Revive: Favorite Discoveries of February 2025

His Motorbike, Her Island (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986)

2025 is barreling forward at an alarming pace, and I’m floored by the realization that we’re already in March. Yeah, yeah, it’s a cliché, but honestly — where has the time gone?! With Rewind & Revive launching last month, I’ve admittedly seen fewer films than usual. That said, dear reader, quality over quantity has been the name of the game, and the movies I have indulged in have, by and large, been certified bangers.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s address the elephant in the room: The Academy Awards were last night. I debated covering the Oscars this week, but I’m sure your inbox is already flooded with round-ups and recaps from passionate folks with incredible insight. While I indeed tuned in (I even went to a fab Oscars party!), I’d rather use this time to highlight my favorite watches of February. Hopefully, you’ll find some new discoveries — or maybe even a nudge to finally check out something that’s been gathering e-dust on your watchlist.

So, let’s rewind and revive, shall we?

Play It Cool (Yasuzō Masumura, 1970)

This was my most anticipated watch of February. I started my journey through Yasuzō Masumura’s work late last year, so this Arrow Video release felt almost serendipitous. Play It Cool is an early entry in Japan’s revenge cinema boom, arriving just before genre-defining films like Lady Snowblood (1973) and Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972). While Masumura’s film embraces some of the pulpy, exploitative aesthetics of the genre, it’s more restrained, steering clear of the overt violence that would later become a hallmark of its successors.

Yumi (Mari Atsumi) is a quiet fashion school student living with her mother, aging hostess Tomi (Akemi Negishi), and her stepfather, Yoshimura (Ryôichi Tamagawa). One night, while Tomi is away at work, Yoshimura forces himself upon Yumi — an act that sends Tomi into a rage so fierce it lands her in jail. Now alone, Yumi takes a job at her mother’s former workplace: a nightclub. Determined to secure a comfortable future for Tomi upon her release, she devises a plan: luring men with the promise of a night together, but only if they can beat her in a game of poker. As she rises through the ranks of the hostess world, she attracts the attention of envious rivals… and a potential love interest. You may think you know where this story is heading, but trust me: the final moments left me floored (you tell ‘em, Yumi!).

Masumura himself had a remarkably fascinating career, one I’ve only just begun to explore (for further reading, I highly recommend Jonathan Rosenbaum’s essay “Discovering Yasuzō Masumura: Reflections on Work in Progress” from the 2003 collection Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia). Born in 1924, Masumura’s passion for cinema began in kindergarten, thanks to a childhood friend whose father owned a movie theater. He studied law and literature at the University of Tokyo but dropped out after two years when he landed a job as an assistant director at Daiei Studios. After working tirelessly to finance the remainder of his education (ultimately graduating in 1949 with a degree in philosophy), he won a scholarship to study at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Here’s where I start to salivate: his teachers included none other than Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Casual, right? Masumura returned to Japan in 1953 and made his feature debut with Punishment Room (1956), kicking off a career that would span over two decades.

What I’ve come to appreciate most while diving into Masumura’s filmography thus far is the agency he gives his female characters — so often, they’re more compelling than their male counterparts. This was no accident; Masumura himself believed that women were better conduits for expressing the complexities of human nature. As he told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1970, “To express the human, there is only the woman.” With Play It Cool, although the film certainly has its harrowing moments, Yumi’s tenacity and ability to put her own desires first make her deeply engaging. She may be trapped in an oppressive world, but she refuses to play by its rules — and she’ll damn well make sure things are done on her own terms.

Though Masumura exposes the seedy underbelly of Japanese nightlife, there are moments of undeniable beauty, thanks in part to Setsuo Kobayashi’s cinematography. Scenes like the throes of passion in a love hotel (complete with a spinning bed and mirrors galore); the dark sky littered with neon signage; the hypnotic energy of Tokyo’s club dance floors — it’s these moments that offer fleeting, intoxicating escapes before the reality of Yumi’s world comes rushing back in.

The Play It Cool limited edition Blu-Ray is currently available to purchase via Arrow Video here.

Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)

I love a good intellectual sparring match in the films I watch, and Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground has that element in spades. What begins as a cerebral exploration of reason gradually unfolds into a raw and vulnerable embrace of feeling through art.

Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) is a beloved philosophy professor absorbed in her latest research project: a quest to understand “ecstasy.” Her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), is a painter known for his landscapes and still lifes, though he’s desperate to transition into abstract work. We assume they were once happy, but now, it’s clear they’re drifting — losing ground, so to speak. When Victor sells a painting to a museum, he insists on celebrating by renting a house in upstate New York for the summer — a move that vexes Sara, who would rather stay close to a well-stocked library. Nevertheless, off they go, growing more distant by the day. The divide deepens when Victor becomes enamored with one of his subjects while Sara agrees to star in a student’s film. Her time on set sees her slowly drawn toward the charming advances of her co-star, Duke (Duane Jones).

