The 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century (BBC)

This is a list that the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation, to those outside the UK) put together in 2016, polling 177 professional critics and collating their choices to create the 100 Greatest 20th Century films.

The aim, and subsequent undertaking, to view and review every film on this list had quite a long gestation period, and came, as so many things do, from a small germ of an idea. As the year 2017 drew to a close, I entertained a notion that I might write a review for every single film I saw from that point onward, or, if that were perhaps just a little too ambitious, I could maybe just do it over that coming year, 2018, and see where things went from there. I’d been interested in film criticism for a while, particularly that of the late, great, venerated Roger Ebert, and even if my project didn’t take off, it seemed a much better idea than writing nothing, waiting vainly for inspiration to strike.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. I wrote three reviews, but the third, an overview of Aaron Sorkin’s glossily entertaining but ultimately empty thriller Molly’s Game, was lost forever, and I found it impossible to re-write. Disheartened, I found myself realising a few weeks later that I had somewhat forgotten the project, having watched several films in the interim with no critical eye, and no inclination to re-visit for analysis.

I’m including my other two reviews here, partly as a ‘taster’ for those who are wondering if they will like my reviewing style, and partly for completion’s sake. If nothing else, they’re ‘bonus’ reviews.

The Dinner (Oren Moverman, 2017)

The Dinner is plonked at your table with an audacity approaching rudeness. After a short and mystifying opening monologue from Steve Coogan’s ‘Paul’, garish neon colours and pounding dance music introduce a scene of partying teenagers which is, we (much, much) later discover, tangentially relevant, but utterly incongruous with what we have seen so far, and what we would reasonably expect to see in the coming 120 minutes. Incongruity will, sure enough, develop into a major theme- the entire movie, in fact, hums with it, as do audacity and rudeness retain their presence throughout.

The Dinner is the kind of film that appears tailor-made not just to divide audiences, but, more pertinently I feel, professional critical opinion. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the production- it’s sumptuously filmed, and it’s well acted. But it walks the line- gleefully, it seems- between masterful art-house stylings and incoherent nonsense, often veering from one to the other in the same scene, daring the reviewer to pick a side. Some- not many, I wager, but some- may declare it a masterpiece, while others will soundly and vociferously dismiss it as an exercise in navel-gazing.

I actually think it’s a pretty good film. Not great, and certainly not a masterpiece, but pretty good. Part of my penchant for it comes from the fact that it doesn’t care if you like it or not. It wasn’t really made for any audience at all, apart from, possibly, the aforementioned professional critics, and even then just to divide them. It exists, first and foremost, for itself.

I think I like the film more now than I did when I was actually sitting and watching it. This is partly because the second half was better than the first, particularly when it came to the last thirty minutes, which I felt offered a denouement that was, in its own openly discordant way, quite satisfying. I know now that (with one exception) you’re not supposed to understand these characters, and you’re certainly not supposed to like them. It is, ultimately, a piece of film-making that isn’t supposed to matter much, that exists only to be a vicious sideswipe at the over-educated, rigorously polite, horrifyingly impolite, trenchantly entitled middle classes, who are, behind their masks of respectability and fierce intellectual rhetoric, barely human. These are basically the same points made by Mary Harron’s American Psycho, but I prefer The Dinner. Why? Don’t know, to be perfectly honest, but maybe it’s because I’m given four characters to spend time with instead of one. Maybe it’s because, for all their awfulness and inhumanity, these characters are more real than Patrick Bateman, they’re more recognisable. Their transgressions are ones your friends and neighbours might far more feasibly commit. Maybe it’s because, though The Dinner is undoubtedly a conceptual piece, it’s not quite as conceptual as American Psycho, and because it’s less hyperbolic, its satire, I would argue, is more effective.

In any case, I simply enjoyed it more. I liked it more. I can’t say it’s compelling throughout, and I can’t say that there weren’t parts of it that felt like they were needlessly testing my patience. If you want something straightforwardly entertaining, don’t watch it, because it doesn’t give a shit if it entertains you or not, and it makes sarcastic comments behind your back. But if you do watch it, you will, at the very least, be served with four rather fine performances, and (admittedly spare) portions of enthralling interplay. Steve Coogan is tasked with most of the heavy lifting, and my perception that he isn’t quite up to it actually adds something to the overall tone of the film- intermittently impressive, you can all too often see the seams in his performance, the joins, the workings-out, the exertion of labour it requires of him. It is an ambitious performance which, in the spirit of the film itself, is both flawed and rich, with flashes of genuine depth and an unorthodox appeal. It was brave of him to take the role, but also egotistical, just as the film is both brave and egotistical to expect us to watch its quartet of characters indulge in self-centred ephemera, and serve this to us in such an upended fashion, even having the nerve to separate sections into ‘courses’, with title cards, as if to suggest the film is finely-paced and well-structured. Which it isn’t.

The Limehouse Golem (Juan Carlos Medina, 2016)

Hot on the heels of The Dinner came another film that gave me something completely different from what I expected, or, truth be told, wanted (the fact that I ended up quite liking The Dinner notwithstanding.)

The blurb I read for The Dinner sounded not unlike a stage play, implying that its events unfolded over a single night, with bad news regarding the group’s offscreen sons coming as a bombshell revelation mid-way through what was supposed to be a relaxing meal, its potential ramifications particularly dire for Richard Gere’s politician character and inspiring lots of taut and highly wrought debate. I was expecting, and hoping for, a tense, talky thriller, completely set around the restaurant table, like something David Mamet might have written.

As I’ve stated, it wasn’t that. There was no ‘bombshell’ moment. The ‘offscreen’ sons were very much onscreen, and didn’t need to be (though I should admit that I filled in certain information gaps on my own; no-one ever actually promised me anything about the screen-time of extraneous characters.) I felt similarly misled by the blurb on the back of the Limehouse Golem DVD that I purchased, which I can now quote from directly (paraphrased for brevity): ‘Victorian London is gripped with fear as a serial killer is on the loose and leaving cryptic messages written in his victims’ blood. Faced with a list of suspects, a seasoned detective with a troubled past must discover which one is the killer before the Golem strikes again.’

It sounded great. It sounded like Bill Nighy, starring as the principal detective, would be involved in one rip-roaring horse-and-carriage pursuit after another as the spring-heeled killer sank in and out of shadows, always just one step ahead. Proper old-school. Instead, The Limehouse Golem, just as The Dinner did, involves lots and lots (and lots) of flashback sequences, and backstory, and peripheral information. It’s tighter than The Dinner, though that’s not saying much; there are probably student films tighter than The Dinner. But once again, I expected a thriller and I got a drama. A character-study.

It is not, however, a character study of Bill Nighy’s Inspector Kildare. He does not feature in any of those copious flashback sequences at all. His ‘troubled past’ is barely touched on. Nighy’s performance is almost the opposite of Coogan’s- it’s understated, it’s apparently effortless, and it’s thoroughly assured, but it is actually, despite top billing, a supporting performance, playing off another, more prominent supporting performance from Douglas Booth (superb) and most notably, an exceptional central turn from Olivia Cooke.

The excellent standard of acting (though I found Daniel Mays’ performance a bit spotty) and the similarly high standard of cinematography, together with some distinctly odd screenwriting choices, are where The Limehouse Golem’s similarities with The Dinner, a film otherwise completely different in terms of tone, genre, atmosphere and setting, can be most firmly drawn. Both films, interestingly, have been adapted from novels, perhaps going some way to explain their arty, meandering scripts.

Overall, you’d probably have to say The Limehouse Golem is the better movie- it’s more measured, it’s more involving, it feels less like some onanistic trick being played on you. I liked it. It had a lot of charm. And the final twist, though I sort of saw it coming, was genuinely chilling.

