One of Kaurismaki’s funniest and most fascinating deviations in his oeuvre, this East Goes West road movie sutures music, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and deadpan humour into a pseudo-documentary, crowned by arguably the best hairstyle ever committed to celluloid.
Arguably Kaurismaki’s bleakest film, this portrait of a woman trapped in work and domestic monotony spirals into quiet doom and gloom as she contemplates a drastic action.
Good but not great, Kaurismaki does ‘60s period drama with his brand of droll comedy as two Finnish men on a test drive encounter two female ‘comrades’ (a Russian and an Estonian) in need of a ride to the harbour.
The first of Kaurismaki’s ‘Proletariat’ trilogy is where it all crystallised very close to the fullest form and style of the Finnish director’s subsequent films as a garbage truck driver meets a supermarket cashier.
A disappointment from Kaurismaki in this way too simplistic and monotonous tribute to silent era filmmaking about a young and naïve wife of a farmer husband who is lured away by a rich old man promising a better life.
Kaurismaki adapts Shakespeare for the dog-eat-dog world of industrialising Finland with this decent black-and-white revenge noir filled with moments of absurdist humour and conniving tactics.
Dreary yet comforting and a brilliant example of how to tell a story with poetic economy, this is a near-perfect work by Kaurismaki about a miner who loses his job but inadvertently encounters a parking attendant whom he falls in love with in the drollest possible way.
Kaurismaki brings his unmistakable style—and gallows humour—to London as he teams up with French icon Jean-Pierre Leaud for a darkly comic take on one man’s desire to end his life.
Kaurismaki’s style remains unmistakable, but this isn’t a particularly edifying effort as two affection-shy strangers elusively seek romance and companionship in lonely Helsinki.
Kaurismaki’s confident first solo feature already contains the hallmarks of his sober, deadpan style, in the guise of a loose adaptation of Dostoevsky’s famous text.
Eternality Tan 