Movies of 2013: My Top Twenty

Who's in the mood for me jizzing over a bunch of obscure foreign films? Hmmm?

* Crickets *

Well, anyway...

20) 3 Iron (Bin-Jip, 2004, Ki-Duk Kim)

This was most definitely a film set up for disappointment. After listening to Jez rant about how Kim Ki-Duk is the greatest thing to happen to art since Marcel Duchamp (Jez may or may not have actually said this), I started with this deeply beloved film of his to see if he lived up to his reputation. The first thing to note here is that I was, actually, disappointed. It just didn’t blow my head wide open as I’d expected, but perhaps the more important thing here is that it was still a truly excellent bit of filmmaking. Completely idiosyncratic, it uses a wonderfully colourful palette to portray the offbeat world of our central character and is very spare on the dialogue. It’s most definitely artistic filmmaking as well, with a meaning all its own and at times quite perplexing. Whatever my overall impression of this film was when I first watched it, I certainly have to note how firmly and deeply so many of its sequences resonated with me then, and continue to resonate now.

19) Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Like Ozu, Antonioni is a director whose few films I’ve seen I’ve loved, but are otherwise quite difficult to track down. More is needed. Red Desert is a plaintive examination of depression, one that’s brutally honest but somehow, also, exquisite to look at. Antonioni uses colour vividly to depict emotion, and the whole spectrum comes out at one time or another. As in L’Avventura (the other Antonioni film I’ve seen), Monica Vitti delivers a consummate performance in the lead, drawing an intimate portrait of melancholia with shades of desire and even playfulness at times. It’s amazing, to me, how difficult it is to discuss an Antonioni film without sounding atrociously pretentious, but here it is. This is just a beautiful artistic film, gorgeous to look at while evoking deep contemplation.

18) That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet du désir, 1977, Luis Buñuel)

Another Buñuel? Well yes, and with very good reason. I see this one as almost a companion piece to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, not just because they both feature many of the same actors, but because they both seem to stem from a similar creative seed. However, this film is not only more coherent in at least having a storyline, it’s also just more entertaining. Framed by a man telling a group of strangers on a train the story of why he just poured a bucket of water over a woman in full view of them all, it goes on an adventurous narrative arc into a complicated and frustrating relationship. Fernando Rey is delightful as the conflicted and obsessed Matthieu, while Buñuel’s ingenious decision to cast two different women as the ‘obscure object’ of Matthieu’s desire not only lends his trademark surrealism to proceedings but elicits two vibrant performances from the actresses involved. This has all the charm of Bourgeoisie, but hits with greater success for combining it with a compelling and resonant story.

17) Rosetta (1999, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

Yes! It’s another Dardenne film, and – here’s a shock – it’s about a young person grappling with parental issues while trying to forge a meaningful existence. This was also my first taste of the Dardennes and I still consider it their most emotionally striking. The incredibly nuanced performance from Emilie Dequenne as the eponymous Rosetta helps a lot in this regard: it’s somewhat elusive at times to know what’s going through her head, while at the same time what motivates her is clearly borne out by her actions. What makes this film so emotive is that her goal is such an unassuming one: to make a living. To be independent. Somehow that goal remains just out of reach, and as she strives towards it, the Dardennes drive the story towards their signature conclusion of ambiguity and inconclusiveness. Inconclusive, but strangely satisfying.

16) The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985, Woody Allen)

Ah, speaking of directors we haven’t heard from for a while, we reach the top of my Woody Allen pile this year with this charming little gem. To me this has all the elements that made Midnight in Paris such a success: a quirky meta-narrative full of daydreams and wry jokes about people’s expectations in life. I enjoyed this a lot more than Midnight, though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Mia Farrow is just wonderful as the simple cinephile who dreams of escape and adventure. The second reason is simply that it just feels so symmetrical to have Woody making a humorous riff on people going to the cinema. The whole schism in reality that the film delivers is something out of the absurdist theatre: wonderful conceit and increasingly amusing and charming as it unfolds.

15) Days of Heaven (1978, Terrence Malick)

I basically watched Terrence Malick’s filmography in completely the wrong order. Well maybe not completely as I began with The Thin Red Line, but then caught up with The Tree of Life before jumping backwards to watch his two indisputable masterpieces, Badlands last year and this this year (Leaving The New World ‘til last seems like a bad idea). There’s a similar vibe to Days of Heaven as with Badlands – the cinematography and music in particular are shot from the same artistic barrel, and they are both as beautiful and evocative as each other. Sam Shepard is as Sam Shepardy as you can get here, which is always great value, and Richard Gere is surprisingly good as the ambitious and unscrupulous labourer trying to con his way into Shepard’s fortune. Performances aside though, the winner in this film is unmistakeably Nestor Almedros’ camera work and the haunting score from Ennio Morricone, all brought together through Mallick’s elysian vision. Really gorgeous film.

14) Shallow Grave (1994, Danny Boyle)

So after working my way through Danny Boyle’s filmography and finding a large number of them closer to the bottom of the list, I had to reach the conclusion that his first film is also his best. As is obvious from looking at his body of work, he’s a director who likes to try his hand at different things, but I think when it’s a dark canvas he’s working on, his style shines through best. This feels similar to some of the Coens’ best work (similar but not equal to): the ordinary people caught in over their head, with a lot of morbid humour and some strange Gothic imagery. I could watch Christopher Eccleston for hours on end in any role, and fortunately he also has a really meaty part here acting-wise, although Kerry Fox and Ewan McGregor have the lion’s share of screen time. This is definitely a genre film, with little meaning beyond being a bit of a caper, but it’s an absolute bullseye for me in terms of the visual flair and atmospheric chills it delivers.

13) 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamâni si 2 Zile, 2007, Cristian Mungiu)

Another film I caught up with due to the high regard given to it by Filmspotting, this gritty Romanian drama was one of the most compelling things I sat through all year. Set in the 1980s when abortion in Romania was criminalised, we follow a pregnant young lady (the implication of the title is that she is this far gone) and her loyal friend going through the process of organising an abortion for herself through illegal channels. There’s a lot going on in here even while not much ‘happens’, as the interactions between the two friends and their ‘contact’ vacillate between anxious misrepresentation and brutal honesty. It’s overall a totally gripping drama about the choices we have to make and underlying it all is a political statement about how larger decisions about society affect individuals.

12) High + Low (Tengoku to Jigoku, 1963, Akira Kurosawa)

Ah, with all that Mizoguchi discussion and riffing on Ozu I was starting to think we’d never get to the real Japanese master, the deliverer of my #1 film of 2011. This was the only one of Kurosawa’s oeuvre I caught up with this year, but what a film to choose for that option. Strangely more procedural and intimate than most of his other work I’ve seen, High and Low deals with the fallout of a kidnapping that goes wrong when the son of a rich man’s chauffeur is taken instead of the rich man’s own son. Following the scenario closely from the first moments through to the final wrap-up of the investigation, the film manages deftly to weave in a lot of meditations on wealth, class and morality, which never reach fever pitch as much as they do in some of Kurosawa’s other works. It’s complex as it goes along, but I thought it finished somewhat conventionally. That’s not a bad thing as it’s greatly satisfying, while instead of leaving questions about the plot unanswered it leaves us instead hanging with the thought of ‘what did it all cost?’

11) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, 2007, Julian Schnabel)

I went into this film with a certain quantity of dread. The synopsis itself just gives me claustrophobic chills thinking about ‘locked-in’ syndrome and what it would be like to experience. And indeed the first half-hour or so has moments of that utter impotent frustration, except that the writers and conceivers of the film are clever enough to include Jean’s internal monologue to take the edge off. The story of his learning to communicate, and ultimately dictate his own memoir, is all told with a patient hand and restraint that holds this from falling into the precipice of TV movie territory. What really, really stuck out for me though is the final (?) sequence, which takes us back to the moments before the stroke which basically destroyed his nervous system – only, we’re not told it’s the moments before, and the suddenness of it is terrifying and gut-wrenching. It’s a deeply dreadful moment, even while the rest of the film becomes so powerfully inspiring.

10) The Place beyond the Pines (2012, Derek Cianfrance)

There has been so much written about this film from Derek Cianfrance, all saying basically the same thing, along the lines of “I wish the third act didn’t exist” or “I wish the second and third acts didn’t exist.” The fact is that I agree. The first act, with Ryan Gosling as a stunt motorcycle rider who tries to provide for a woman and her child he’s just learned is his, is beyond amazing. Absolutely idiosyncratic filmmaking, with a devastating grungy wash and an arresting moral ambivalence that just pushes the envelope of what film storytelling can be. I was also totally invested in the second act, with Bradley Cooper at his best that I’ve seen as the cop who (sudden spoiler alert) shoots Gosling dead at the end of act one. The third act is most definitely a let-down. Not just because it’s the weakest of the three, but because it feels like a tacked-on bit of conventional filmmaking, trying to achieve neat closure in a story that neither demanded nor required it. There are strengths all the way through, in particular the presence of Ben Mendelsohn who I genuinely feel has the on-screen charisma of a young Brando: I can’t imagine material that wouldn’t be improved by his involvement. But still, when the first two thirds are some of the most inventive and powerful filmmaking I’ve seen all year, the third act is an uncomfortable return to conformity. What I’m saying is, if the third act had gone differently and the film had ended elsewhere, this could have been pushing for my number one spot.