Through Sara’s dive into unabashed artistic creation, she finally reaches catharsis. The final moments of the film, which I won’t spoil, left me breathless. At the same time, watching Sara and Victor’s marriage unravel is devastating — especially because Victor is such an egotistical pig that he earns a spot among Éric Rohmer’s most infuriating male leads (a filmmaker Collins often cited as “the only person who’s ever influenced me cinematically”). Their demise is made more tragic because their esoteric desires could be understood better if they just turned to one another. Remember: Victor’s pursuit of something completely abstract is right within Sara’s wheelhouse, while her search for artistic “ecstasy” is a way of life that Victor has newly embraced already.

Yet, Losing Ground is more than just a portrait of a crumbling marriage — it’s a richly layered study of intellectual ambition, artistic self-discovery, and the intersection of race and gender in spaces that often resisted such complexity. In the end, Sara’s journey isn’t just about understanding ecstasy in theory: it’s about allowing herself to feel it.

It’s worth acknowledging the shameful fact that Losing Ground never received a theatrical release during Collins’ lifetime — she died in 1988 at just 46 years old. After being largely forgotten for decades, the film was restored in 2015 by her daughter, Nina, and has finally been given the long-awaited respect it deserves.

Losing Ground is currently available to stream on the Criterion Channel.

Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, 1961)

I continued my Ermanno Olmi journey in February with Il Posto — a film that nearly gave me whiplash when I realized its star is the spitting image of a young Timothée Chalamet (seriously, can one of you just validate me with this thought?).

As for the movie itself, we follow Domenico (Sandro Panseri), a young man who forgoes further education and heads to Milan in search of a corporate job to help support his family. We watch as he sheds the cocoon of his bedsheets only to wrap himself in another — the oversized coat of adulthood — carrying his parents’ advice like a talisman: if he finds a job at a big corporation, he’ll be set for life. What initially sounds reassuring takes on a far more dismal weight by the film’s end.

Il Posto wears its Italian neorealist DNA on its sleeve, yet it moves beyond the movement’s social focus, honing in on emotional and existential dilemmas with a gentle absurdity. It’s a kind of poetic realism that kept my eyes glued to the screen, as Olmi has an extraordinary ability to weave tenderness into the quiet hellscape of the working world. Although he never forces the critique, you feel it immediately. Domenico’s new workplace is a nameless, faceless corporation: an endless sea of desks, stark white walls, and the mechanical ebb and flow of employees shuffled through its doors.

Yet, that tenderness I speak of — it’s there if you look for it. A shy, flirtatious coffee break with Antonietta (Loredana Detto). The peculiar office rituals of men in different departments. The awkward, fleeting joys of the company New Year’s Eve party. Though the film tracks Domenico, Olmi’s camera lingers on these passing moments, granting even the most peripheral characters their own flashes of life. His curiosity is infectious, capturing both the hilariously absurd and painfully relatable rhythms of corporate existence. After all, aren’t arbitrary workplace rules and routines sometimes just that?

Il Posto is currently available to stream on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy (depending on your region).

His Motorbike, Her Island (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986)

I had the perfect excuse to finally pick up Third Window Films’ release of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s His Motorbike, Her Island — I’m guesting on an upcoming podcast covering it! The episode is already recorded but not yet live, so I’ll hold off diving too deeply into the movie for now (I plan to make a standalone post to coincide with the pod’s release).

The film itself is yet another fantastic reminder that Obayashi was so much more than his beloved 1977 hit, House — though don’t get me wrong, it remains one of my all-time favorite horror watches. Across a career spanning five decades, Obayashi amassed 76 credits across countless genres. Yet, his surrealist visual style is always unmistakable, even in a film like this, where things are far more subdued than one might expect.

His Motorbike, Her Island is wonderfully playful. Par for the course in an Obayashi outing, right? Koh Hashimoto (Riki Takeuchi) is a music student with a part-time delivery job, though the work is really just an excuse to indulge in his greatest pleasure: riding his Kawasaki W3. He has an utterly devoted girlfriend, Fuyumi (Noriko Watanabe), though his interest in her is waning, as all she does is “cry and cook” (relatable). After breaking things off, fate leads him to the beautiful Miyoko (Kiwako Harada), a free spirit who immediately takes a liking to his bike. Koh teaches her to ride, but her love for the open road — her desire to become one with the wind — is something he cannot tame. Ultimately, His Motorbike, Her Island becomes an ode to the transience of youth and the faint memories of long-gone summers, where everything is remembered with a wistful warmth.

The staples of Obayashi’s oeuvre are all here: the gleeful jump cuts, the pockets of absurdity (like the brass band that romantically plays as Koh meets Fuyumi for the first time), and the interplay between color and black-and-white film stock. To that final point, Obayashi offers a hint at the film’s start: Koh mentions that he only dreams in monochrome. Watching everything unfold, I couldn’t help but wonder: are those emotionally swelling black-and-white moments a faithful recollection or a memory softened by nostalgia’s doting lens? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Perhaps, like all great young loves, those distant memories drift past us every so often, brushing against our senses like tender kisses, only to vanish with the wind once more.

You can purchase the Third Window Films release of His Motorbike, Her Island at Terracotta.

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And that’s all from me today, folks! As always, you can keep up with everything I’m watching over on Letterboxd ☻