My 12 best reviews – official

Before I begin, please forgive me for the most appalling self-indulgence. But imagine a callow newcomer, around 1,500 reviews in, rooting through this blog trying to find The Good Stuff. No need! Since I publish the filmic elements on mildly successful social networking site Letterboxd, there's a very easy way to determine which of my witterings are the most defensible: those with the most up-votes from the small number of discerning film nerds who frequent that website. So here are, objectively, my 12 best reviews. Some are po-faced and endless, others just smug one-liners. 'Enjoy'.

12. The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)



Reviewed April 2015
"Here are 10 things I love about The Empire Strikes Back, the best of the series, without any shadow of a hint of a suggestion of a doubt..." (5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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11. The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941)



Reviewed August 2015
"We need to go beyond the canon. The established canon. The regimented canon ... Between the monoliths and the re-evaluated misfires lie films every bit as good: forgotten, neglected, still classic. This masterpiece is a caustic, troubling, profound examination of a Southern family brought low – or high and to prominence, depending on how you view it – by a sea of moral dissolution." (5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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10. Far From Heaven (Tod Haynes, 2002)



Reviewed February 2012
"Haynes's florid recreation of the style of classic-era "women's pictures" is meticulous, the cast is uniformly fine and there's a terrific, backwards-looking score from Elmer Bernstein that captures the essence of the genre ... To get the full effect - and appreciate the dark humour of the opening reels - a crash-course in the work of '50s director Douglas Sirk would definitely help, but I think you can appreciate the film regardless, as a deliciously mannered portrait of an ideal crashing quietly to the floor." (4.5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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9. The Invention of Lying (Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, 2009)



Reviewed December 2012
"What begins as a mildly entertaining high-concept comedy (with Woody Allen-ish credits) turns into an incredibly heavy-handed atheist satire that operates at the heady intellectual and theological level of an 11-year-old skim-reading Philosophy for Beginners." (1/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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8. Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1928)



Reviewed December 2013
"Yesterday saw a rare screening of Kevin Brownlow's near-mythic five-and-a-half-hour reconstruction of Abel Gance's silent film Napoleon, a labour of love that has dominated more than 50 years of the historian's life ... It's the longest film I've ever seen and among the strangest, most restlessly innovative and technically astounding. It's as if Gance had never seen a film before, and no-one had told him that this simply isn't how it's done." (5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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7. About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, 2002)


Reviewed July 2013

"Dear Ndugu,

How are you? I'm fine. Today I watched the film About Schmidt. I enjoyed it. At times I feared it was just a less inspired take on The Straight Story, with a score that went too jaunty too often, and a tendency to undercut its many truthful moments with smug comedy. But then the ending came along, one of the greatest endings I've ever seen, a heartbreaking voiceover followed by a heart-mending pay-off, and I realised that I'd seen something truly extraordinary, a film whose flaws are a small price to pay for a majestic, life-affirming whole. And then there was Nicholson's performance. It's so long since he bothered to act - I suppose One Flew Over must have been the last time - that I was willing him to succeed. And, yes, there were ticks and twitches there, and at times he hadn't quite submerged arrogant, shark-faced Jaaack within self-hating, sad-faced Warren (me), but in the end it was a triumph, just like the movie. Along with the usual cheque, I'm enclosing a little something extra to spend as you please.

Yours very truly,

Warren Schmidt"

(4.5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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6. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)



Reviewed February 2014
"So what's all this then? Basically Banks of New York, with Leonardo DiCaprio as hedonistic stockbroker Jordan Belfort, the kind of guy who caused the global recession.

Here he is having an awesome time. Look at his wife. Look at his car. Look at the size of his house. Here he is snorting cocaine off a hooker's boobs. Here he is doing it another eighteen times. Here he is making money. He has lots of money." (2.5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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5. The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)



Reviewed October 2013

"On this evidence, I'm not sure talking pictures are a very good idea." (1.5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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4. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)



Reviewed August 2013
" 'Something had happened. A thing which years ago had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. And now it came at last: George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance. He got it three times filled and running over. But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.'

But when George Orson Welles, the infuriating, profligate wunderkind of American cinema got his comeuppance - three times full and running over - the whole world was watching." (5/5)

Full 2,278-word review: Letterboxd / This blog

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3. The Outlaw (Howard Hawks, 1943)



Reviewed August 2013
"I'm not going to jugs this film too harshly. It has its knockers, and tit's certainly not the breast Western of the '40s - perbaps the casting of Jack Buetel is a bit of a boob - but it has a couple of really good points, which hold your interest as the cliches rack up." (2.5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / It's not on this blog, I wrote the these all-new boob puns especially.

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2. Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)



Reviewed October 2012
"Wine is probably the most boring subject on Earth, so how come Payne’s film about a lonely, bitter best man (Paul Giamatti) taking the soon-to-be-groom (Thomas Haden Church) on a week-long tour of vineyards is so bloody good? Perhaps because of Giamatti’s astonishing characterisation, which imbues an arrogant, self-destructive, self-hating pseud with a completely disarming humanity. Or perhaps because it’s not really about wine at all, but love and friendship and the choices that people make that end up deciding and defining their lives. It’s the antithesis of formula filmmaking: incredibly entertaining, but also about something, and featuring – quite unexpectedly – a handful of brilliant sight gags." (5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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1. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)



Reviewed October 2012
"You can take your Juno, your Scott Pilgrim, even your Heathers, and chuck them in a skip, because Ghost World just does it all so much better. Well, all of it that's worth doing. I'm beginning to think this melancholy, bitingly hilarious crystallisation of teen ennui might be the only film I'll ever really need." (5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

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Of course, Letterboxd doesn't have that many people on it, so this will continue to be my main review platform, and we're now hitting 20K hits a month, which is lovely. The 10 most popular blogposts are viewable here, with 35K views between them:



Boast boast boast.

Here are three other reviews I was pleased with:

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
Gas, Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992)

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Thanks for reading.