Anyway, as 2018 was in its final months, I found a list that the BBC had arranged two years earlier, proposing the 100 greatest films of the 21st century. They had polled 177 professional film critics, invited them to choose their top 10s, and compiled the final rundown from the results, awarding 10 points to their number 1 choice, 9 points to their number 2, and so on.

I love Top 100 lists, particularly ones that have not been voted for by the general public, and feature bodies of work that not only have I never experienced, but I haven’t even previously been aware of. This list featured many of those. Here it is in full (with a 3-way tie for 100th place):

100. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)
100. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)
100. Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010)
99. The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
98. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)
97. White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)
96. Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003)
95. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)
94. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
93. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)
92. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
91. The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella, 2009)
90. The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
89. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
88. Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)
87. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
86. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
85. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, 2009)
84. Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)
83. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
82. A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)
81. Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)
80. The Return (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2003)
79. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
78. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
77. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007)
76. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)
75. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
74. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)
73. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
72. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)
71. Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)
70. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
69. Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)
68. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
67. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)
66. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003)
65. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
64. The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
63. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011)
62. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
61. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
60. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
59. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
58. Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembène, 2004)
57. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
56. Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2000)
55. Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013)
54. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)
53. Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
52. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
51. Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
50. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015)
49. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
48. Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015)
47. Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)
46. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
45. Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
44. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)
43. Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)
42. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)
41. Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015)
40. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
39. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
38. City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)
37. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
36. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014)
35. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
34. Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015)
33. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
32. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
31. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)
30. Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
29. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
28. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
27. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
26. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
25. ​Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
24. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
23. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
22. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
21. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)
20. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
19. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)
18. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
17. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)
16. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)
15. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
14. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
13. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)
12. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
11. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)
10. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
9. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
8. Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
7. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
4. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

As I pored over the titles, the interest in my abandoned film-writing project was rekindled, this time with more well-defined parameters. I decided I was going to watch all of these films, including the ones I had already seen, and write a review for each one. These are the films I had already seen, 24 in all:

96. Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003)
88. Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)
87. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
79. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
78. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
74. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)
73. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
68. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
65. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
62. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
51. Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
33. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
27. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
26. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
25. ​Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
22. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
20. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
13. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)
12. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
10. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
4. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

Following is what my own personal Top 100 may have looked like as I embarked on the project. You will notice that it is far less scholarly than the professional list, with far less emphasis on art film. I know full well I have included movies that would never appear on serious lists of this ilk, and this is not intended in any way to be a challenge to that paradigm. This is simply meant to be a relatively honest, fairly loose list that marks out films I’ve particularly enjoyed, for this reason or that one, within our given timeframe. There isn’t a huge focus on cinematography, craftsmanship or high artistic merit. It’s just films I’ve enjoyed. There are movies on here that even I don’t think are that special, I just happen to find amiable, or sharp, or amusing.

Also, some films on this list were released too late to have been included on the BBC’s professional one from 2016; again, the purpose of my own list is not intended to ‘match up’ or be cross-referenced with their main list in any way.

Here we go.

1. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
2. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2003)
4. Calvary (John Michael McDonagh, 2014)
5. Wild Bill (Dexter Fletcher, 2011)
6. Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2010)
7. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
8. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)
9. Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)
10. Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
11. 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)
12. Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)
13. Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010)
14. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008)
15. Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Davis, 2006)
16. (500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009)
17. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)
18. The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007)
19. Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014)
20. Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2008)
21. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsey, 2011)
22. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)
23. The 40-Year Old Virgin (Judd Apatow, 2005)
24. Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004)
25. Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, 2005)
26. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)
27. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)
28. School of Rock (Richard Linklater, 2003)
29. Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2003)
30. Roger Dodger (Dylan Kidd, 2002)
31. Dead Man’s Shoes (Shane Meadows, 2004)
32. Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)
33. The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012)
34. This Film is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick, 2006)
35. Cashback (Sean Ellis, 2006)
36. Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 2009)
37. High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000)
38. The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010)
39. Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)
40. Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler, 2017)
41. Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006)
42. Tape (Richard Linklater, 2001)
43. Hail Satan? (Penny Lane, 2019)
44. Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, 2006)
45. The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, 2006)
46. Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)
47. Humpday (Lynn Shelton, 2009)
48. Black Klansman (Spike Lee, 2018)
49. Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)
50. Cyrus (Jay & Mark Duplass, 2010)
51. Overnight (Tony Montana & Mark Brian Smith, 2003)
52. The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)
53. Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2015)
54. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)
55. The Revenant (Alejando J. Iñárritu, 2015)
56. The Guard (John Michael McDonagh, 2011)
57. Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011)
58. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
59. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009)
60. Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)
61. Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)
62. Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004)
63. Frailty (Bill Paxton, 2001)
64. Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)
65. The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)
66. Adult Life Skills (Rachel Tunnard, 2016)
67. Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001)
68. Looking for Eric (Ken Loach, 2009)
69. Four Brothers (John Singleton, 2005)
70. Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010)
71. The Invention of Lying (Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson, 2009)
72. Nick and Norah’s Ultimate Playlist (Peter Sollett, 2008)
73. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)
74. District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)
75. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014)
76. Peterloo (Mike Leigh, 2018)
77. Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009)
78. My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2004)
79. This is England (Shane Meadows, 2006)
80. Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002)
81. Everything Must Go (Dan Rush, 2010)
82. Made (Jon Favreau, 2001)
83. Money Monster (Jodie Foster, 2016)
84. Bedazzled (Harold Ramis, 2000)
85. Crazy Heart (Scott Cooper, 2009)
86. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 2017)
87. Storytelling (Todd Solondz, 2001)
88. Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007)
89. Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020)
90. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008)
91. Night Owls (Charles Hood, 2015)
92. Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)
93. Orange County (Jake Kasdan, 2002)
94. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (Chris Smith, 2017)
95. Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)
96. Pieces of April (Peter Hedges, 2003)
97. Interview (Steve Buscemi, 2007)
98. Sleeping Dogs Lie (Bobcat Goldthwait, 2006)
99. The Illusionist (Neil Burger, 2006)
100. Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener, 2013)

‘Honourable mentions’ include Mission: Impossible II (John Woo, 2000), The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001), 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002), Bubba Ho-Tep (Don Coscarelli, 2002), Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), 8 Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2002), Weirdsville (Allan Moyle, 2007), Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007), Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007), I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007), A Complete History of My Sexual Failures (Chris Waitt, 2008), The Rocker (Peter Cattaneo, 2008), Transsiberian (Brad Anderson, 2008), Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008), Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009), Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012), The Last Stand (Kim Jee-woon, 2013), Life After Beth (Jeff Baena, 2014), Birdman (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014), Top Five (Chris Rock, 2014), Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015), Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017), Bad Times at the El Royale (Drew Goddard, 2018), Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019), and 21 Bridges (Brian Kirk, 2019).  

Of the films that didn’t make the cut, even into the ‘Honourable Mention’ section, there are many which feature elements very similar to ones that do. These elements- quirk, understatement, tragicomedy, and minimalism, to name a few- often signpost high artistic merit and critical, if not commercial, success. Subsequently, the ensuing list contains many films that were very well-reviewed and even award-winning. These are films which, in some cases, I thought were okay, but maybe found somewhat underwhelming and not strikingly effective. Others I outright disliked. Included in this bracket are About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, 2002), Igby Goes Down (Burr Steers, 2002), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002), The United States of Leland (Matthew Ryan Hoge, 2003), American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 2003), Party Monster (Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato, 2003), Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004), Garden State (Zach Braff, 2004), Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004), I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell, 2004), Factotum (Bent Hamer, 2005), Junebug (Phil Morrison, 2005), The Matador (Richard Shepard, 2005), The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005), A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006), Fast Food Nation (Richard Linklater, 2006), 10 Items or Less (Brad Silberling, 2006), Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007), Eagle vs. Shark (Taika Waititi, 2007), Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, 2007), Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007), Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008), The Wackness (Jonathan Levine, 2008), Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, 2008), Ghost Town (David Koepp, 2008), Gigantic (Matt Aselton, 2008), The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009), Away We Go (Sam Mendes, 2009), Cold Souls (Sophie Barthes, 2009), Youth in Revolt (Miguel Arteta, 2009), 44 Inch Chest (Malcolm Venville, 2009), The Disappearance of Alice Creed (J Blakeson, 2009), Cemetery Junction (Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant, 2010), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010), Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010), Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010), Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011), Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011), The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011), Jeff Who Lives At Home (Jay & Mark Duplass, 2011), Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow, 2012), End of Watch (David Ayer, 2012), Seven Psychopaths (Martin McDonagh, 2012), The Iceman (Ariel Vroman, 2012), Trance (Danny Boyle, 2013), The World’s End (Edgar Wright, 2013), The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, 2015), Trumbo (Jay Roach, 2015), Triple 9 (John Hillcoat, 2016), Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017), Downsizing (Alexander Payne, 2019), Velvet Buzzsaw (Dan Gilroy, 2019), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019), Hot Air (Frank Coraci, 2019), Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019), I Used to Go Here (Kris Rey, 2020) and Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021).

