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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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.

***

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

***

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

***

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)

***

Thanks for reading.

Ronald Reagan, a docfest and Dan Harmon's kids film - Reviews #134

In the first update for a little while, we're also talking documentaries, Ronald Reagan yelling about his legs and a really useless romantic comedy.



Reagan (Eugene Jarecki, 2011) – Simply one of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen, an endlessly illuminating, virtuosic study of one of the most fascinating American figures of the 20th Century – a B-movie star turned General Electric salesman turned President – that seeks to tear down Reagan’s constructed image, and explain who he was, what he stood for and whether he’s worth celebrating. The wealth of footage available from Reagan’s life means he’s eminently suited to this kind of profile, and the movie takes full advantage, using archive clips to exalting, chilling and hilarious effect. The sequence illustrating Ronnie’s faltering film career is amazing, including not only a scene with Reagan as a traffic cop that features the worst back projection of all time, but also a clip of him shouting: “Attaboy, Bonzo!” at a chimp, and hugging him. Through intelligent interviewing, sure-sighted polemic and staggeringly brilliant editing (a nuclear war montage cut to 99 Luftballons is a marriage of image and music worthy of Terence Davies at his best), Jarecki creates a dynamic, compelling portrait of a complex figure who made Americans feel good about themselves and their country, but whose simplistic and destructive “Reaganomics” resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy that put millions out of work and destroyed entire towns. If your film is described on Twitter as both a “hatchet job” and a “glowing portrait”, then you’re probably doing something right. Really, it’s an incisive, insightful and even-handed documentary that speaks – and listens – to both sides. Reagan's son, Ron, offers an extremely interesting, thoughtful and balanced assessment of his father’s legacy, while Mark Hertsgaard may be the most handsome man in the world. It’s an astonishing, haunting movie - and a must for modern history buffs. (4)

***



Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008) - An impressive doc about an astonishing story: Philippe Petit’s unsanctioned tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Marsh famously frames the story like a heist movie, cutting between time-frames, and mixing compelling interviews (Petit himself is a wonderful subject: poetic but straightforward) with unusually effective reconstructions, and idyllic archive footage, albeit none of the central stunt itself. The images of Petit in his element – hundreds of feet up, framed against the sky – are mesmerisingly beautiful, as if he were walking on air. (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
My Kid Could Paint That (Amir Bar-Lev, 2007) – Four-year-old Marla Oberman is an abstract artist whose paintings sell for thousands. But what starts as a treatise on the nature of modern art turns into a mystery movie midway through, when her family is accused of guiding – or actually just doing – her celebrated works. It’s a fascinating, gripping, sometimes eerie film, laced with moments of cringe comedy (watching Marla’s dad squirm after she tells him, “Your turn to do it”, may be the most uncomfortable I’ve felt in a film this year), that throws up some interesting questions about the skill and mindset required to create great – or successful – art, though perhaps not in the way it originally intended. (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald, 1999) – MacDonald’s Oscar-winning – and career-making – documentary tells the story of the group of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics taken hostage by Palestinian revolutionaries. It’s extraordinarily well-researched, securing an interview with the only surviving terrorist, forensically dismantling the Germans’ atrocious handling of the hostage situation and unearthing some remarkable new information, which should really be given greater prominence. But it isn’t particularly well put-together: it spends more time dealing with Nazism than the complexities of Israeli-Palestinian relations, places too much emphasis on certain hostages ahead of others – dictated largely by who agreed to be interviewed – and has montages that range from the daft (confusing race clips, and split-screen images with squashed heads) to the appallingly tasteless, climaxing with a horrific, unjustifiable sequence in which photos of bloodied corpses (partly smudged out) are cut to Child in Time by Deep Purple. It’s really handy if you can’t imagine what a dead body covered in blood looks like. (2.5)

***



Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004) – 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. (4)