9) Gravity (2013, Alfonso Cuarón)

Talk about films set up for disappointment. When I finally forced myself to watch Y Tu Mamá También last year (not looking forward to it) and it became one of my top ten films of that year, Cuarón cemented his place as one of the directors I just watch closely, because everything he does is gold. Then this film came on my radar and I salivated through most of the year. Then it came out, and not one person in existence failed to stop me in the street and tell me it’s the greatest movie ever made and that I must see it on pain of death. I finally did get a chance to catch it in a near-deserted cinema on a Wednesday night, in 3D. And it was not disappointing. On the contrary it absolutely knocked me on my back. There are undoubtedly problems with it: the 3D objects occasionally knocking into the camera were annoyingly distracting; George Clooney is smug and far larger than the film demands; there are numerous ‘as if’ moments and questionable bits of science… But absolutely none of that matters. What Cuarón has created here is something unique: the camera work, the sense of weightlessness, the silence. It’s a piece not only of filmmaking art or visual art, but sensory art. All of this film’s problems can be excused because the experience of this film is unlike anything another film could ever hope to be.

8) Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard, 1955, Alain Resnais)

On the subject of the filmmaking art, here is another piece of mind-blowing brilliance. In this short documentary, Resnais amasses one of the most heart-wrenching and evocative half-hours of film imaginable. The visuals consist of a combination of panoramic tours around abandoned concentration camps, entwined with brutally shocking archival footage of those camps at their peak and their inmates. The voiceover is spare, but asks all the right questions: the questions that make your head spin with the enormity of what happened here, that still haven’t really been answered and never will. In all the years I’ve watched holocaust films, studied Jewish history in school, etc. I’ve never been so moved as Resnais managed in the short running time of this piece. Got a spare half an hour? Watch this film. Go on, do it right now. I’ll wait here.

7) Underground (1995, Emir Kusturica)

I watched this film purely on the basis of Kusturica coming up on some random dude’s list of directors – I can’t remember where the list was and didn’t necessarily give it any credence, but the fact I hadn’t heard of Kusturica made him seem worth checking out. Having seen this film (which is apparently now on the top 250, TIL), my one regret is now I’ve discovered how hard his other work is to come by. This is a very weird, but somehow very real and grounded film at the same time. There is a wonderfully carnivalesque vibe to much of it which almost belies the seriousness at its core. In particular the two leads, Predrag Manojlovic and Lazar Ristovski (who remind me a lot, respectively, of Roberto Benigni and Gerard Depardieu as strange as that sounds), lend a surreal joy to the bizarre circumstances they find themselves in, and Manojlovic in particular wears his mask of whimsical joviality well to conceal his hidden malevolence. It’s a film about war, and about the interpersonal bonds that war can both tear apart and forge. Above all that, though, it’s a film of and about Yugoslavia, and a brilliant piece of fantastical narrative.

6) Fallen Angels (Duo Luo Tian Shi, 1995, Kar Wai Wong)

So of all the directors this year of whom I managed a bit of a retrospective, Wong unsurprisingly hits near the top of my list with his highest-ranked entry. You’ve probably gleaned from my previous two reviews that there is something unmistakeably beautiful about his films that I just react to, regardless of the onscreen content. In this case the lush beauty of his camera work and production design is backed up by a killer story, part of which Kim Ki Duk’s 3 Iron reminded me of when I watched it later. Strangely, we’re lacking the charisma of Tony Leung here, although a very different-looking (different from his more conventional roles in House of Flying Daggers and Red Cliff) Takeshi Kaneshiro steals the show with his mute loner who breaks into people’s shops at night and opens them for business (that’s the bit that reminds me of 3 Iron by the by). This three-or-four-pronged story is beautifully intertwined, with the surrealism of Kaneshiro’s character providing an odd foil for the killer protagonist and the various broken women that seem to fascinate Wong so. It left me musing, as do all of Wong’s films, on what rare beauty can be invoked from a hypermodern world.

5) Four Lions (2010, Chris Morris)

When I was telling Bec a couple of months ago about how much I enjoyed this film, she was actually quite shocked when I explained what it was about. “That’s horrible!” I distinctly remember her screeching, before saying something or other about me getting a haircut and a real job, and how come I always record the weather lady’s segments on the morning news… Blah blah blah… Anyway, the point is it didn’t really occur to me in isolation how – I don’t know – inappropriate? the idea of a comedy about a group of suicide bombers sounds. Basically it didn’t occur to me because this is so absorbingly and adeptly made. It’s black, yes - not just dark in tone but actually disturbing at times – but it’s also very, very funny. Most of the humour is character-based, but a large amount is culture-clash humour: comedy based on the incompatibility of different ideologies trying to make sense. More than just being funny, though, this film has a surprising humanity to it: these guys, as simultaneously funny and scary as they are, come off the screen as real people, and to be able to do that to radically indoctrinated potential murderers is no easy trick of script writing. I genuinely believe that comedy, in the form of films like this, can go a lot further towards reducing the hysteria around ‘radical Islam’ than the presence of however many friendly Muslim faces in the media could hope to do. Brilliant, modern film.

4) The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador, 1962, Luis Buñuel)

So speaking of directors of whom I managed a retrospective falling near the top of my list, Buñuel tops the list with this bizarre effort. To be honest, looking at my top ten, something I really responded strongly to this year was surrealism in film. Underground, Fallen Angels and this all lean heavily on the world of the slightly bizarre in getting their story across, perhaps none more simply or as overtly as this. Quite simply, the plot is: a group of guests stay beyond their welcome at a dinner party because, for absolutely no reason, they are unable to leave the room. The whole thing is claustrophobic, minimalistic, and a little childlike and playful. It reminds me a lot of my number 1 film of last year, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker in that it just has that shroud of childlike imagination about it, a gigantic game of “we can’t leave this room” among a group of bourgeois adults. Of course, into the mix Buñuel throws some characteristic snappy dialogue and inter-class sniping as the guests get increasingly frustrated with their predicament. Of course no explanation in the end is offered, but the beauty of this type of surrealist filmmaking is that we can project our own interpretation onto the action if we want or, if we don’t want, just take it as we see it, perhaps with one eyebrow raised at the absurdity of it all.

3) Incendies (2010, Denis Villeneuve)

So no, in case you just read the titles and nothing underneath them, this isn’t my #149 film of the year but rather somewhat higher. Among all the films this year that were set up for a disastrous disappointment from my celestial expectations, this film perhaps had the easiest ride through to the top. I knew nothing about it going in, I hadn’t seen any of Villeneuve’s other work, I frankly knew nothing at all about Villeneuve. That’s a pretty good situation to go into a movie as fucking good as this is. I hate to ruin that situation for everybody else by ranting about how good this is, but there’s little else I can do. Essentially this is just as riveting as storytelling in film form goes. We are presented at the beginning with a mystery - a conundrum - that our brother-sister protagonists (chiefly the sister) set out to investigate. We learn more about the mystery as she does: the twists and turns in the story; and at the same time feel her hurt, her fear and trepidation, and the actual danger she discovers as she attempts to find out who she is and who their now deceased mother was. When Jez put this near the top of his list last month, he made a point about how satisfying the ending is. I’m not usually a sucker for endings, but there certainly is a real completeness to the closure this film achieves, and it is hugely satisfying to have watched this story unfold.

2) The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson)

Oh, this film. What bad luck it has. Snubbed completely by the Academy, it nevertheless managed to ride from January 2013 to November as my number one film. It was going to get that top spot, and nothing could topple it. But then... I’ll save the big reveal of what could possibly top this for now, however, and discuss this film. Firstly, I love Paul Thomas Anderson. Like Cuarón he’s a filmmaker who can seemingly do no wrong but, unlike Cuarón, he’s a filmmaker who also writes about as well as could be, and doesn’t have to compensate for his plot shortcomings with an amazing sensory experience. The Master is immaculately crafted cinematic art, both in terms of the story and characterisation and in terms of PTA’s incredible, mind-blowing visual eye. It produced so many of the year’s memorable, iconic moments and sequences - and one in particular that has continued to reverberate with me for its – wait for it – sheer surreal absurdity. It’s probably also not any of the ones you think, if you’ve seen the film. It’s the sequence in which Freddy is undertaking the ordeal to get admitted to Lancaster Dodd’s ‘movement’ and inner sanctum, and as the sequence goes on, and on, and Freddy’s suffering increases and stamina is pushed to its limits, Lancaster stands up as casually and arbitrarily as you like and says something like “examination over”. Just the random, arbitrary nature of that is mind-blowing, and cuts to the very heart of the great baffling mystery this film presents. What, after all, does this film mean? I have no idea. I have some theories (not mine, but ones I’ve heard from other people) that satisfy me to varying degrees, but that’s all part of the wonder of this film and PT Anderson’s genius. However, the slight lingering confusion is perhaps the only thing that stands between The Master and…

1) Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (Bom Yeoreum Gaeul Gyeoul Geurigo Bom, 2003, Ki-Duk Kim)

Yes, as miraculous as I found The Master, there was that lingering doubt, that chaos and confusion of what it all meant. In late November I sat down to watch this gorgeous piece of filmmaking from Kim Ki-Duk, and while I still sat on the question for a month of ‘is this a better film?’ I had to sit this one on top for the simple reason that it resonated in complete form the first run through. There’s a distinct possibility that The Master will overtake this on subsequent viewings as I get a better grasp of its themes, but as you know I don’t do things that way when it comes to my end-of-year lists. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring is part of the crop of artistic films to which I strongly responded this year, and is also the most beautiful. It’s a meditation on life, death, love and rebirth, told from the setting of a remote monastery on a lake surrounded by mountains, and represented by the changing of the seasons. It would be ruining the film to summarise the plot of any of its sections, but it’s basically a journey through a life, starting with a coming-of-age and journeying between the trials, retributions and struggles we all have to suffer through to reach inner peace in the later stages of life. There’s a heavy Buddhist subtext to it all - with a heavy emphasis on the endless cycle of life - and it’s told with all the relaxed pace and naturalist imagery you would expect from such a subtext. There are still some ambiguities left by the end of this film, some unanswered questions as well:  but they’re not inscrutable, simply ponderous. This film doesn’t shove its message down your throat, but it’s a very pleasing, satisfying work of art, one that poses some very important philosophical questions, but also provides the most curious and probing answers.