My most hated film? Well, I have a trait whereby I feel as if can pre-judge with reasonable accuracy if I am going to like a given movie before I watch it, leading me to often choose simply not to. This will, of course, have resulted in me missing films that I would have unexpectedly enjoyed, but it also means that I rarely see a film I really, really don’t like. Having said that, there are four standouts, and three of them have got Al Pacino in. The first would be Simone (Andrew Niccol, 2002), the second would be 88 Minutes (Jon Avnet, 2007) (a film so bad that it appeared to be deliberate), the third would be Righteous Kill (Jon Avnet, 2008), and my fourth pick for this brief roll of dishonour, sans Pacino, would be The Number 23 (Joel Schumacher, 2007), an inchoate lump of pure absurdity. While we’re talking Jim Carrey vehicles, I found Bruce Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2003) to be pretty limp, too.

Are these movies the very worst that the 21st century has so far had to offer? Probably not, although 88 Minutes in particular feels like a contender. But other films I might have had similar reactions to, such as the mega-budget superhero franchises Transformers, Iron Man or The Fantastic Four, among many others, remain unknown to this viewer’s eyes- they’re outside my age range, for one thing, so that’s a factor in why I haven’t watched them, but what small pieces I have seen, I really didn’t like. The Saw and Hostel franchises too. So, with these gaps in my movie-viewing knowledge in mind, my most ‘hated’ films could probably be better described as a handful of pieces that were merely mediocre and trifling. Certainly with a case like Righteous Kill, my experience was characterised by disappointment that a film with such talent in it could be so lifeless and derivative and lazy, rather than anything resembling ‘hatred’.

Anyway, on to the reviews. Just to add some idiosyncrasy to proceedings, I’m watching, and subsequently reviewing, them out of sequence, at random, beginning with what is probably one of the most difficult films on the list.

Enjoy.

16. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)

What does it all mean?

There’s a scene towards the end of French director Leos Carax’s Holy Motors where the characters played by the characters played by Denis Levant and Kylie Minogue are ascending some stairs (none of that sentence is a typo). Kylie, who has no trouble walking whatsoever, is lifted into the air, bridal-style, by Denis, who, against a backdrop of incredibly grave and solemn string music and some sweeping camerawork, carries her the rest of the way before depositing her, upright, at the top, where she continues to walk normally before (at the risk of spoiling one of the film’s most striking moments) breaking gravely and solemnly into song.

What does it all mean?

When a film is deliberately obtuse and eschews all forms of conventional narrative, you often see the same sorts of criticisms: it was incomprehensible, it was incoherent, it was pretentious. It mistook nonsense for meaning, vapidity for profundity, inanity for genius. It had nowhere near the insight or depth it appeared to purport. But even if I did find Holy Motors dull at times, and a bit frustrating, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to watch the whole thing in one sitting, the levels of artistry displayed in the film, solely on their own merits, would immediately render such accusations moot, if not unfair.

The problem: How do you review a film that you didn’t really understand?

Holy Motors tends to teeter on the brink of incomprehensibility and pretension without ever really losing itself to them, largely thanks to an extremely assured film-making hand, a bravura central performance from its lead actor, and some impressive tonal control. It is something of a tightrope walk, a conjuror’s trick. It is a film which is very deliberately both completely ridiculous and incredibly serious.

Its vignette structure may well have derailed a lesser film with similar intentions, as it almost begs a reviewer to call it ‘disjointed’, but here Leos Carax shamelessly exploits it to his own advantage- just when it seems that Holy Motors is about to disappear up its own proverbial backside, he changes tack, changes setting, and effectively gives us a piece of an entirely different film altogether. It’s sleight of hand. We’ve already forgotten that we didn’t like the previous vignette very much. Suddenly the work has become vital and alive again, and we can fully understand why it was such a critical rave. Or at least, we think we can.

Tone is everything in Holy Motors. It has to be, really, in an art film with no plot to speak of, but even within those parameters, its success (or otherwise) relies on tone to an almost-absolute degree. If these vignettes were presented in any other order, we would be experiencing an entirely different film, one which would most likely have fallen off the tightrope, on either its absurd side or its serious one, and subsequently been reviewed far less favourably. But here we are, looking down the barrel of what may very well be something of a masterpiece. I didn’t love it- it’s too studious, too clinical, and yes, too incomprehensible, to inspire that level of devotion in me. Still, a masterpiece it may very well be.

What does it all mean? I dunno. Maybe I’m not supposed to. But, like Synecdoche, New York, it seems to be, certainly in its more morose scenes, about death. And that song that Kylie breaks into, with its repeated, insistent refrain of ‘Who are we?’, may well be expounding the film’s central theme straight to our faces in almost a parody of narrative clarity. Who are we? Are we all of the characters inhabited by Denis Levant’s enigmatic chameleon-man? Are we none of them? Are we the passive, often deeply unfortunate bit-players in his set-pieces? Are we all, as suggested by the assassin segment, somehow killing ourselves? Are we all already dead?  

84. Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

‘Play me a melancholy song,’ Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore asks his computer equipment early on in Spike Jonze’s Her, and immediately I thought ‘That’s what this film’s largely going to be. A melancholy song.’

I wasn’t wrong. Her is quirky, offbeat, and could possibly be described as serio-comic, but on closer inspection, there is hardly any comedy, if any. Consciously or not, Jonze levies this by employing a sharp, attractive colour palette, utilising likable actors such as Amy Adams and Chris Pratt to give bright, likable supporting performances, and filling the film with moments of tenderness and relatability. But none of it is ever really funny.

Problem? No. Why should it be? From what I can remember, the film wasn’t marketed as a comedy, though possibly something of a comedy-drama. The only reason I mention it is because, firstly, one might automatically expect a streak of comedy, however surreal or irreverent, from the director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and secondly because it’s not often that a movie is quirky and offbeat without any real comedic element; the only other film I can think of close to this description is Garden State, which I would argue is more forced and contrived than Her (less entertaining, too). But at its heart, Her asks completely serious and distinctly disquieting questions, namely: have we really become so disaffected as a species, and alienated from each other, and downright lonely, that we will now go on to seek our most meaningful relationships from Artificial Intelligence technology? Are our friends and family, partners and lovers really not good enough? Is it really that hard to find someone, made of living, breathing flesh and blood, who stirs your soul the way you want it to be stirred?

Theodore’s impulses are treated with warmth and empathy, as are that of his friend Amy (Amy Adams). So they should be. But the film shows its characters accepting and embracing this kind of technology with a willingness that, to my mind, speaks incredibly negatively about the society we have built for ourselves, and subsequently live in. Despite being set in the future, the world Theodore and Amy occupy is completely recognisable as our own. These people do the same things we do: go on dates, have picnics, work office jobs, and spend far too much time than is healthy staring at and interacting with phones, tablets and TV screens. And actually talking to them. This is one of the most well-judged aspects of the movie- the technology has been only very marginally pushed ahead, so that we can see this film is about us, now, and it’s just as much about the world we inhabit today as it is about the one we will inhabit tomorrow.

