Directed by Shunji Iwai | 146 mins | 2001
Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated from classmates and his old friend Shusuke (Shugo Oshinari), Yuichi retreats into his relationship with the songs of goth-inflected pop act Lily Chou-Chou—created for the film, with vocals by Salyu, though the three-piece reformed for the movie’s 10th anniversary—whose music can do nothing to stop the bloody, hormone-fueled reckoning ahead. A clangorous collision of tradition and ultramodernity, innovative in its understanding of digital cinematography as a new medium with new rules.