***



*BIG SPOILERS*
Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942) is like Our Town’s weird, moody little brother, an overwrought, attention-seeking movie that – much like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – offers us a small-town idyll, only to immediately destroy it. While censorship restrictions put paid to the source novel’s interest in incest and necrophilia, there’s still melodrama and strangeness aplenty in this visit to the titular turn-of-the-century town, including a mysterious, over-protective father (Claude Rains), a surgeon who seems more than a bit crap (Charles Coburn) and a frustrated good girl who wants to have sex with Ronald Reagan. The film is best known today for featuring the 40th President of the United States’ finest performance (at least before he entered politics, LOL) and while “finest” is a relative term, both Reagan and fellow woodenite Robert Cummings – the nominal star of the piece – are uncharacteristically decent, carried along by a story so packed with incident, so full of vivid light and pitch-black shade, that you can’t help but be swept up by it too. Cummings is the superbly-named Parris Mitchell, a French-American pianist, trainee doctor and orphan who's beset by tragedy. His grandma dies, his mentor poisons his own daughter (and Parris’s girlfriend) before shooting himself, and his best friend (Reagan) has his legs sawn off by a psychopath – prompting his never-to-be-forgotten cry of “Where’s the rest of me?!”, unquestionably the best moment of the movie, and a rare example of Right Wing Ronnie doing something good on screen. Despite its cosy, distinctly Sam Wood-ish trappings, the film – and its emphasis on dark secrets – has far more in common with Douglas Sirk’s “women’s pictures” of the 1950s than with wartime Americana like One Foot in Heaven or The Human Comedy, gleefully embracing soapiness and Gothic melodrama, as well as stopping to rest, periodically, on mile-high corn. It’s not subtle, but it’s very entertaining, powered by a remarkable cast – including doomed child star Scotty Beckett, Betty Field as the last word in nervy young recluses, and Ann Sheridan playing a girl from the wrong-side-of-the-tracks – and an unshakeable commitment to its bowdlerised, batshit story. (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
American Madness (Frank Capra, 1932) – A minor classic from Capra and regular collaborator Robert Riskin, in which liberal bank president Walter Huston stands up for the little guy against corporate greed, only for a robbery to force a run on the bank (foreshadowing It’s a Wonderful Life), and his marriage to head for the rocks. It’s expertly directed – particularly in the expressionistic robbery set piece and the overhead shots of an increasingly frantic crowd demanding their deposits – features an atypically cool characterisation from Pat O’Brien, and has a progressive view of both capitalism and convicts, but suffers slightly from a familiar problem with Riskin’s work: he sees himself as a liberal, but he sees ordinary people as stupid and easily manipulated. It remains a fascinating film, great to look at (the art deco sets are sumptuous), but with a brain and a heart: lecturing, in a still-timely manner, that when financial institutions put profit before people, everything goes tits up. (3.5)

***



Away We Go (Sam Mendes, 2009) – After Maya Rudolph gets pregs, she and her boyfriend (Big Tuna from The Office) visit various friends and family – trying to decide where to set up home. The leads are both very good, but their memorable, attractive scenes together are really the film’s sole selling point, and their appealing relationship is the only thing about the whole enterprise that feels real. Aside from their old college pals (including Melanie Lynskey, who performs a stylised but nonetheless gutting "pole dance of grief"), the supporting characters range from the sitcom-ish (his parents) to the completely unrealistic (her former boss), with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ludicrous caricature-of-an-almost-cousin, which belongs in the latter category, spectacularly tiresome: unbelievable, annoying and unfunny, as far away from entertaining as it’s possible to be, and such a cartoon that she’s ultimately meaningless. In all this, the film rather recalls Jim Jarmusch’s unsatisfying Broken Flowers – another downbeat road movie on the subject of family, populated by the sort of people who only exist in indie films. Away We Go is also saddled with a horribly overbearing song score that signposts emotion at every turn. A pity, as Rudolph and Tuna are really good together, and their conversations – treading an affecting line between grown-up decision-making and child-like concerns – frequently feel so genuine and unforced. (2.5)

***



Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) – An incredibly inconsistent comedy-horror-for-kids, co-written by Community creator Dan Harmon. The characters are rather poorly conceived and most of it is surely far too intense for under-10s, but it’s fairly well-animated in that underwhelming motion-capture way, the story is quite original and it has its share of good jokes, as well as some completely incomprehensive ones, like a 12-year-old boy saying he feels like he’s having a stroke. (2.5)

***



The Accidental Husband (Griffin Dunne, 2008) - Absolutely pathetic. (I was going to watch Bring It On, but the disc was broken.) (1.5)

Next up: a Douglas Fairbanks special!