Her is not a howl against the horrors of potential technology, nor is it a howl at the chasm of loneliness that seems to exist at the centre of our society, and that these new technologies are not necessarily helping. It’s too understated and intentionally ambiguous to be boiled down to such pat definitions. It is too interested in people, and the way people behave, to be seen purely as a ‘message-movie’ or metaphor for anything. Only one character is seen reacting harshly to Theodore’s new relationship, and though her comments could be construed as mean, they’re perfectly understandable in light of the circumstances surrounding them. Maybe they’re perfectly understandable outright, even without their mitigating context, the movie seems to say. It doesn’t judge. It lets its characters breathe (which is ironic, really, considering how stifled they are), and it lets you, the viewer, decide for yourself how to absorb these characters, these themes, and exactly how you feel about them.   

92. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a long, slow, thoughtful film, played at a deliberate, glacial, meditative pace and clearly striving for a very particular, and rather rarefied, stately grandeur. It also, I believe- if I can use the previous two movies as a benchmark- aims for the mainstream in a way that Holy Motors (quite profoundly) does not, and it aims for the arthouse in a way that Her does not, attempting to occupy that often-treacherous terrain between the two.

It is, then, an ambitious movie, and one which I believe is sometimes in danger of being caught up in its own ambition. Examples of this are the frequent fade-outs, often occurring apparently mid-scene, and the grave, sonorous voiceover narration- a bold move, to be sure, but perhaps a little too contrived, perhaps signposting the movie’s heavy, serious intentions a little too clearly. I would also posit that the film does not flow particularly evenly, thanks in part to those oddly-placed fade-outs, and entire scenes- some very brief- that could quite easily have been excised completely. These ‘shortcomings’ may well be deliberate- the lack of typical, expected narrative glide contributes to the movie’s growing sense of paranoia and unease, as well as reflecting its characters’ disjointed lives. One also senses that, with this project, director Andrew Dominik would have preferred to create a flawed, rich, idiosyncratic film experience over one that was extremely neat and well-ordered yet somehow somewhat lacking in resonance, emotional or otherwise.

Either way, it’s an impressive film, despite its drawbacks, and if it isn’t quite the masterful maelstrom of mainstream and arthouse, or incisive essay on genre conventions, that it wants to be, then this certainly doesn’t condemn the movie to artistic redundancy. Far from it. For one thing, it’s beautifully photographed, one particularly magnificent shot framing Brad Pitt’s Jesse James, crouching on a frozen pond, between two distant but enormous mountains.

Casey Affleck’s nomination for Best Supporting Actor is thoroughly deserved. His Bob Ford begins the movie as the kind of overly friendly, eager-for-approval type that people tend to mistrust, edge away from, or even, in some cases, laugh at. By the end of the movie he is jaded, cynical and fully removed from the lingering, prolonged adolescence that seemed to influence his previous behaviour and decisions. The transformation is believable, and logical, and though Brad Pitt understandably has plenty of screen time (he is Jesse James, after all), it’s Affleck’s performance which is the lynchpin of the movie.

Pitt’s James also has his own notable character arc. He begins the film as an enigma, and something of the strong, silent type who even appears to behave kindly to Bob Ford. He ends it as petty, paranoid and, described directly by the narration, ‘deranged’. This may inform the film’s most pertinent and valuable message. Of this band of thieves, there are no real ‘heroes’ or ‘villains’- Jeremy Renner’s Wood Hite is probably the closest the film has to an outright antagonist, and even he is driven by jealousy and rejection rather than anything approaching evil. Instead, what we have is a rather pathetic bunch of men who live miserable, incredibly short lives, often in hiding, and are riddled with the same jealousies and insecurities that affect those on the right side of the law. Only one- Jesse- is shown to have a wife and children. The others revolve around Jesse, and his wife’s cooking, like satellites with no power or inclination to escape their planet’s gravitational pull. They make no decisions of their own and are completely at his beck and call.

Essentially, the film is a meditation on disappointment, disillusionment, unfulfilled expectations, sadness and loss; the tendency of youthful naivety and wishful thinking to be either chipped away over time by increments or sometimes simply crushed wholesale. ‘I was expecting applause,’ Bob Ford laments at the end. In another world, maybe he would have been the film’s hero.  

47. Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)

Leviathan is a grim Russian drama that focuses grimly on a small group of characters who struggle, argue, threaten, betray and sometimes even physically attack each other as they attempt- and fail- to find some peace or equilibrium in their harsh existence.  

They’ve been brought to this by political and administrative iniquity. It’s left completely down to the viewer to decide if these people would have peaceful, contented lives if it were not for this specific problem, though the movie certainly seems to imply that their issues run rather deeper, and that the oafish, monstrous presence of the megalomaniacal local political official is merely a manifestation of more abstract, ingratiated difficulties, the kinds of things that, in our own ways, ‘we all struggle with’.

It’s a tough, powerful, uncompromising piece of work that pulses with uneasiness and gnaws at the viewer with its discordant notes. It is also, at times, extremely beautiful, shot through with insistent natural images that provide moments of stability in this study of lives being torn asunder by circumstance, malice, and selfishness, but that also, despite their beauty, somehow seem to pulse with uneasiness too. 

It’s an alienating experience for the viewer. We find out almost nothing about the small coastal community these people inhabit, so narrow is Zvyagintsev’s focus. He does not ask you to like any of his characters, and they proceed to consistently behave in ways you wish they wouldn’t, often erring on the self-destructive. Perhaps the most relatable of the group drops out of the narrative completely two-thirds of the way in. Nevertheless, with the exception of the film’s clear villain, they’re not bad people, and therein lie the film’s most basic, fundamental tensions and complexities. Powerlessness. Lack of control over one’s own impulses and life in general. The ruthless immutability and intransigence of time.

On the one hand, Zvyagintsev presents these characters and events to us with the matter-of-fact air of a documentarian. On the other, he employs a distinctly literary proclivity, pulled straight from the pages of Hemingway or Raymond Carver, to leave great swathes of the story, including information that one could fairly consider crucial, off-camera. Maybe this proclivity is what separates Leviathan from a standard, thoroughly unremarkable kitchen-sink drama, the like of which we’ve seen dozens of times, and makes the film, amongst other things, sleeker, slipperier, more mysterious. Or maybe it’s the insistent, ultra-natural dialogue that completely avoids tired cliché, plot expediency of any kind, and the general pitfalls of lazy writing. Maybe it’s those more usual elements which most commonly provide distinction in these instances- the tone, the pacing, the overt arthouse stylings, the elevated levels of acting and cinematography. But maybe it’s something else, something far less easily definable, that makes the film so beguiling, so ingratiating- that is, genuine insight into the human condition. More so than the previous three films, Leviathan resembles a visual novel; it’s novelistic in the handling of its themes, in the way it takes relatively mundane subject matter and uses it to make points about human beings’ struggle with sentience, especially when striving for virtue.

The performances are excellent, if occasionally perhaps a little overwrought. If I were to pick a standout performer, it would be Elena Lyadova as Lilya, a woman whose delicate features hum with unspoken ennui, whose stoicism collapses into a rictus of pain when she is on her own, away from others. She is, arguably, the human centre of the movie, the point where audiences might most clearly turn to dish out their empathy, and the actress rises to this responsibility with aplomb.

Criticisms? Well, the film’s villain was a bit cartoonish, which was probably deliberate. And the Philip Glass score, so effective in the right film, did not, for me, work particularly well in this one.

100. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)

Well, that was an experience.

A thoroughly enjoyable one too. I would, incidentally, recommend watching Toni Erdmann with as little information as possible, and this review contains spoilers.

