“The greatest movie ever made,” according to Ari Aster
From a young age, Ari Aster was deeply inspired by the captivating horror genre and developed a particular fascination with the tension-driven style of Stanley Kubrick’s Jack Nicholson-starring classic, The Shining. Aster also developed a deep admiration for fellow-New Yorker Martin Scorsese, a prominent figure in the city’s rich cinematic history.
Over the past five years, Aster, 36 years old, has gained widespread critical recognition for his first two original and notably disturbing movies, Hereditary and Midsommar. Adding to his cinematic repertoire, Aster’s latest creation, Beau Is Afraid, starring Joaquin Phoenix, has garnered mixed reviews but is poised to make an equally unique mark on the film landscape upon its release on May 19th.
Praise from his growing fanbase was perhaps topped by the words of one of Aster’s all-time heroes in 2020. “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 horror. “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.”
As a categorical film nerd, Aster has seen far more movies than the average human being and hence would find it difficult to choose his all-time favourite. That said, the kooky auteur rarely shies from recommending a good watch. For example, when asked, during a 2022 interview with Sight and Sound, what his favourite Kubrick movie was, Aster picked out Barry Lyndon.
“The funniest, the most stately, and at once the loveliest and most alienating of Kubrick’s films,” he commented on the selection. “Everything here feels perfectly judged – from the ultra-deliberate tempo of its scenes to the uncannily measured line readings to the famously immaculate slow zooms to that sudden, hilarious shift to handheld when cool heads finally cease to prevail.”
In a recent interview with Criterion, Aster was asked to select his favourite independent movies from a gigantic DVD store cupboard. In total, the director picked out 21 movies, including picks from Michael Haneke, Steven Soderbergh, Karel Zeman and Paul Schrader, the screenwriter behind Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
Among his selections was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 cult classic Cure. As a psychological thriller, the Japanese movie is right up Aster’s street. Kōji Yakusho and Masato Hagiwara star in a plot that follows a detective on the trail of a serial killer who carves crosses into the necks of his unfortunate victims.
Cure was shown in the United States at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April 1998. After making a significant impact in the indie circuit, the movie was screened once more at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1999 in a celebration of Kurosawa’s seminal contributions to cinema.
“There’s an argument to be made that Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the greatest movie ever made,” Aster ambiguously stated as he pulled the DVD from the shelf.
Watch the trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure below.