And with that, I have nothing more from 2013 to count down... That gives me time to concentrate on my crippling emotional pain.

Movies of 2013: My Bottom 10

So just to confuse those of you who like to move in #1Direction (token gesture for the teenage girls who read my blog), we're now going to shift gears into reverse, leap a long way backwards on my list to number 140, and count 'up' (as in backwards) my bottom 10. Just a reminder that the films on this particular list aren't necessarily bad, but to put it another way, they definitely are.

140) Flight (2012, Robert Zemeckis)

I think it’s testament to the quality of my film selection process this year that there are a couple of decent (but just fatally flawed) films from ‘this year’ on my bottom 10 – you don’t have to scroll down much further to see the other. Obviously the Academy Award nods given to this and the other help this drop down further because the accolades given to Washington’s performance don’t hide the problems with this film but just exacerbate my annoyance at them. Leaving aside his performance - which is really quite good, actually, even though he’s playing Denzel Washington – and discuss firstly what a mess this film is. Is it a disaster flick? A courtroom/legal drama? A 'battle with personal demons' drama? Any one of those might have been alright, but this film tries to be all three at once, and the final sequence just sums up beautifully how confused it is, because it leaves us with this message and theme which really hasn’t been mentioned at all up to that point and makes you ask “Oh, is that what the point of the film was?” Also, aargh those John Goodman scenes. What an atrocious waste of a wonderful actor. Seriously what in the hell is he, and those scenes, doing in this movie? Trying to be three things at once apparently wasn't enough, so let's throw in 'buddy drug comedy'??? Throwing those scenes into this movie is like going to the hollowed-out crater of a plane crash scene and putting a bomb in it, because that fucked-up mess can always be even more fucked-up.  The thing is, this film actually had some pretty good parts but overall it’s a poorly-oiled, rusty machine with broken and missing parts and people still kicking the shit out of it.

141) Lo Imposible (2012, J.A. Bayona)

I told you it wouldn’t be long before another ‘this year’ film. OK so this movie actually holds together a lot better than Flight. To continue the whole ‘machinery’ analogy, this film is like a machine that works pretty well for what it was created to do, but what it was created to do was create actual human excrement and go into crowded places and fling it around the place. It’s a sappy, predictable and formulaic piece of saccharine TV soap opera, with an awe-inspiring tsunami sequence and some decent acting. The reason this is actually below Flight though is basically because I just felt unaffected by any of the really large emotional climaxes (perhaps because I knew they were coming), while the bigger moments in Flight stood out among the rubble. If you can suspend the screaming shrieks of disbelief that this film instills in even the most vulnerable and credulous viewer, it could actually be somewhat touching. But it never reached a level above 'midday movie to kill time before Days of our Lives' material for me.

142) Little Women (1994, Gilliam Armstrong)

OK this is more than a little unfair. There’s really nothing particularly wrong with this film - if you like stories about little girls realising they’re no longer little girls; they’re little women, then by all means watch this film. Trouble is, as I implied ages and ages ago when discussing The Importance of Being Earnest, I find something stodgy and wooden about such straight page-to-screen adaptations of beloved material. And even though I haven’t read Little Women, this still just feels like such a self-conscious lifting straight off the page. The difference is I don’t think the book itself would be as entertaining and witty as Importance, so this film isn’t either, and while Importance has Colin Firth to ameliorate the stagey lack of imagination, this has... Winona Ryder. Bzzzt. Wrong answer.

143) Ghostbusters II (1989, Ivan Reitman)

Haha, you’d forgotten this one was coming, didn’t you? I mentioned I watch Ghost busters, and this, in a marathon session one morning, and you probably thought the sequel was going to be higher on the list! Well joke’s on you, you presumptuous idiot, that’ll teach you to jump to conclusions? Don’t you feel utterly, utterly foolish now? Don’t you want to just hurl yourself off your nearest volcano crater bridge? You will find out in this book? Seriously though, everything that was wrong with the first Ghost Busters film is repeated in spades here, and it’s so much worse if you watch the two back-to-back. The whole lack of any kind of science in their science fiction is made even more glaring here when oh, what do you know, the machinery they built doesn’t work again, and they need to try something even more radical and crazy with wacky gizmos than they tried before. There’s really a limit to how far you can push that story formula, and that limit is at most one film. There’s also a limit to how much Peter Venkman I can tolerate, and that limit is about an eighth of a film.

144) The Ninth Gate (1999, Roman Polanski)

If Polanski’s early European films were somewhat baffling, his foray into Hollywood popcorn is just disappointing. Also funny that when you’re dealing with films about deluded people summoning up demons to take over the world, I’ve ranked Ghostbusters II ahead of this one. This is just heavy-handed farcical nonsense, trying to masquerade as some kind of historical intrigue. The Emmanuelle Seigner character is risibly shoehorned in, and the whole thing just plays out like some weird Gothic teenager’s wet dream. Rosemary's Baby this certainly isn't; it lacks the unease, the sheer menace, of that earlier effort, and just typifies some kind of descent into generic commercial slush for an otherwise interesting director. It’s saying something when by far the most alert and excited I was watching this ‘thriller’ was in about the third scene when Johnny Depp is walking down Bleecker Street in NYC and I recognised the exact spot from my travels there. Disappointing.

145) Fatal Attraction (1987, Adrian Lyne)

Wow, I really don’t respond to trashy, ham-fisted melodrama, do I? I don’t feel bad at all about this film being as low as it is, obviously, because anyone who counts it among their liked films could only do so by filing it under ‘guilty pleasures’. Frankly we’re dealing again here with TV movie territory; Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest comes right out of some David Hasselhoff career-reboot vehicle, the way she starts out easy-going, friendly, charming, and then what... oh, yeah, becomes a hysterical psycho stalker bitch who’s probably also a vampire but they cut those scenes out (possibly because they, unlike the rest of this, lacked verisimilitude). There are, yet, no redeemable qualities to this film – Michael Douglas is uncharismatic, the plot is predictable but all the biggest moments are shriekingly over-played. The worst part is it’s quite clear that everybody in this film is taking it very seriously; if it had any tongue-in-cheek moments, it could almost be redeemed as having been in on the joke that it ends up being.

146) A Life Less Ordinary (1997, Danny Boyle)

Ah, Danny Boyle. You’ve had a mixed year with me. Which is to say, you’ve had a mixed career. Earlier when I discussed Shallow Grave, I discussed how Boyle works best in a somewhat dark milieu. Where he’s at his worst (or, least comfortable) is in quirky romantic comedy, as in this film. Funnily enough, with the exception of Cameron Diaz (not a fan) he’s working with a good cast here, including Holly Hunter, Delroy Lindo, Dan Hedaya, and his mainstay Ewan McGregor, but at the end of the day nobody can elevate this above the level of silly schlock. The whole ‘angels’ conceit oddly enough felt far-fetched to me – 'oddly' not because it’s not far-fetched, because it is – but because it seemed unnecessary, and incongruent with the rest of the film, which already has an interesting plot conceit. This maybe makes for some decent evening entertainment with your SO, but taken on its own there’s very little to recommend this film.

147) The Miracle Worker (1962, Arthur Penn)

OK, so for a film with an IMDb rating of 8.1 this is pretty damn low on the list. Am I the one monster in the pack? (trust me, that metaphor works) Or am I just the only person who’s willing to see through the façade of inspirational sweetness this film puts out there? Actually it’s probably the former, I’m afraid. The fact is that in spite of knowing and imagining how terrible an existence Helen Keller’s must have been - not being able to interact in any way with the world around her - I just found her so bloody irritating in this film. But not so much her personally, the film itself was irritating because it just seemed to be 90 minutes of Helen loudly breaking things and wrestling really quite violently and uncomfortably with Annie (played by Anne Bancroft). It was basically just one long stream of frustration porn followed by ten minutes of “hooray, it’s finally worked! Huzzah for humanity!”. Obviously Arthur Penn, maker of Bonnie and Clyde, is not interested in the usual heart-warming formula. But I don’t know, there is still a reason that formula exists.

148) Funny People (2009, Judd Apatow)

For a movie about funny people making other people laugh, this really isn’t funny. Having said that, I don’t think it was ever really the point to make it funny but the point seems instead to make a ‘behind-the-curtain’ look at the stand-up life. The only trouble is it’s bad in that sense as well. It’s rare indeed for Adam Sandler to become even less likeable on screen but his George Simmons is a complete twat, inoperable condition or not. The biggest problem with this film, though, is that it doesn’t even know what it’s doing. A huge part of the film seems to be setting up the fact that Sandler is going to reconnect with his ex-wife and settle down and become a better guy, and then it sort of realises too late that that's not going to work… whoops, well let's trying and make it about the bromance? No there’s no chemistry there either. Oh well, let’s just roll the credits and maybe people will have gotten some satisfaction out of it. Messy = all well and good if it’s funny, and not funny = all well and good if there’s a satisfying serious point, but messy and not funny? Sorry, Judd Apatow. You’ve made far better films. This one is only really more enjoyable than… say…

149) Incendies (2010, Denis Villeneuve)

No, I'm just fucking with my brother here.