Anyway, of these five movies I’ve watched so far, Toni Erdmann was the one I found most outright entertaining. That should be enough to recommend it to anyone, right? Well, no, not really. For example, I wouldn’t recommend it to my mum, who would baulk at the film’s frank treatment of sexuality, its penchant for subversion, its apparent disregard for character arcs. She would most likely think some impenetrable post-modern trick had been played on her, both by me as the recommender and the filmmakers themselves for having made the film in the first place.

She wouldn’t ‘get’ the film.

Do I ‘get’ the film?

On some level, no. I didn’t ‘get’ why there was a needlessly explicit, and somewhat repugnant, sex scene in the middle of the movie that seemed to serve no narrative function. I didn’t ‘get’ the Whitney Houston musical set-piece. And, most pertinently, I didn’t ‘get’ the naked party. I didn’t ‘get’ the big Bulgarian furry costume. I didn’t ‘get’ why characters who had been established as level-headed would behave in such outlandish ways.

Does any of this matter, as such? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I need to ‘get’ every aspect of a film to find it rewarding and enriching, and that’s certainly the case with this one. It’s an uncommonly bold piece of filmmaking that recalls Holy Motors in its deft, serpentine synthesis of grave solemnity and dada-esque farce. Unlike Holy Motors, though, it has a ‘real’ narrative, with ‘real’ characters, and is set unremittingly and very recognisably in our ‘real’ world. There is nothing in this movie that speaks of symbolism. The characters, along with their decisions, represent only themselves, subsequently living and dying entirely on their own merits; consequently, it feels that there is more at stake. This serves to make the movie’s flights of fancy, in their own way, even more significant, more substantial, and Toni Erdmann is arguably the more interesting movie of the two.

The movie seems to extol that you don’t need to understand its character’s actions in a fully linear, literal way to reach some level of relatability and compassion with them. It invites you to just go with it, and focus more on the way the movie makes you feel than how much you necessarily ‘get’ it. It also, like Leviathan, appears to explore and comment upon malaise, though in this case the focus is on what malaise might make a person do if affluence offers them more options, and they are sufficiently free of concern to behave nihilistically.

The behaviour exhibited is what I would consider, ultimately, to constitute mild or even moderate nervous breakdowns. The movie flirts with the audience, and teases with how close it can sail to narrative collapse, the complete loss of tonal control. Crucially, though, it’s also a film that is shot through with pathos- bittersweet, poignant and sad.

Could a few minutes have been shaved off its 162-minute run-time? Yeah, probably, especially in the middle. Is the cinematography as sharp, or the execution as precise, as that of the previous four films? No, it isn’t. But focusing on that kind of thing would be completely missing the point. Toni Erdmann is not supposed to be an incredibly tight, polished piece of work- if it was, it would be a different film altogether.

The bottom line- I loved the movie, and think as many people as possible should watch it. But a viewer has to be sufficiently receptive to its off-kilter sensibilities. One would probably need to have at least a minor predilection for arthouse stylings. That said, it’s not a particularly ‘difficult’ movie- it doesn’t have the impenetrability of Holy Motors, the ponderousness of Robert Ford, or the socio-political spikiness of Leviathan.

Recommended.

65. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

Fish Tank is the first film I will review here that I have seen before. Full disclosure: first time round, I didn’t like it very much. I preferred director Andrea Arnold’s earlier film, the tense, atmospheric Red Road, with its much stronger emphasis on plot and intrigue. I saw Fish Tank as a grim, grinding kitchen-sink drama that I had to persevere to finish. I struggled to relate to any of its themes and I didn’t think I would watch it again.

Going into it for a second time, I was under the impression that it had been five or six years since the first viewing, but on closer inspection it is, in all likelihood, much closer to ten (I write this in January 2021). Time can be like that sometimes, sadly. Anyway, this time I was obligated to watch it as if it was, hypothetically at least, the 65th best film of the last 20 years, and better than three of the five films I have already reviewed.

And of course it’s a better film than I thought it was. Of course it is. That was inevitable, really. So why was my reading so different second time around? Was it just because of its presence on a serious critical list such as this one? I hope not, but I have to admit that that was probably a factor. However, I would also like to think that I am now more able to recognise and appreciate nuanced cinema than I was ten years ago.

On one level, a viewer’s interest in the film would appear to largely rest on their interest in what life is like on British council estates, and the trials and tribulations a teenage girl, in this case named Mia, who doesn’t necessarily belong there, might go through when living on one.

It’s still a grim kitchen-sink drama. I was right enough about that. There’s a question mark, though, as to whether it is- to use my previous description- ‘grinding’. I was surprised as how compelling some of the characters’ interplay was, even though I knew what was going to happen and how it was going to play out. Perhaps even because of that.

Like in Leviathan, expository dialogue is completely avoided, and the film runs on its own rhythm, often with little-to-no narrative through-line. Subsequently, these characters are real. They talk like real people really talk. Life isn’t lived neatly, separated into satisfying parcels of beginning, middle and end. It’s often lived in the empty spaces. Mia’s empty space is an unoccupied flat she breaks into so she can disconnect from the flat that she actually lives in, and the kind of life she has been forced into. A white horse in the neighbourhood, which fascinates her, appears to symbolise the hopes and dreams that seem utterly alien in this setting.

Mia, however, is a girl who is abrasive to say the least. This was one of my sticking points first time around- I didn’t like the main character and didn’t understand why the director was so keen to tell her story. Yet she exudes vulnerability (it’s a terrific central performance from the young Katie Jarvis). There are times when Arnold stretches our sympathy for her to its absolute breaking point, yet there are others where we are able to see the level-headed, reasonable person she could quite easily be if circumstances were different. If we were asked to like Mia unreservedly, and be completely on her side at all times, Fish Tank would be a film which was far less nuanced, far less intelligent, and far less authentic. But it’s not interested in giving the audience exactly what they want, and leaving them with a nice warm glow. There are plenty of other films for you if that’s your thing. Fish Tank does its own thing. That’s why it’s on a list like this.

54. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)

Well, I don’t know about this one.

Again we are presented with a film that belongs firmly and squarely in the realms of the arthouse, with no hope, and apparently no intention, of ever finding traction with a conventional mainstream audience. Again we are presented with long, long, slow takes and gaping silences. But for the first time since I started these reviews, I came to the end of this film and did not really feel that there was any significant payoff.

Like Leviathan, a great many details are never revealed to the viewer and are simply left to the ether. Unlike Leviathan, I wasn’t sure that this approach worked. With these supposedly extraneous details excised, I’m not convinced that what’s left is enough. Like Fish Tank, the film runs entirely on its own whims and at its own rhythm, which is stately to say the least. Unlike Fish Tank, I’m left feeling rather empty- unfulfilled, slightly numb, and not particularly moved or affected one way or the other.

If I was to speak non-critically about the film, I would say the execution was crisp, the technical aspects superb and the acting strong and effective. The film is a snapshot- taking place over a single night and the following morning, a timeframe of about 12 hours. There is, then, not much room for character development, even with strong actors. Consequently I found the film dry and deeply elusive. In an ensemble cast, one character emerges in the latter stages as our focal point, and he is stoic to the point of complete impenetrability. There are times when tension and atmosphere seem to build, but they don’t, to my mind, ultimately lead anywhere.

