Is Jacques Tati’s PlayTime the best-directed film in existence? Impossible to say, of course, but it’s equally impossible to deny how few films bring together every aspect of the cinematic medium - photography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound and narrative - in as intricate and impeccably controlled a way as this one. That on its own would be more than enough justification for its regular presence on best of all time lists, but the film is always doing more than what’s on…
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The Tree of Life 2011
If you ask me, few films from the 21st century have a very strong claim to All-Time Masterpiece status; The Tree of Life is one of them. Watching it, you feel as though Terrence Malick deliberately set out to make something people like me would be falling over themselves to praise. I don’t think I can name any American film, even among Malick’s own body of work, that concerns itself so deeply with the fundamentals of the human condition: birth,…
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Basic Instinct 1992
I was getting angry at how over-plotted the film was until the climax, when it seemed to turn out that it had actually been a very clever exercise in sleight-of-hand, convincing us we knew what was going on before pulling back the curtain and laughing in our faces for uncritically buying into all the capital-T Tropes it had laid out. (I'm aware that I've just praised a film written by Joe Eszterhas for being smart, but Paul Verhoeven has never…
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The Merchant of Four Seasons 1972
A question for any Fassbinder-heads reading this: do we think the post-dubbed soundtrack in his films from this period was a stylistic choice or a production necessity? Because whatever the answer, it's extremely difficult to ignore and, if you ask me, a detriment - the flat, monotonous dialogue reading does nothing to enhance a stylistic project that's already admittedly interesting (paring back the emotionally florid style of the '50s melodramas it's homaging, leaving them as chilly, doubtful studies of social…
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Allen v. Farrow 2021
Why don't we all just forget about when Mia Farrow's legal team, which included one Alan Dershowitz, offered to make the molestation charges go away if Woody Allen would agree to a $5 million settlement? I don't know about you, but to me that doesn't exactly look like something a woman who feared "for years" that her boyfriend was a paedophile would do (see also: allowing him to co-adopt their children in 1991).
Oh, and another thing: if it doesn't…
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Chariots of Fire 1981
In winning the Best Picture Oscar, Chariots of Fire was condemned to an image of mediocrity, its most common context for discussion being that it stole the award from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's true that two films nominated that year - Raiders and Reds - were better than Chariots, but since the Academy isn't exactly known for its perceptiveness it's best to judge it on its own terms, and in that respect, it's an assured success.
I wasn't…