149) The Beach (2000, Danny Boyle)

I remember when this film came out. It was panned sight-unseen by me for being lady porn staring Leo DiCaprio's torso: at the very height of DiCaprio’s hysterically-screaming-underwear-throwing-nymphet phase, he stars in a movie mostly topless and all the hysterically-screaming-nymphets pack an extra pair of underwear and tramp off to the movies in droves. Back then, little did I suspect that Leo would toil for ten years under the tutelage of Martin Scorsese and earn a modicum of respect from me. Little did I know at the time that at the helm of this film was the maker of that wonderful dark comedy Shallow Grave. So what better time to catch up with, and re-educate myself about, this film than now, at the height of possibility for proving myself wrong? Yes, the circumstances were right. What wasn't right was that this film may not have just been lady porn. But worse yet: ninety minutes of a still image of a shirtless DiCaprio staring at the camera would have been far more worthy of being put on film than the brainless shit this film ends up being. It’s over-the-top teenage soap opera drivel, comprising of the most atrociously awkward dialogue and an adolescent fantasy plot that even Boyle can’t inject with the right quantity of sinister darkness. He tries - oh, he tries - but there's just such bad writing, so many cardboard cutout characters being badly portrayed here; even Tilda Swinton can't escape playing a caricature of herself, and she wasn't even famous yet. At the end of the day this film is just so silly that any semblance of suspense, or desire for emotional investment, gets crushed under the weight of the pile of money this film made from hysterical teenage girls (#1D #Harry4life). But seriously, on that point, Leo is cute but  I don’t think anyone could go that crazy for his shapeless, pasty torso; he's no McConaughey. Maybe I was, and am, wrong about what this film aimed to do. But I'm not wrong about it failing to do anything else.

Now let's all take a deep breath. Put the negativity aside, and tomorrow we'll go back to the lush, verdant pastures at the top of my list. Or rather, knowing my taste in films, the gnarled, hollowed-out husks of once-lush pastures ravaged by disaster and chemical warfare. But artistic integrity!

Movies of 2013 Part 6: 40-21

And off we go again...

40) Maria Full of Grace (2004, Joshua Marston)

From one local library acquisition to another. I’d heard vague things about this film when it came out but had generally managed to ignore and evade it. Definitely no regrets about having caught up with it, though. A gritty and somewhat ugly portrayal of the drug trafficking industry between Colombia and the US, it’s told through the lens of a pregnant 17-year-old (Maria) who signs on as a drug mule to raise funds for her family. I won’t pretend this film is particularly surprising: it hits a lot of the beats you would expect such a story to tell, but it tells that story well, and left me with a hollowed-out feeling of the futility of it all. Indeed, I’m not even sure if futility is the breakout message intended, but the intricate redemptive themes just passed me by as this film affected me in other ways.

39) 2046 (2004, Kar Wai Wong)

Wow, more than a hundred films into my write-up, and this is our first look at Wong Kar Wai. Spoiler: there will be more. But then of course there will, because he’s a fucking brilliant filmmaker. This sort of sequel to Wong’s masterpiece In the Mood for Love received more than a few mixed reviews upon its release, leading me stupidly to neglect it for ten years before finally resuming my rightful place in Wong’s corner, cheering on everything he does. While this is definitely a far less straightforward film than its predecessor, it is packed full of stunning imagery and travels sideways and backwards across a narrative trajectory whose emotional rewards are very rich. 2046 finds its way at the bottom of the Wong pile this year because it will need a revisit to fathom completely, but at the same time as I was a bit perplexed by it, I fell instantly in love with its lush, seductive vision of Hong Kong’s future. Oh, and it goes without saying it helps to have Tony Leung as your guide through the journey.

38) No (2012, Pablo Larraín)

Chile! Nanananana, na, na, nana! So goes the incredibly catchy advertising jingle at the core of this film, a song I’ve gotten stuck in my head more than a few times since watching it, in spite of my obviously not knowing the lyrics. This is a wonderfully uplifting South American film about the power of the common people to affect big political change. Uplifting it is, while still paying enough credit to the audience to depict the struggle, the moral dilemmas, and the perspective of the antagonist to our central character. Gael García Bernal is always good value, and he delivers again here as the mercurial advertising whiz-kid in charge of a campaign to oust Pinochet via ballot. This is really likeable filmmaking: cerebral and politically savvy enough, but ultimately non-threatening and easy to absorb. It’s a sign of a certain type of good film when both Bec and I enjoy it. It probably also means there’s a minimum of people’s limbs getting hacked off. Bec, for some reason, loves that stuff.

37) La Règle du Jeu (1939, Jean Renoir)

There was most definitely a strong current flowing against this film when I sat down to watch it. Baffled by the only other Renoir film I’d seen (La Grande Illusion) and even more baffled by its reputation, I wandered with some trepidation into this... and to my delight got a very solid, witty film out of it. Revolving around the melodramatic interactions amongst a group of the social elite during a sojourn at a French chateau, this film bears a thematic resemblance to some of Buñuel’s films that have yet to be discussed (was probably a great influence on them). This is somewhat more conventional storytelling than those latter, however, with a distinct narrative arc filled with misunderstandings, rash acts and their consequences. I won’t pretend this film knocked me for six, but it was very solidly entertaining and a huge amount better than I’d expected going in.

36) Alphaville (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)

So we come to the highest-ranked of Godard’s films and, surprise surprise, it’s a dystopian genre piece. I say ‘surprise surprise’ because I think in a filmography as stylistically distinctive but thematically inscrutable as Godard’s, a nice piece of familiar genre filmmaking is a good way to get me on board. And it’s not like Godard allows the generic conventions to dictate his style here, either: it’s very much in his manner of doing things, and there are some notably discordant elements that make this film unique. Story-wise it’s nothing out of the ordinary, pulling together sci-fi and hard-boiled detective elements in a mystery narrative arc, but the film is definitely most memorable for the sensations it produces. At times it’s uncomfortable (the Alpha60 computer voice is, in a word, excruciating) but at all times intriguing. It just makes me wonder about other unfathomable directors who might have tried their hand at this genre... did Fellini ever do a dystopia?

35) Days of Being Wild (Aa Fei Zing Zyun, 1990, Kar Wai Wong)

So we didn’t have to wait too long for more of Wong Kar Wai to be introduced. It’s also somewhat odd to me that this ranks higher than 2046, because while both have a beautiful, melancholic quality, Days of Being Wild has a real cruel quality to it, at least in terms of its central character. He’s not a heartless type so much as aimless, but his aimlessness takes on a callous quality when dealing with the two women who fall for his wayward charms. This film is interesting from an attachment theory point of view, but as with Wong’s other films, there is a picturesque beauty to every frame. As much as I grew to hate ‘Yuddy’, the main character, the build-up of sweeping melancholy in the scenarios played out by the two female leads is heart-rending and bittersweet. I seem to be playing from the same songbook when I describe Wong’s films, but then his films all seem to follow a similar sort of tune: an inventively harmonious and mellifluent tune.

34) Hana-Bi (1997, Takeshi Kitano)

I’ve had this film in my DVD collection for a long time, and for some reason it just sat there on the shelf. I think at one point I confused it with Wong Kar-Wai’s As Tears Go By and thought I’d already seen it. Regardless, I went in expecting a similarly frenetic gang violence-type movie, and it took a good 40 minutes before I realised this isn’t that type of film at all. At first I was becoming increasingly chagrined that there were so few urban shootouts and car chases, and in all honesty this chagrin didn’t really dissipate until near the end of the film. Then something funny happened. Kitano’s subtle, downbeat direction not only began to grow suddenly on me, but it’s been continuing to grow ever since. This still has much of the aesthetic of a police crime drama, but imbued with an incredible depth of feeling and nuance. It’s a very different film, not only to what you tend to expect, but to other films in general. I’m definitely interested in learning more about Kitano in the future.

33) Where is the Friend's Home? (Khane-ye Doust Kodjast?, 1987, Abbas Kiarostami)

As discussed earlier in relation to Life and Nothing More, this is the first in Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy and the film that frames the narrative of the latter film. This film has a distinctly odd pretext: while doing his nightly homework, a young boy realises he has mistakenly taken home his friend’s work book, without which his friend will be unable to complete the homework and most likely be expelled from school on a third-strike-and-out basis. From that odd premise Kiarostami takes the boy on a journey to the next town to try and locate his friend’s home to return the book. The film is quite obviously unscripted for the most part, and there is a messy quality to it that nevertheless remains grounded. Also, it’s fascinating how suspenseful the film becomes given how simple its premise is, with a burgeoning sense of importance of the boy’s quest. We’re given another fascinating look into rural Iranian civilisation and treated to quite a delightfully ironic denouement.

32) The Fugitive (1993, Andrew Davis)

A big film that I’d never caught up with, this was the final film I watched on the flight home from New York. While it will never be more than a bit of a popcorn thrill ride, it’s about as solid an example as you can get. Harrison Ford is at his best in the good guy-done-wrong routine, and Tommy Lee Jones supports admirably while also providing the moral compass of the film. Kimble is obviously in the moral right, we know that, but Jones’ Agent Gerard is cleverly used to point the question of right and wrong in the right direction when needed. This film is tense, exciting, but also very tightly paced and controlled, so the suspense and drama trickles out at a steady pace. There’s ultimately no great insight into the human condition delivered here, it’s just knockout entertainment. The tension was also heightened for me because the climactic scene was just starting when I was told to pack up my monitor for the descent into Sydney, and I wasn’t sure if I could stick it out. Spoiler alert: I did.

31) Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, Robert Bresson)

As with Max Ophüls, I didn’t manage to follow Filmspotting’s Bresson marathon assiduously, but did manage to catch this pearler. And what a rip-roaring hoot it isn’t. To sum up this film succinctly, it’s basically a study through the eyes of an innocent animal of what complete c***s human beings are by nature. I recognise hints in this film both of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados and Haneke’s Das Weiße Band, dealing with a village community populated largely by simple, well-intentioned people but dominated by selfish folk with a callous disregard for others’ suffering. Bresson’s donkey Balthazar forms an obvious Christ figure here, taking on the suffering of those around him without complaining (well, he’s a donkey). Bresson’s striking shots of the eyes of the donkey reflecting the actions around him are a powerful bit of imagery, and help to make this a work both to lament and reflect on. Not upbeat, but very effective.

30) Footnote (Hearat Shulayim, 2011, Joseph Cedar)

I’m not sure how many others of the Filmspotting faithful headed out to find this wonderful film after semi-regular guest critic Michael Phillips listed it among his favourite films of 2012, but it is well worth a visit. It tells the story of rival Talmud scholars Eliezer and Uriel, who also happen to be father and son, and the fallout over the announcement that the father will finally get the academic recognition he feels he deserves. At the heart of this film is a thirst for approval, both from Eliezer the father in relation to his peers and from Uriel in relation to his father. But it also strikes me as a wonderfully Jewish film, full of stubborn male egos and family tension. I think many may see this as a bit of an academic slog, but the moral dilemma it presents and the way it heightens the drama also makes it a captivating watch.

29) Jules et Jim (1962, François Truffaut)

It’s been many, many years since I last watched a Truffaut film, and it was most definitely like the return of an old friend. Jules et Jim is essentially a tender love story, but one not about a romance between man and woman but between two male friends, possibly pioneering the concept of bromance. The story spans a number of years as Catherine, the woman at the centre of the love triangle, vacillates between the French Jules and the Austrian Jim while simultaneously vacillating between charmingly impulsive and batshit crazy. I’m not well-versed in history enough to know if there’s a geopolitical subtext to the friendship between Jules & Jim (I mean there’s obviously subtext but I don’t know if there’s an overt analogy), but the story of their relationship is an achingly bittersweet piece of melodrama.

28) Zero Dark Thirty (2012, Kathryn Bigelow)

So I certainly wasn’t part of the bullshit movement that called out this film for ‘glorifying torture’; nor was I part of the similarly bullshit converse movement that called out this film for “suggesting the US tortured people; they would never do such a thing”. I think it’s fairly evident that the US tortured suspects, and I think it’s fair enough to assume that said torture would provide some information that may, at some point down the line and through further investigations, led to discovering the whereabouts of Bin Laden. That’s not what this film is about: its plot is that of a procedural investigative thriller, but the question it asks us is: in the end, was it all worth it? It doesn’t seek to answer that question, it’s not in any way part of the stupid jingoistic movement that pretended that Bin Laden’s death solved anything. It’s a powerfully provocative bit of filmmaking from Kathryn Bigelow, who is a wonderful director. While her ex-husband fiddles with himself in the sandbox of computer animation, she is making serious, grown-up films for adults. And this is her best work.

27) Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshô Dayû, 1954, Kenji Mizoguchi)

We’ve reached the last, and hence top-ranked, of the Mizoguchi films, and funnily enough this was also the first one that I watched. While not centrally about prostitutes, this does feature a prostitute or two, but let’s not focus too heavily on that (we have Mizoguchi to focus too heavily on that for us). This is an epic tale about familial bonds and the resistance they hold in the face of major adversity. Melancholic and strangely beautiful, this film is the best of Mizoguchi’s to my mind because of how seamlessly it weaves its narrative magic. Far less self-conscious than some of the others, it just allows the story to be told and lets us draw our own meaning from it. In truth this is probably also his most conventional film, but it works in every way for me.

26) Take Shelter (2011, Jeff Nichols)

I spent an inordinately large amount of time in 2012 trying to find this film, after it became the darling of critics and alternative cinema goers at the end of 2011, but never managed to grab a copy of it until Jez put it on a hard drive and lent it to me. Although my initial enthusiasm had had time to dissipate, it didn’t take too long for this film to ratchet it up under its own steam. Michael Shannon’s devastating performance is the lynchpin of this film, but Nichols’ sparse, small-town-America aesthetic is also given its best treatment here. It feels like a deceptively simple story, but Nichols and Shannon are able to draw from the premise an immense foreboding doom which strikes at the heart of the everyday dream of domesticity. Jessica Chastain provides the balance, the yardstick of normality on which Shannon’s mental instability can be measured, and the sequence between the two of them in the storm shelter is one that will stick around in my memory for a long time. Absolutely brilliant film.

25) The Wedding Banquet (Xi Yan, 1993, Ang Lee)

So we move from a devastating film about the breakdown of a family to a beguiling and funny film about a family not really breaking down when it very well could have. What I really enjoyed about this early effort from Ang Lee was how much it kept me guessing. There are so many occasions when I thought I knew where the plot was going and it yanked me in a completely different direction. Aside from its cleverness in this regard, it’s also just a funny and sweet family story about love in the modern world (and yet it’s 20 years old, hmmm...). It was also a very good film for Bec and me to watch together, bringing together the themes of culture clash and familial expectations, and lampooning them all admirably.

24) The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972, Luis Buñuel)

Buñuel hasn’t been discussed for a while, although there were quite a few of his films I caught up with this year (I’d never seen one prior to 2013). I’d like to call this one of his stranger efforts, but I’m almost certain there’s far more intense weirdness still to explore in his filmography. It is, however, just an odd style of filmmaking, a series of episodes in the life of a group of well-to-do socialites who repeatedly meet up for a meal and inevitably don’t end up eating. If that sounds like a weird premise for a movie, I’m glad, because that’s the strangeness of it. What’s even more strange is just how entertaining it becomes, with their interactions being witty and amusing as well as offbeat and somewhat surreal. It’s most definitely a difficult film to fathom, but even without understanding it’s quite easy to be taken along for a charming ride.

23) La Promesse (1996, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

The second of the Dardennes’ films on this list, and another story of young people trying to overcome parental issues and forge meaning for themselves. In this case it’s the story of Igor, a young lad whose father is a con artist scamming money from illegal immigrants. The titular ‘promesse’ (that’s ‘promise’ by the way) forms a powerful moral dilemma for Igor as he has to decide between loyalty to his father and loyalty to his own conscience, plus in the mix is the question about what, ultimately, is the right thing to do. It’s a fascinatingly complex quandary posed by the Dardennes, and it plays out in a deeply absorbing drama. Jérémie Renier and Olivier Gourmet play Igor and his father, respectively, and are both extremely good in their diverse roles in drawing out the two sides of the dilemma.

22) Mississippi Burning (1988, Alan Parker)

This is a film that really surprised me. The plot centres around two FBI agents investigating a disappearance (we know it’s a homicide) in a small Mississippi town during the pre-Civil Rights era. While the plot is tense, exciting stuff with an immense sense of menace, what really surprised me was the unexpected source of some of that menace. Prior to watching this, it had never occurred to me that Stephen Tobolowsky could be a threatening presence. Here he plays the town’s industrial champion whom the two agents suspect of being the local KKK leader, and it’s precisely Tobolowsky’s simple, everyman ordinariness that makes his character such a menace, because his subtle policy of racial hatred is so inconspicuous as to be dangerous. By contrast, the more overtly threatening Michael Rooker seems less perilous because his explicitness betrays an instability and insecurity that will ultimately be his downfall. The threat being well established, the ‘good cop bad cop’ conceit of Hackman and Defoe in the central roles leads to a somewhat conventional but deeply satisfying denouement. I really, really liked this one.

21) The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste, 2001, Michael Haneke)

Falling just outside my top 20 is this sweet, upbeat comedy about the redemptive power of the human spirit. Sorry, my brain just clocked off there for a second, where was I? So seriously, this film is located very firmly in Haneke’s bailiwick of cruel, sadistic stories of human misery, and is by a long way the most difficult film of his that I’ve come across yet (no, I haven’t seen Funny Games). Isabelle Huppert is quite astonishingly good as the standoffish pianist and elite tutor sheltering a dark secret, and there is a striking courage to her performance and the gusto with which she embraces it. I can’t say that this film left me feeling particularly enlightened, and it obviously didn’t leave me feeling happy, but with this much emotional power you can’t really help but respect it.

Now that I've got you on tenterhooks on the precipice of my top 20, it gives me great pleasure to vex you by announcing that in the next post, I'll be taking a step back to count up my bottom 10 films of the year, in an infuriating system of counting down which I think I invented, then Jez stole, so now it looks like I stole it from him.

Movies of 2013 Part 5: 60-41

And we dip our toe into my top 50. But first, some films that didn't make the top 50. That's the way countdowns in lots of 20 sometimes work...

60) X-Men: First Class (2011, Matthew Vaughn)

So this is the other film that is far more sophisticated than it has any right to be, and another of the films I watched on planes. I found this film actually gripping, which is quite a startling achievement, given how high-concept the whole X-Men universe is. It’s helped here in no small way by the stellar cast, and in particular the byplay between James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender in the leads. There are most definitely problems with this film: the scene where the young recruits are sitting around coming up with ‘nicknames’ for each other is excruciating, but the fandom elements are cleverly worked in otherwise. As an outsider I didn’t recognise Magneto’s helmet until Fassbender actually put it on, and later in the film it suddenly struck me how well-cast he was as a young Ian McKellen (not that McKellen is the definitive Magneto, but it created a nice symmetry with Bryan Singer’s ­X-Men film universe). I’d maybe regard this more of a guilty pleasure, but it remains a remarkably sophisticated piece of action filmmaking.