In an echo of The Assassination of Jesse James, much of this film takes place in vast expanses of sweeping, featureless landscape, a village dotted here and there. A group of men have been thrown together, this time on the right side of the law and holding positions with high amounts of societal respect. They converse. They banter. They bicker a little. These men are not itinerants, but in another life, they could be, and despite their clearly-defined goal, their movements carry with them an air of abjection and aimlessness. With one crucial offscreen exception, women exist only to have their beauty commented on and to identify their husbands’ corpses. This is not to say that it is a misogynist film- it isn’t, as far as I can see, but it is one which deals heavily, almost exclusively, with masculine concerns. At least three of these men have a wealth of great unhappiness weighing down the backgrounds of their lives, mostly only hinted at, and this unhappiness follows them everywhere, even out to the windswept Anatolian steppes in the dead of night, when they are working, and cannot possibly be confronted or expunged, only accepted. They deal with their feelings in different ways. As mentioned earlier, Doctor Cemal, ‘stoic to the point of complete impenetrability’, is unfailingly calm and pensive. Commissar Nasi is far more willing to let his vexations get the better of him- he tries to be restrained, and temperate, but frequently fails. And Prosecutor Nusret falls somewhere between these two sensibilities- he appears to go about his business with assurance and capability, the consummate professional- but in what was, for me, the film’s most powerful scene, he is unable to see out the night without breaking, without letting his façade slip. His burden is the heaviest of the three.

You will, without any shadow of a doubt, have seen worse films. I have seen much worse films than this. But I don’t feel I can, in all honesty, recommend it. Certainly not with any enthusiasm or fervour, anyway. It just didn’t do it for me. I don’t understand why Ceylan insisted on so many lingering silences. And it was in the film’s perplexing denouement that I felt most frustration and disappointment. I had hoped the final 20 minutes might bring clarity and closure, and instead the complete opposite occurred.

A strange one.

Revision:

I wrote that review on Saturday night (Feb 22, 2021), and it’s now Monday evening. I thought about the film quite a lot at work today, so it’s evident that I can no longer say I was ‘not particularly moved or affected one way or another’, and instead the movie had taken longer to seep in than I had initially realised or necessarily cared to admit. I still can’t say I like the film, but I think it runs along the same sort of arid, uneasy and thoroughly unforgiving lines as No Country for Old Men, a film I similarly struggled to process, let alone enthuse about.

My assertions that the movie didn’t go anywhere I also feel may be ill-founded. It doesn’t go anywhere in the traditional narrative sense, to be sure, but it’s now clear that the film, which has a relatively light first hour, descends, or perhaps even devolves, into a chronicle of crushing existential despair.

Why didn’t I see this on Saturday night? I think I have a certain resistance to extremely austere existentialism when it takes the form of apparent pointlessness and disorder, which is of course the basis for whole schools of philosophical thought. Put quite simply, I don’t like the way they make me feel. At all. I think I tried to use this an excuse for giving the film an unenthusiastic review and implying that it is a substandard movie; it isn’t, just an unusual one which made no clear attempt to entertain me or enrich my life in any way. It wanted me to feel numb at the end. It wanted me to feel perplexed and out-of-sorts.

It wanted me to directly confront death.

Put simply, it is an art film through and through and through, very pointedly not entertainment, perhaps more so than any of the films I have reviewed thus far, and more so than No Country for Old Men, which stars famous Hollywood actors, features far more incident, and is more ‘crowd-pleasing’ all round. It is also more ‘real’ than that film, with all apparent allegory stripped away. From what I can see, it is uncompromisingly, unrelentingly real. Quite pointedly, there is no music in it. Real life simply doesn’t feature non-diegetic music, so Once Upon a Time in Anatolia doesn’t either, not even over its closing credits.

59. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)

Well, I don’t know about this one.

It plays, particularly in its early stages, like a made-for-TV movie, albeit one where you see a man’s jaw being blown off in close-up and a role-play themed sex scene with a higher level of explicitness than would be usual for that type of film. There’s a subplot involving the protagonist’s son being bullied at school which, to these eyes, came off trite and underdeveloped. There’s heavy use of incidental music, which sounded like Kylie Minogue’s ‘Confide in Me’. It didn’t strike me as a ‘great movie’ at all.

When I write these reviews, I avoid, as best I can, reading the opinions of other critics. But I just didn’t know what to write about this one. The movie seemed so slight and insubstantial, especially since its placing on the list was relatively high. So I went on Rotten Tomatoes. The reviews often focused on how restrained the movie is by Cronenberg’s standards. So it is. Most films are. But I found that even positive reviews (and there are many; this was a very well-reviewed film) refer to the movie as ‘predictable’ (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal), ‘straightforward’ (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times), ‘painting by numbers’ (Garth Franklin, Dark Horizons) and ‘clichéd’ (Kaleem Aftab, The List). I’ve used a little artistic licence in cherry-picking those quotations, but you see my point. Ebert also states that ‘this is not a movie about plot, but character’. Unfortunately, I didn’t really feel that at all. Viggo Mortensen’s performance could be generously described as ‘controlled’ and ‘understated’. He gives us almost nothing. Bello is okay, but she underplays her role too. William Hurt picked up a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work in the film. I don’t know why. He’s hardly in it. I mean he really is hardly in it.

It’s perfectly watchable. It’s also very streamlined. At one point, our protagonist makes a 1400-mile round trip, and the journey itself is dealt with in a matter of seconds. You are unlikely to be bored. So if you’re looking for a pulpy thriller that maybe has a little more brains and a little more of a cerebral edge than most, helmed by an undeniably talented and incredibly respected director, then I guess this is the one for you. Notably, it was the first movie so far that I watched in a single, unbroken sitting.

But that’s all I can say, really. I am more than willing to accept that there may be layers of depth to the movie that I’m just not seeing. Unfortunately, if I don’t see them, I can’t comment on them.

43. Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)

Melancholia opens with a slow-motion, dreamlike sequence in which a number of images are presented. Kirsten Dunst, and occasionally other figures, are in a huge, opulent garden. With steel in her eyes, looking like a vengeful goddess, Kirsten is shown, amongst other things, with lightning at her fingertips. Sometimes she wears a wedding dress. Visual references are made to John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. Interspersed are scenes from space- planets slowly crashing into one other- while thunderous classical music plays throughout.

Oh God, I thought. This is going to be pretentious. It was clearly going to be an art film, an indulgent one, with its arthouse stylings placed front and centre, and an entirely different approach from Leviathan’s icy distance or Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s desolate minimalism.

I was wrong. This opening sequence is the only scene in the film of this ilk (spoilers ahead). Once the film ‘starts’, we meet a married couple, one of them Dunst, who are late to their wedding reception, and struggling to get there. It’s all fine, though. They’re giggling. They’re the picture of newly- married bliss.

But over the next hour of screen-time, things go wrong. Slowly at first, gradually. The bride’s mother stands up and essentially ruins the big day by saying things you should never say at any wedding, let alone your own daughter’s. Her father, seemingly the sweetest and most level-headed person in the room, has nevertheless somewhat provoked her into this outburst. Later, he lets his daughter down again, callously, needlessly. She makes him a simple request, and he selfishly reneges. Her boss similarly behaves bizarrely, making his own contribution to the ruination of the wedding. The bride’s behaviour becomes more and more erratic.

It was compelling. I really enjoyed it. Maybe you’re not supposed to enjoy this type of material, as such, but I did. The handheld camerawork, while perhaps sacrificing something in precision and presentation, made the work feel involving and immediate. In fact, with the possible exception of Toni Erdmann, it was the most involving and immediate piece of film I’d seen since I began the project.

The film is in two parts, though, both roughly an hour long, and the second hour- the one, I feel, which is supposed to act more as the ‘heart’ of the movie, with more import- did not have the same effect on me. It was OK. It essentially became a two-hander between Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and though the much-acclaimed Dunst was undeniably good throughout, Gainsbourg, in a role that required more juggling, was arguably better.

It felt like two hour-long films rather than a single cohesive one. One was a family drama that was, in its own discordant way, quite tightly structured. The other wasn’t. It felt as if much of the energy- and subsequently, much of the drama- had evaporated. This is particularly puzzling because the second half deals with a situation which is, on the face of it at least, far graver and far more serious than that of the first. Maybe von Trier is making a direct comparison between the literal end of the world and instances where peoples’ own small, insular worlds ‘come crashing down’, and purposely making the point that the latter can somehow feel just as bad. In a twist on mainstream filmmaking and the kind of standard, often quite dull heroism we see in it, we are shown that, in real life, behaving in an assured manner and insisting that everything is under control means nothing, and often simply serves to cover up gaping cracks in that person’s resolve. In this case, we’re dealing with a character who has probably gone his entire life without being in a situation he can’t control.

