News flash: World cinema still dead!

The top 10 fresh wounds to the body politic of global filmmaking.

By Chuck Stephens

. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, USA)

. Land of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA)

The 74th and 83rd highest-grossing pictures of the year (in worldwide grosses, as of Dec. 17, 2005), these politically twinned visions of life in modern-day North America are at once proudly cartoony and sociologically precise – not to mention a pair of potent reminders of why I won't live anywhere near North America anymore. Both films are based on the possibility that seeing how the other half lives may not be such a good idea, especially if you're only half here (or there, or wherever you are) to begin with, and each remains true to its creator's long-established and peculiarly mutated form. Cronenberg writes his typically sexed-up History in bumped-ugly bruises and orgasmic identity crises, while Romero litters his Land-scape with glistening body-wounds and perilously swapped fluids but resolutely prefers carnivorousness to carnality, and wouldn't touch a sex scene with the vice presidency's Dick.

. Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan)

. Heart Beating in the Dark, 2005 version (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan)

Two vigorous signs of life from Japanese cinema's ever-unpredictable indie sector. Linda is a hormonally specific and shoe-gazingly intoxicating portrait of teenage women still stranded in their high school uniforms but altogether ready to rock; Heart remakes Super 8 cine-outlaw Nagasaki's own 1982 child-abuse psychodrama even as it doubles as a career self-portrait of this wholly unique and enduring filmmaker as a still young-at-heart, if increasingly graying, one-man band. With Miike's moment well on the wane, and everyone long since bored of the Rings, there's still plenty of life along the fringes of Japanese moviemaking – though hopefully the announcement that Memoirs of a Geisha star Koji Yakusho's next project will be something titled Penal Colony of Love isn't an indication that the erotic grotesqueries of the late Teruo "Joys of Torture" Ishii (1924-2005) have come back from the dead so soon.

. 4 (Ilea Khrzhanovsky, Russia)

Who knows what to make of this sprawling noise-symphony of ludicrous lies, double-double agents, mongrel howling, Robocop jackhammering, sub-Tarkovsky zone-wandering, and naked grannies pelting each other with greasy slices of pork? As unexpected an erruption from a national cinema otherwise thought to be teetering on the edge of insignificance as last year's Mexican Japón, Khrzhanovsky's deliberately fracture-prone debut is also as infuriating as it is engrossing, and a one-of-a-kind cosmic/comic marvel that remains this year's only fantastic 4.

. Spying Cam (Whang Cheol-mean, South Korea)

. Tale of Cinema (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

Two variations on the same basic theme – the experience of modernity as an ongoing and wholly inseparable interpenetration of movies and life – from the most cinephilic nation on Earth. Whang's low-budget digi-movie is a hyperdramatic tour de force that posits undercover cold warriors as just another species of cracked actor, and an aptitude for political terror-brokering as the stuff of which successfully cutthroat studio execs are made. Hong's big-budget cine-whatsit is filled with slow-zoom Eurotrash filigrees, absurdly timed classical music cues, and precisely placed oddball emotions, all of which give a Buñuelian burnish to the director's now-patented passion for presenting the political division of Korea's north from south as both a cut that binds the nation's identity tenuously together and a splice that fuses it forever apart.

. The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)

Talk about Inside Deep Throat: Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan's archbishop of anomie, continues his ongoing exploration of loaded silences and karaoke discontent with this quasi-pornographic sci-fi oral hysterie that takes place in a world without water, and squares the song-and-dance, suck-and-fuck antipodes of the utopian musical and the dissolute stag reel by insisting that the suppression of the gag reflex is modern cinema's final frontier. The sort of movie that the cable-smut merchants of Cronenberg's Videodrome might appreciatively have programmed, The Wayward Cloud is both erotic and repellent, fearless and idiotic, abject and superabundant, and as haplessly adorable as it is hopelessly hard to swallow – and it climaxes with a blow job sequence so outrageously protracted you'll begin to wonder if Tsai isn't already wooing us with a coming attraction for his next elemental celluloid apocalypse: a breathlessly brutal romantic comedy set entirely in a world without air.

. Worldly Desires (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)

. Citizen Dog (Wisit Sasanatieng, Thailand)

Thai cinema may be looking healthier than ever from a landlocked American cineaste's perspective, especially in a year where choices as bilaterally yours as Tropical Malady and Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior could be found lighting up US screens. But here in Bangkok, Thai movies currently seem to be standing in place, especially as both Apichatpong and Last Life in the Universe director Pen-ek Ratanaruang remain buried in pre- and postproduction chores on features due next year. One provocative pair of giddy new gas-doodles did, however, emerge to color this season's otherwise cloudless Thai cine-sky. In the weirdly overgrown featurette Worldly Desires, a pair of romantically entwined soap opera escapees head for the woods in search of a sacred tree, only to find themselves haunted by a movie crew hard at work shooting the world's most irritating fashion video. In the candy-colored castration-anxiety musical Citizen Dog, the only boy in Bangkok who doesn't possess the city's mark of urban distinction (a tail) falls for an obsessive-compulsive corporate office-cleaning girl who believes a mysterious white book contains the answers to her every prayer, if only she could read the language it's written in. (Some questions are easier to answer than others, and for those credit-scrutinizing Citizen Dog fans out there, here they are: Yes, the eco-prophet in the tie-dye wardrobe is in fact played by yours truly, and no, I didn't get to keep the shirt.)