59) Repulsion (1965, Roman Polanski)

Did I call Polanski utterly baffling before? Well this sophomore feature effort from him didn’t do much to dispel that image after Knife in the Water, if for no other reason than that I watched them in the opposite order. Actually this is a far more comprehensible film for the most part because it takes the form of a conventional thriller; a visceral and quite disturbing one however. There’s something quite polished about his style here, as well as the unsettling performance he gets out of Catherine Deneuve, and the tortured maiden vibe here has more than a little foreshadowing of Rosemary’s Baby in it. This is not an enjoyable film, but it is a stylish and provocative early horror effort, well-made.

58) My Name is Joe (1998, Ken Loach)

I haven’t watched a lot of Ken Loach – just this and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, but I’ve been pretty warm towards what I’ve seen. I’d got the impression from listening to David and Margaret back in the day that he was a dour, cynical kind of filmmaker, but in spite of the dank, impoverished settings that he uses, he has a very keen, humanist eye for storytelling, and it’s plainly apparent here. OK so this is a romance as well as a drama, but the romance is not sappy in the slightest and Loach allows it to take a back seat to Joe’s principal dilemma and his conflict of loyalties (similar themes, in fact, to those explored in The Wind that Shakes the Barley). Loach obviously has one eye on the darker recesses of human behaviour in society, but the other eye zeroes in sharply on the brighter side, so I find him quite an interesting and intelligent director. I look forward to catching up with more of his work in 2014.

57) Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Otto Preminger)

This is another film that came with the strong recommendation from my brother, and while it’s an enjoyable courtroom drama I again must admit I didn’t love it as much as he did. We’ve had discussions about this, in particular about the fact that I prefer Witness for the Prosecution while he prefers this. Having caught up with only my second Preminger film very, very contemporaneously to writing this review (like, I literally finished watching it about three hours ago), his very methodical, procedural narrative style is very apparent, and it’s that that didn’t quite work for me in this film. Interesting and thought-provoking that it is, it just lacks the drama and excitement that I want from a courtroom drama. They’re not elements I demand, or expect, but when the film you’re dealing with is as long as this, I just need more overt conflict to keep me fully engaged.

56) Life, and Nothing More... (Zendegi va Digar Hich, 1992, Abbas Kiarostami)

The second in Kiarostami’s ‘Koker trilogy’, after Where is the Friend’s Home (which will come up later – possibly in the bottom ten of the year, but almost certainly higher than this), this stands firmly in the Iranian school of meta-filmmaking. The basic plot summary is that, after having made Where is the Friend’s Home in a rural area of Iran called Koker five years previously, an earthquake hits the town and the earlier film’s director (portrayed by an actor, it’s not documentary-style) visits the town to try and find out if the novice actors he used are OK or affected by it. This also has a very meditative and reflective quality to it, as one would expect from Kiarostami, as the ‘director’ meets and converses with various people along the way about how they’re coping with life and discovering what values people hold as important. The film doesn’t conform to any of the more conventional narrative themes from such a story, as its interest is more in posing questions than answering them, but it does so admirably. It left me quite deeply contemplative about the society depicted, and what is really worth valuing in life.

55) The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang)

The funny thing about film noir is that sometimes the most easy examples to watch and enjoy are those where the sense of danger is lessened. Maybe it’s just the more wise-cracking the detective, the more likeable, or the less high the stakes, the more enjoyable is the game. The Big Heat strikes me as a very gritty example of the genre, where the detective starts out talking tough, but gets broken down in many ways by the perilous circumstances in which he finds himself. As a result, this is certainly less of a joyride than encountering The Maltese Falcon for the first time, for example, but it’s well-plotted action, and with one or two obvious heavy-handed exceptions, a really good moody piece.

54) The Killer (Dip Huet Seung Hung, 1989, John Woo)

Probably John Woo’s most famous film and certainly now my favourite of his (I’ve seen two (three) and you’ve already read me discussing the other(s)). This is Hong Kong action filmmaking at its best, really. Following a similarly noir story to the above, we follow the misadventures of Chow Yun-Fat’s assassin as he plots one final job. I’m sure it’s a pretty archetypical character, but there’s (antecedent) shades of Clint Eastwood’s Bill Munny in this: the apparently remorseless killer who has an inexplicably protective instinct for innocent people. However, Woo doesn’t have Clint Eastwood’s knack for moral ambivalence, so the two sides of the character are both presented in narratively schizophrenic ways: oh, he’s violent and ruthless; oh, now he’s rescuing a baby. The relationship between him and Inspector Dumbo, though, is enjoyable, and while the film’s sentiment is fed to us through the emotional equivalent of a beer bong, it’s all part and parcel of the 80s Hong Kong action vibe.

53) To Have and Have Not (1944, Howard Hawks)

Howard Hawks was another director whose filmography I tried to catch up with, despite the fact he strikes me very much as a studio man of the golden era rather than someone with a distinctive style of his own. To Have and Have Not does have a similar sort of vibe to another of his works, The Big Sleep, owing mainly to the fact that it’s got practically the same entire cast. Yes, well spotted, it actually only shares two actors in common, but when those two actors are Bogart and Bacall, there will inevitably be ‘chemical’ cross-contamination, if you know what I mean. Anyway, all that said I had a goodly amount of fun with this film: there’s a decent amount of suspense with a subtle political undercurrent played out largely through the tension between Bogart and the French authorities. Walter Brennan seems oddly out of place here, but there is obviously a strong on-screen relationship between the two leads, and that’s really at the heart of this film.

52) Searching for Sugar Man (2012, Malik Bendjelloul)

I was definitely set up for a disappointment for this film, having been told by everyone, living or dead, and many not yet born, that this was the greatest conceivable movie. In the end it didn’t disappoint me, even in spite of the fact that I went in having already read a couple of pieces that debunk a lot of its mythology. The fact is this isn’t traditional documentary filmmaking at all, but very much part of the new wave of documentary style films more or less covering real events. The fact is that however much spin and creative licence were taken with the story of unearthing ‘Rodriguez’ doesn’t bother me at all. It helps, of course, that the subject matter is not controversial, and the fallout from the making of this film would never hurt anybody, but notwithstanding it doesn’t matter a whit whatever this lacks in veracity. It’s really just classic storytelling.

51) 12 Years a Slave (2013, Steve McQueen)

I’m writing this the day this film just picked up the Golden Globe for best motion picture – drama, so I feel immediately on the defensive that this film has fallen outside my top 50. To be honest I can really only put it down to maybe a bit of a difficult 50/50 decision when sorting these films that went the other way, but moreover I’d put it down to personal resonance. While I appreciate McQueen’s scintillating eye for drama, and his clinical restraint in portraying such dark subject matter, I still didn’t manage to get as emotionally tied up as I would expect. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o deliver towering performances (from what I’ve seen so far of the competition, they both deserve an Oscar, not just Nyong’o) and there’s outstanding support all the way down the line – yes, even from Brad Pitt, Adam from Filmspotting – but the film didn’t really get me in the feels until the redemption at the end (that’s not a spoiler, I mean the guy clearly wrote his own memoir somehow). At least, not in a cathartic way.

50) Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais)

Resnais was another filmmaker whom I was kind of stalled trying to discover due to scarce availability (legitimately or otherwise). This and one other of his films was all I managed to see, although they are certainly a good start. This film carries a fair amount of emotional baggage, both as a bittersweet love story and as a sort of post-mortem dissection of Japan after the war, and it was nice, following last year’s Amour, to catch Emmanuelle Riva in an earlier, younger role. Overall the film had an oddly detached quality to it, which worked to its artistic credit, but made me feel strangely conflicted by the end. I shouldn’t expect too much of course, but as with the previous film, the emotional wallop is there to be delivered and I felt like it either missed me, or I somehow dodged it in watching.

49) Au Revoir les Enfants (1987, Louis Malle)

Wrapping up my Louis Malle retrospective, this is most certainly the most ‘complete’ film of his I watched this year. To be honest, the only real problem I had with this is that it has a very samey, generic “French cinema” feel to it, but it’s good storytelling, and has some beautifully shot sequences. I’m not quite sure yet what I make of Malle as a director, but I can say this is his most visually appealing film, and probably the one I emotionally connected with best. It’s no mean feat to make a film that feels so genuine and heartfelt with a cast of such young actors, but this film manages to pull it off.

48) The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997, Jafar Panahi)

A film that Adam from Filmspotting pimped the hell out of during their contemporary Iranian cinema marathon, it shot right to the top of my to-watch list. And I wasn’t disappointed. Again in the school of Iranian meta-filmmaking, this has a very similar vibe to the other Panahi film I’ve seen, Offside, in that you’re never really sure if you’re watching a fictional narrative unfold or some kind of pseudo-documentary. Regardless of the veracity, this is another really fascinating snapshot of urban Iranian society and culture, typifying norms and values as it follows a little girl’s journey home from school. The girl’s voice is undoubtedly irritating in its screechy register, but the story she leads us on is interesting enough to cut through.