I don’t know why critics were so polarised. They always are with von Trier, I suppose. Overall, I felt it was a decent, solid, mature piece of work which, speaking broadly, I appreciated and liked. Nothing more, nothing less. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Incidentally, what a pleasure it was to see the late John Hurt lighting up the screen from beyond the grave.

71. Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)

In a striking coincidence, Tabu is a film which, exactly like the previous one, is split openly and overtly into two parts. Melancholia’s were ‘Justine’ and ‘Claire’. Tabu’s are ‘Paradise Lost’ and, simply, ‘Paradise’.

The first thing to say is that the whole thing is in black and white. I found the first section, set in present-day Portugal, to be something of a slog. It was odd, quiet, shrouded in murk, and relatively indecipherable. It featured deliberately stilted acting, off-kilter abstractions, and did not appear to have much direction or purpose.

I persevered. But I wondered how I was going to review a film that, in an echo of our first movie Holy Motors, I didn’t understand.

The second section, set in 1960s Africa, then opened out into a glorious vista of incredible beauty. In a protracted montage sequence, redolent of the dusty old exotic novels of Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham and E.M. Forster, Gomes serves us one aching, sumptuous image after another in a captivating display of pure aesthetic filmmaking, completely justifying, amongst other things, the decision to shoot without colour.

I was really bowled over by this one. I watched the final 80 minutes in a single stretch, very unusual for me, and allowed myself to be carried along by the sheer pleasures of this captivating sequence, the skill involved in creating such a work of art.

And it is art. It would sit quite comfortably in a gallery as a video installation. In fact, of the films I have covered so far, this is the one that edges closest to art-for-art’s-sake. There is a plot, and for what it’s worth, it’s a good one, and I cared about the characters, but the real prize was the poetry and majesty of the presentation.

Melancholy gnaws, largely unspoken, at the edges of the film. Its sources are the usual suspects- regret, the mists of the past, the unforgiving but inherently beautiful intransigence of time, and, of course, eventually, unavoidable death. Time has turned Aurora into someone I doubt she ever would have wanted to be. It has taken feelings and emotions that used to be so lively, so vibrant, and dulled them, and covered them in spiderwebs, and turned them into relics.

As with the previous film, there’s a certain discordancy between Tabu’s two parts, a certain level of disconnect between them. Time lapse and displacement are factors in this- there is, arguably, always going to a level of disconnect between two narratives that are fifty years apart from each other, and set not just in different countries, but different continents. For these reasons, and others, there is more ‘excuse’ for Tabu to feel slightly disjointed, and I would argue that the two disparate halves of Tabu are tied together more gracefully than Melancholia’s were. But that’s no surprise, really. I think Tabu is one of the most graceful movies I’ve ever seen.

19. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road starts with a half-hour action sequence. It was loud, it was in-your-face, there were loads of explosions and shouting. People were doing these weird, very jerky movements, somewhere between excitement and urgency, that you only ever seem to see in action films or music videos. I think the sequence was supposed to ‘leave me breathless’ or ‘tear my face off’ or something. I didn’t care for it.

Was it a bold move to start the film like this, and just drop you into it for such a prolonged period of time without much narrative context? Yes, I suppose it was. Did it endear me to the film, and get me pumped for the remainder? No, it didn’t. If I’d wanted to point out praiseworthy aspects, they would have to have been purely technical- the visuals, the editing, the CGI- things that I am not really disposed, or necessarily qualified, to discuss. Generally, I don’t like these types of movies, and I don’t watch them. I haven’t seen any of the previous three Mad Max films, so I was not viewing this instalment in the context of its host series, and I don’t know if it would have made any difference if I had been.

When the first half-hour quietened down and we started to get some narrative, including conversation and characterisation, I felt that the film did improve. Quite a lot, in fact. One could talk about the elevated quality of the actors involved, in this case Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, but it’s not unusual. There are a great many actors of that calibre peppered across the ultra-mainstream action flicks these days- Jeremy Renner, Amy Adams, Liam Neeson, Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Daniel Craig and Anna Paquin, to name a few. An argument that this particular film is more cerebral, or more substantial, than other films in the genre is probably valid on some level, but it’s not one I’m going to make.

Once the characters and the plot and the motives had been established, it was reasonably entertaining, and I was reasonably entertained. If you like action, then you will like Mad Max: Fury Road, because there’s loads of it. One thing after another after another explodes or sets on fire. There are a couple of interesting narrative choices (spoiler ahead)- the early killing of a young, pregnant heroine, for example, who would have more typically survived until the end. Another notable aspect, perhaps, is the film’s single-minded focus. The background information provided for these characters is minimal, almost everything is in-the-moment, and we find out very little about the landscape’s surrounding areas, the different tribes that would surely exist across it. We don’t find out how humanity got to this point in the first place. These sorts of things may be covered elsewhere in the series; if they were omitted in this one to make it effective as a stand-alone film, and/or to make it leaner and more streamlined, then the decision was successful.

The movie works. As an exciting action film, it works. The fact that I wasn’t particularly excited is irrelevant. I’m not the audience.

66. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (Kim Ki-Duk, 2003)

Well, I don’t know about this one.

This film is set exclusively on a secluded lake in an unspecified spot of South Korea- from the beginning of the film to the very end, we never move from this location. A Buddhist monk has a young pupil. As the movie progresses, we see the boy grow up, and so it is something of a coming-of-age story.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this, and in actual fact it’s the kind of material that I would typically find quite favourable. I’m very receptive to the exploration of these sorts of themes. But throughout, I felt that the film was striving for a poignancy and lyricism which it was not achieving. Unusually for a film like this, the tranquillity is marred by sex, murder, self-immolation and fatal accidents, decisions that I felt counted against the movie’s tonal tapestry. There was also the uneasy suggestion that if you kill someone, then it’s kind of okay as long as you serve a few scant years in prison and then come back to the Buddhist retreat where you grew up and start making ice sculptures or whatever.

There were some lovely individual shots- picturesque visions of mists and skies which were all too sparing. Everything was sparing- dialogue, characterisation, information. As with previous films like Leviathan and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, there was lots of information missing, lots of things that the director has chosen not to tell us. Yet Kim Ki-Duk has made a minimalist film that didn’t feel particularly minimalist, something which, I suppose, was a strength. It wasn’t tedious, at least not for the most part, and was not all that difficult to sit through. It was lean, crisp, and certainly considering its subject matter and general tone, surprisingly brisk. But I just don’t feel driven to give the movie a glowing review. Its apparent spirituality was lost on me. I didn’t feel any narrative heft. I didn’t feel any emotional heft.

This movie is clearly a personal work, and about as far away from a studio-led, demographic-dictated approach to filmmaking as you can possibly get, at least here in the western world. This may have been a factor in why the film found such critical traction. Admittedly, it had the misfortune of being viewed so soon after Tabu, a film which I felt possessed in abundance all the qualities that Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring largely lacked, including visual splendour. I’ve praised individual shots, but overall, I don’t feel that it is what I would call a ‘beautiful’ movie.

It was okay. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from watching it. But that’s all, for me. Just okay.

55. Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013)

Ida is a Polish film that is, like Tabu, completely in black-and-white. It’s set in 1962, and the spectre of the Holocaust less than two decades before hangs, largely unspoken, over every frame.

Ida is a good film. It’s just good. It’s poised, it’s classy, it’s understated. It’s accomplished. It’s cohesive. It’s visually striking. It deals with its weighty themes deftly and gracefully.

