Aster explained that he chose the movie for “this programme I’m doing at the Lincoln Centre for Beau Is Afraid. This and Beau have in common that they are about a man who really needs to come.”
“There’s an argument to be made that Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the greatest movie ever made,” Aster adds during a later selection from the DVD store.
“Speaking of unconventional biopics that don’t fall into the typical traps, Mishima by Paul Schrader it’s, I mean, it’s almost definitely the best film he ever made,” he comments on a later selection. “What he’s doing with artifice here, what he’s doing with structure, it’s really brilliant. And when I first saw it, it was like… shocking.”
See the full list of Ari Aster’s movie selections below.
A collection of Ari Aster’s favourite arthouse movies:
- Jiří Menzel – Closely Watched Trains
- Michael Haneke – The Seventh Continent
- Michael Haneke – Benny’s Video
- Michael Haneke – 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
- Věra Chytilová – Daisies
- Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Cure
- Joseph Losey – Mr. Klein
- Abbas Kiarostami – Where Is the Friend’s House?
- Abbas Kiarostami – And Life Goes On
- Abbas Kiarostami – Through the Olive Trees
- Sacha Guitry – La Poison
- Karel Zeman – Journey to the Beginning of Time
- Karel Zeman – Invention for Destruction
- Karel Zeman – The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
- Terrence Malick – The New World
- Lee Chang-dong – Secret Sunshine
- Hiroshi Teshigahara – Woman in the Dunes
- Steven Soderbergh – Che
- Paul Schrader – Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
- Nicholas Ray – Bigger Than Life
- Guy Maddin – Brand upon the Brain!