47) The Life of Oharu (Saikaku Ichidai Onna, 1952, Kenji Mizoguchi)

Another in the Mizoguchi catalogue, this one, surprisingly, doesn’t have anything, at all, to do with prostitutes! Except that the lead character is a prostitute, and the story is exclusively about her long career as a prostitute. This one doesn’t venture into the preachy territory that I reacted against in some of Mizoguchi’s other films, but rather focuses on the heartfelt story of the ageing Oharo: themes of family honour, regret and the class divide are dredged up and explored, but without proselytising. Kinuyo Tanaka, who appears in many of Mizoguchi’s films, delivers a subtle but brutally honest performance as Oharu, and the film is worth watching for that alone.

46) Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino)

Wow, this is embarrassing. Only several films after I’m in defensive mode over 12 Years a Slave and suddenly this quandary. I am pretty sure when doing my sort on these films, I was never offered the choice between 12 Years a Slave and this, because the former would most certainly have come out on top. I can only say some other film became a pivot point where ‘enjoyment’ of this worked in its favour. As well as Django Unchained falls into Tarantino’s new genre of ‘righteous historical revenge fantasy’, there’s also a certain moral corruptness in the ‘good guys vs bad guys’ black-and-white approach he takes here. What makes 12 Years a Slave a far more worthy film is the way it portrays slavery as a subtle evil by focusing light on the people who just sat and watched and let it all happen. Obviously Django is a fun film, full of memorable characters, quotable dialogue and satisfying vengeance sequences, but the fact is its particular spot on this list I’m marking down as a statistical anomaly.

45) Captain Phillips (2013, Paul Greengrass)

Another statistical anomaly, I hear you asking? Actually, no. I thoroughly enjoyed this real-time drama from the master of this non-genre. The funny thing was, about twenty minutes into this film, it struck me that it had a vaguely familiar air, and that was when I realised that the atmosphere was very similar to United 93. For some reason I’d had in my head that the latter was directed by Michael Winterbottom, but it made sense instead that Greengrass was applying that real-time horror aesthetic to this retelling of the 2009 capturing of an American freight ship by Somali pirates. The atmosphere is wonderfully chilling, and the performance by the unknown Barkhad Abdi is profoundly impassioned. The other big, pleasant surprise though, was the subdued but captivating performance by Tom Hanks as the eponymous lead. It’s fair to go into this film expecting one of Hanks’ trademark scenery-chewing Oscar pitches, but there’s a commanding honesty and gravitas to his Captain Phillips that forms the heart and soul of a tense and gripping film.

44) Up in the Air (2009, Jason Reitman)

Another pleasant surprise, this, and with Sleepwalk with Me another candidate for worst possible film to watch on a sleep-deprived flight. This was the only one of ten Best Picture nominations I managed to avoid in 2009 (feeling safe that it wouldn’t win anything), and even against my better judgement, felt it was worth catching up with. What really surprised me is what an emotional core this film had. I’d gone in expecting some of Reitman’s typical quirky, cynical comedy – and there is that; I mean ‘quirky, cynical comedy’ is basically a three-word description of George Clooney’s acting style – but it also packs a surprising emotional sting. The most crucial scene (without spoiling too much) is also a thoroughly thought-provoking one, simply because it’s a scene we’ve seen a hundred times before, but with the traditional gender roles reversed. Somehow that subversion makes it not only surprising but also largely affecting. I found it fascinating because it also asked questions about my own preconceptions and prejudices. It’s a respectable film that can do all of that.

43) An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no Aji, 1962, Yasujiro Ozu)

In spite of my ambition to catch up with more Ozu this year, he really is a difficult filmmaker to get your hands on without, you know, the radical step of actually buying DVDs. This one I did watch in bought-DVD form, and it brought me to many of the same places that his masterpiece Tokyo Montagatari did last year. The two films are similarly meditative, and both have a deep interest in ageing and the duties that a family should perform for each other. While this doesn’t have quite the profound philosophical bent that Tokyo does, there are many moments that were quite touching, as well as lots of moments of humour (generally drunken humour). Ozu definitely strikes me as a director with a distinctive style and eye, and I look forward to agglomerating more knowledge of his singular body of work in the future.

42) Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s Kino-Apparatom, 1929, Dziga Vertov)

So last year, about here in my rankings, was a film called Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which was basically just a silent documentary of a day in the life of Berlin. Man with a Movie Camera, I think regarded by many as one of the first documentaries (although Berlin was earlier, go figure), is basically the same premise in the Soviet Union (Mostly Moscow, although apparently also Kiev and Odessa). This is slightly less straightforward fly-on-the-wall filming though, and progresses in a far more narrative style. There’s almost a gonzo feel to some of the sequences as we see Vertov with his movie camera become part of the scene. Basically it’s an absurdly simple premise, but while such a simple premise can form the basis of a fascinating historical document, it can also lead to a remarkably entertaining 60 minutes as well.

41) Like Stars on Earth (Taare Zameen Par, 2007, Aamir Khan)

Another sort of recommendation from Jez, but also one I just happened to acquire from my local library, this is part of what I see (and, in case you haven’t cottoned on yet, I know nothing) as a modern Bollywood trend of telling dramatic, topical stories in Bollywood style, rather than pulling from the more tried and true well of folklore and fairytales. What you get as a result isn’t nearly as colourful or entertaining as your typical Bollywood film (there is only one really upbeat song and dance number here) but rather an oddly sombre musical piece. The very quixotic tale Khan tells (and stars in) here revolves around the message that children with learning difficulties need to be treated with equal patience and care as their more able compadres. The message is somewhat preachy, but it’s easy to forgive it for two reasons: firstly, the inherent camp quality of Bollywood filmmaking allows for a certain leniency; but secondly and more importantly, it strikes me that such things as learning difficulties are more likely to be treated as a greater stigma in developing economies like India, so films like this are probably important in informing the communal consciousness. Along with all of that, I do enjoy a bit of Bollywood.

Movies of 2013 Part 4: 80-61

No preamble this time, aside from this.

80) The Machinist (2004, Brad Anderson)

Another of my local library acquisitions and quite an enjoyable one. Perhaps most famous for being the film for which Christian Bale lost an enormous amount of weight to become roughly the width of a blade of grass, in my opinion this film deserves a lot more recognition. It has all the best qualities of a Fight Club or Memento-style thriller, and its couple of faults lie only really in being a little too ambitious stylistically and maybe not being quite innovative enough to be really surprising. Just shy of utterly compelling otherwise though, I certainly found it an enjoyable and underrated film.

79) Sunshine (2007, Danny Boyle)

Another Danny Boyle film, and another critical flaw. For the most part this is a great bit of sci-fi filmmaking: sparse, isolating; claustrophobic, with a subtle underlying menace throughout. Farbeit from me to repeat what every critic ever has said about this movie, but the fact remains the final thirty minutes of this film are very different from the remainder. I won’t go so far as to say that it’s a weak ending, but the trouble is it makes this a very different film, so it forces the viewer to reassess. Alfonso Cuaron showed just this year how captivating it can be to use space as its own character, and using that as a comparison point, the first 90 minutes or so of Sunshine are the far more gripping parts. I didn’t dislike the ending, but it didn’t quite sit comfortably with what preceded it.

78) Damage (1992, Louis Malle)

So there’s another general rule in ‘filmmaking to please Sam and Sam alone’: if you’re going to put a trashy soap opera on screen, have the decency to cast Jeremy Irons. Honestly, to list all the things that are tacky and bad about this film would take half a page. However, Irons is never bad value, even when presented with material, and on-screen chemistry, as poor as this. Without giving too much away as I’m sure you’re all chomping at the bit to watch this now, there is one scene in particular (and it’s the obvious scene) which is just such a hideous horror even to conceive, and I think Malle handles it with aplomb. It makes this film memorable and almost forgivable for all the other excruciating moments it delivers.

77) The Kid with a Bike (Le Gamin au Vélo, 2011, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

The second of three Dardenne films I saw this year, and also the first to be mentioned so apparently the weakest. This is not a weak film, however: it’s down this low simply because I found Cyril, the eponymous ‘kid with a bike’ emotionally unpredictable and unsympathetic as a result. The stories the Dardennes tell seem all to revolve around the themes of kids with parental issues, trying to forge a life and meaning for themselves. I think in some ways this more recent effort is also one of their more despondent efforts. It ends, as they all do, ambiguously, but with a very pronounced sense of the ongoing cycle of misfortune and misadventure. More pronounced than in the other films of theirs (which we’ll get to later), where I got a greater sense of promise (no pun intended).

76) Knife in the Water (Nóz w Wodzie, 1962, Roman Polanski)

Now if Jean-Luc Godard remains enigmatic as a filmmaker to me, then I’d have to call Roman Polanski just baffling. Stepping back from Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby and his more recent mainstream resurgence to see his earlier European efforts is a really odd experience. Not least so because this, in particular, is quite an odd film. A well-to-do middle-aged couple randomly pick up a young hitchhiker and take him on their sailboat for the day, and the three of them argue about class, ageing and property ownership. There’s some really interesting dialogue, and quite an elusive central conflict that nevertheless remains intriguing. But ultimately I could not really tell you the point of this film; it has that minimalist, artistic temperament of European cinema, but also just comes from a stylistic place I can’t quite fathom.

75) Waiting for Guffman (1996, Christopher Guest)

As I said when discussing Best in Show, Guest’s mockumentary films are pretty easy to like, provided you can engage with the characters. Guest’s own character here, the flamboyant amateur theatre director Corky St Clair, is most definitely a character I can recognise and enjoy, which explains why I enjoyed this more than his other offering. It’s still obviously over-the-top and silly, but the framing plot device, of the Broadway critic Mort Guffman being on his way to view their musical’s opening night, manages to draw out the melodrama and foibles of all the larger-than-life characters. It’s a good plot device for a silly film.

74) Short Cuts (1993, Robert Altman)

It was only about halfway through this multi-thread narrative that I remembered David Stratton writing off PT Anderson’s Magnolia as a Short Cuts imitation. Knowing that at least part of the way through, it’s hard not to make the comparison myself, and when you consider that Magnolia is one of three films always vying for the title of my all-time favourite, unfortunately Short Cuts is going to suffer. For one thing, this strikes me as more multi-thread-for-the-sake-of-multi-thread: there isn’t much of a unifying theme, so it’s just sort of a hodgepodge of different stories and different characters. As a result, for the film to be great overall, all of said stories/characters need to be as great as each other, but there are strong ones and weaker ones. Ergo the film becomes a sort of middle-ground affair for me.

73) The Hudsucker Proxy (1994, Joel & Ethan Coen)

Ah, my last ever Coen brothers film to catch up on: this was a bittersweet experience, knowing that I had no new Coen material to watch until… well, soon, when Inside Llewyn Davis comes out. I think this is generally regarded as one of the Coens’ weakest, and I would have to concur, just on the basis that it feels like far more of a mainstream comedy, and doesn’t have enough of their twisted edge to it. There’s also the fact that the Coens + Paul Newman should = cinematic brilliance, and it just doesn’t come up to the sum of their parts. Maybe there’s just too much Tim Robbins being small-town-cute: the act starts to wear a bit thin after a while. Still a decent comedy, just a bit lacking in the Coen brothers’ magic.

72) Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)

As far as I can tell this is the only western I caught up with this year. There were many more on the cards but just less freely available. This is very much in the vein of the classic John Ford western: the danger from the outlaw gang of desperadoes, and the conflict from the innocents in trusting the ‘outlaw but with a conscience’ to protect their lives. John Wayne is of course masterfully utilised here by Ford, but the miscreant cast of characters from various walks of life sharing this perilous stagecoach ride is what makes the film come to life. It’s maybe not as exciting as my favourite westerns – there’s quite a lot of talk – but it’s still good, clean fun.

71) Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Peter Weir)

Finally managed to catch up with this Aussie classic on the plane over to the US. Knowing my ambivalence towards most Australian cinema, I have to say there are parts here that work, and parts that don’t. Weir casts a wonderfully atmospheric veil over the whole film, creating a mood of both mystery and despondence. The mystery of the film also, however, becomes its greatest frustration, because there’s obviously meant to be a sense of unknowing, and of unreliable witnesses, but it becomes a bit difficult to know even what we’re wondering about anymore. The character of Edith is also the most irritating and shrill character I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across, and her amount of screen time just makes the film grind even more slowly.

70) The Palm Beach Story (1942, Preston Sturges)

The last of the three films in the Preston Sturges DVD set I bought, this is probably the less known and remembered, after The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels. That sadly doesn’t do this film credit, however, as I think it’s the comic equal of the other two films. Just a classic screwball plot, involving star-crossed romance, deception and (of course) mistaken identity, it lacks the sparkling dialogue of some of the genre’s more celebrated examples, but still has the hijinks to make it all an amusing ride. Claudette Colbert is the standout performer here – wily and strangely naïve at the same time, she brings this movie to life; without her it could have been just a staid, by-the-numbers comedy.

69) Lincoln (2012, Steven Spielberg)

Ah, I wanted to hate this film. I wanted it to be terrible and finally consign Spielberg to the ashpile of once-great directors that his last ten years of film should otherwise have consigned him. Sadly, the Oscar-bait source material was handled with an uncharacteristic subtlety and restraint by Spielberg, and he simply allowed Daniel Day-Lewis to do his method thing and deliver a captivating portrayal. I still didn’t love it: I thought the handling of the house democrats opposed to the abolition bill was frankly glib, and there were times when Spielberg just couldn’t resist throwing in Oscar montage soundbites, because being Spielberg, he has no ability to tell a story without focusing on winning an Oscar any more. But I still think it was a far better effort than I went in giving it credit for.

68) Easy A (2010, Will Gluck)

There’s a number of films in this run of ten that I will describe as far more sophisticated than they had any right to be (apparently films like that end up somewhere around the 60-70 mark in my preference). This is certainly one of them. At its heart, it’s still little more than a teen comedy/romance, but it outwardly tweaks the generic conventions with an astuteness and comic sensibility that is really admirable. The other big strength of the film is obviously Emma Stone, who manages an adroit performance that is both part of the action on screen, and the framing narrative that tweaks the conventions of the genre. Great fun.

67) The Player (1992, Robert Altman)

Spoiler alert: this is the highest-ranked of my Robert Altman retrospective. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Altman, but there always seems to be a meta-narrative sense to a lot of his films. Like what people appreciate about them isn’t actually what’s on screen but what’s behind it all. And nowhere is it more apparent (to me) than here, basically Altman’s nod and spoof of the underhanded dealings that go on in the Hollywood film industry. Even the IMDb plot description includes as one of its three phrases “Loaded with Hollywood insider jokes” which goes to show how pivotal those insider jokes are to this movie’s success. Honestly there’s a limit to the number of insider jokes that I personally get, but the satire and not-so-subtle message that ‘Hollywood producers are all sleazebags’ are things I can appreciate, so I liked this film well enough.

66) Star Trek (2009, J J Abrams)

Now I’ve made two oblique references to this film twice already in these write-ups, both times without mentioning the actual title. Can you guess what they were? Well let’s tackle the most recent first: this is the second of the films that are far more sophisticated than they had any right to be. I’ll get into that more after discussing the other oblique reference, do you remember what it was? No? After I even specifically told you to remember it? Honestly. OK, well basically when discussing A Prairie Home Companion I talked about ‘another film’ that spoke more deftly to outsiders looking in. This is that film. What J J Abrams does so well here is that there is obviously a sense of fandom to this franchise reboot, and to someone like me who has never watched more than about a minute of any kind of Star Trek footage (TV or movie alike), it still feels like we’re an outsider looking in. However, Abrams manages to balance the fandom with a non-condescending introduction to these characters, the settings and the relationships. He does it cleverly and with a good sense of humour. Really I couldn’t fault this film much at all; the only reason it finds itself down in the 60s is that, despite its best efforts, it remains to me a hollow blockbuster-type film, and I still feel like an outsider, so if it had set out to draw more people into the fandom, it failed in this respect.

65) Sleepwalk with me (2012, Mike Birbiglia/Seth Barrish)

Another of the films I watched on planes somewhere between Sydney and New York, this was one of the more ethereal experiences, given that it deals with severe sleeping problems, which is basically a three-word description of me on a plane anywhere. At the same time though, this is a very funny and surprisingly poignant memoir, which fans of Birbiglia from his spots on This American Life and elsewhere will recognise as part of his inimitable style. As much as I found myself silently yelling arguments at his on-screen persona, there’s a real charm to his everyman fallibility, and he manages to weave a pretty interesting story of personal development into the mix as well. I’m not entirely sure how true to life the story is, but it just feels so genuinely Birbiglian that I was able to suspend disbelief for the duration.

64) My Dinner with Andre (1981, Louis Malle)

Somewhat more… intellectually satisfying than the previous Malle effort on this list, Damage, this is also a fairly different film. I’m sure the ‘deleted scenes’ section of this DVD would include all the car chases and lurid sex scenes that the final cut was lacking, but I think the film is certainly richer for having excluded them. OK so honestly, this film is obviously very talky, but its conversational nature manages to be interesting just by covering a rich depth of subjects in great detail, travelling from life in the theatre to intrepid travels and posing the questions about what life is really about. Yes, it’s far easier to make this film the butt of jokes than to dissect its meaning, but if you’re willing to engage with its subject matter then it’s richly rewarding. If you’re not willing, you can settle for kinetic popcorn trash like, I don’t know…

63) Beverly Hills Cop (1984, Martin Brest)

Ah, popcorn trash. Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it popcorn trash except in a tongue-in-cheek way. No, this isn’t one of the movies that is far more sophisticated than it has any right to be, but it is a great deal of fun. It’s also kind of fun to go from today’s world where Eddie Murphy is such a washed-up joke back to when he was a superstar, and his brand of irreverent sass-mouth was utilised well in films. The hard-boiled nature of the story and the culture clash between Murphy and his LA counterparts is a milieu that works well for him. It’s certainly not intellectual stuff, but it’s definitely well put together action-comedy stuff.

62) The Lady from Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles)

This film seems to be pretty well-known among cinephile circles, but virtually unknown out of it. That’s a bit of a shame, because I think there’s plenty to enjoy in this noir thriller. Welles’ own mumbling accent gets a little annoying at times, but the film has all the other hallmarks of a great film noir and a great femme fatale performance by the underappreciated (these days) Rita Hayworth. However, the film is most worth it for its memorable stagecraft, in particular the final standoff sequence in a carnival hall of mirrors. Without those very memorable visual games, this is otherwise just a solid film noir.

61) Bullets over Broadway (1994, Woody Allen)

Another Woody Allen effort, and one of my more favourably received ones from this year. Classic Allen comedy stuff, featuring a struggling, creatively-stunted Broadway personality and a whole lot of mafia interference. This film is both funny and sweet, with the standout scenes those between John Cusack’s playwright and Chazz Palmintieri’s bodyguard, who despite his loutish appearance happens to be the literary genius that Cusack wishes he still was. Otherwise, there’s just a load of amusing, chaotic hijinks throughout. I guess given my preference for this over some of his other films this year I think I agree with Ned Flanders, in liking his films ‘except for that nervous fella who’s always in them’. Sometimes I just think his comedy works best through other people’s performances.