There are many aspects of Ida that we have seen in other highly acclaimed films reviewed so far. One is a very stoic and softly-spoken lead character whose feelings and thought processes are largely withheld from those around them and, by extension, from the viewer. Another is a penchant for leaving certain narrative elements unexplained- in this case these are largely centred around our characters’ motivations, especially as we get into the movie’s third act.

These choices inevitably work better in some films than others. I thought they worked in Leviathan, not so much in A History of Violence or Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring. Ida is a film in which they work. In fact, everything works in Ida; there’s something pristine, almost perfect about its slender 80 minutes. David Denby of The New Yorker called it a ‘compact masterpiece’, and I concur, though the exact phrase that ran through my head when viewing it was ‘quiet masterpiece’, like a pearl, or, perhaps more pertinently, a small diamond, shimmering and extremely pretty but hard and unyielding.

There’s a lot of beauty in Ida- it’s an extremely well-shot film- but it’s chilly beauty, emphasised from the outset by snow, and reflected in its title character, whose delicate, elfin features and doe eyes look down disparagingly, often silently, on her aunt’s behaviour and lifestyle. It sometimes feels as if she’s judging the viewer disdainfully too. In the monochrome colour palette of the film, Agata Trzebuchowska’s piercing eyes look coal-black. Together, aunt and niece move through a world that is desolate and decayed, the horror of the Holocaust having pushed everything and everyone into complete numbness.

It’s a film that, with its subject matter, easily could have been overwrought, worthy, even histrionic. Not only does it manage to avoid these sorts of pitfalls, but it never goes near them at all. This is one of the many differences in the respective approaches of this movie and that of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, which did, to these eyes, appear precious and contrived.

The last act of Ida is, in its own quiet way, quite shocking (minor spoilers ahead). It subverts everything that came before it and puts the tone of the whole movie on the line. But it does so in a way that is so casual, weary even, that the viewer accepts it without question. There was a low-key but nonetheless very real sadness in the film’s closing moments which reminded me, conversely, of Fish Tank. I wrote that Fish Tank was ‘not interested in giving the audience exactly what they want, and leaving them with a nice warm glow,’ neglecting to mention that that film actually does end on a note of bittersweet catharsis- Mia escapes the council estate, with the trajectory of her life completely up in the air at that point, just like the balloon that is the final thing we see before we cut to black. Ida- older than the fifteen-year-old Mia, but not by much- essentially does the opposite, deciding that she doesn’t want the ‘escape’ she’s offered, and going the other way, choosing something much different.

Lis (Dawid Ogrodnik), Ida’s love interest, is a young man who is handsome, quietly charming, ostensibly perfectly decent, and self-assured without being arrogant or cocky. He’s even a creative type, a travelling musician. He’s exactly the kind of character which other, inferior films would have presented as the answer to Ida’s dreams, and the ‘escape’ he proposes as the neat culmination of a solid, insistently positive character arc that has come through obstacles and difficulties but prevailed through them. This ‘escape’, though, is suggested flatly, without feeling, like some sort of afterthought. Perhaps this is partly why she turns it down.

One gets the sense that even Lis won’t feel particularly broken when he wakes up in the morning and finds himself in an empty bed, even though it’s perfectly feasible that he will never sleep with a girl that beautiful ever again, let alone marry one. He will simply pick up his saxophone and travel to the next village, the next gig. It’s hard for anyone to feel much of anything after what the country’s been through. But this viewer feels that, at the very least, Ida should have gone to Gdansk with him. She should have gone to the beach. 

37. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Uncle Boonmee is dying. He looks to be in his fifties- too young to die- and reasonably healthy, but he is dying nonetheless. He lives in a secluded part of the Thai forest with his sister-in-law and nephew. They trade mundane conversation. There is no plot to speak of.

One night, Boonmee’s deceased wife appears from thin air while the family sit at the dinner table. They barely react. They greet her like you would greet a casual acquaintance that you hadn’t seen for a while. Boonmee’s son, who had previously disappeared, turns up too, and now he is a monkey. He sits at the table with them and begins talking, gravely and solemnly, apparently still somewhat human. Again, they barely react. We don’t see him again for the rest of the movie.

What does it all mean?

God knows.

The film completely breaks off from this narrative line to present us with a vignette where a woman is complimented by a talking fish and goes on to have a sexual encounter with it. Then we re-join Boonmee and his family for a long sequence featuring very little dialogue where, with no preamble or explanation, they wade through the forest and go into a cave. Then we have a montage sequence- I quite liked this, actually; it was evocative, a little irreverent, and reminded me somewhat of Tabu. Then, after Boonmee is dead- we see neither the death itself, the immediate aftermath, nor the funeral- we have an utterly baffling sequence in a hotel room and then the movie ends.

These descriptions might make the film sound luminous and phantasmagorical. There are some critics who found it exactly that. But for me, such a reading runs counter to the many scenes of people just sitting around a house making pointless, ephemeral, often extremely stilted conversation. To my eyes, the movie was disjointed, incoherent, and often very, very boring. I’ve never seen a film that is both hallucinatory and pedestrian.

Of course, this is my very first Thai movie, so there may be aspects of this film and their culture in general (there is a single, passing reference to Communism and conflict) which are completely lost in translation to a westerner like me. But of all the films I have reviewed so far, this is the one I liked the least. I didn’t understand the film and I didn’t like it. The acting was wooden and the cinematography was downright ugly.

Looking at other media sources that have covered this film, including interviews with director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it seems that these issues, amongst other things, were deliberate stylistic choices that reference cheap television shows and retro cinema. So perhaps there is something about this film I am just not seeing. Perhaps I am not used to a filmmaker who has had the freedom and inclination to be so flagrant with their idiosyncrasies, whose outré inflections might have been more digestible in a novel or on an album, where you can skip certain tracks. Perhaps I will be more attuned to Weeransethakul’s sensibilities when I tackle the other two films of his that are on the list. But as things stand, I just didn’t get this one at all. I wasn’t on its wavelength and it wasn’t on mine.

72. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire movie. It has a smart script which slyly, but only slightly, subverts the kind of tropes one might expect from a vampire movie. If you’ve seen other Jarmusch films, you probably know what you’re getting- it’s erudite, esoteric, quirky without being contrived, arthouse without being overly obtuse or inaccessible, and hovers, in a measured, controlled way, between realist and fanciful. It all looks pretty good, too.

For the most part, Only Lovers Left Alive ticks along quite nicely, especially in its more plot-driven second half, when we even get the occasional quick streak of wicked comedy. The use of very cool, retro music calls to mind a calmer, less exhibitionist Quentin Tarantino, with all the violence taken out (there is no onscreen violence in the film, and except for a single instance of brief nudity, there is no sex either). It also- especially in its comic scenes following the introduction of Ava- sometimes resembled what might result if Alexander Payne made a vampire film.

It has a stellar cast, and they inevitably deliver. As would be expected from Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston and John Hurt, the acting strikes all the right notes, with Mia Wasikowska, Jeffrey Wright, and the late Anton Yelchin all on hand to provide exceptional support. It does not, however, feel as if the actors- any of them- are particularly stretching themselves. It doesn’t feel like the director is stretching himself too much either. This apparent effortlessness, however, is part of its charm, and is almost certainly a significant aspect of Jarmusch’s skillset. And of course, not every work has to be extraordinarily intensive or hugely ambitious.

The chief pleasure of Only Lovers Left Alive is to see an auteur director who is in complete command of his craft, who feels no need to make a tour de force film or impress any grand attempts at virtuosity on his audience. Consequently, this movie is solid and enjoyable, and I liked it. There was very little to dislike. However, notwithstanding the poignant shots of a crumbling, collapsing Detroit, it’s also a relatively light movie that doesn’t necessarily seem designed to stay with you long after the credits have rolled.

That being said, the film’s frightening final shot re-contextualises the entire film, and forces us to see our principal characters in a completely different light. There may be a point there about how rational, reasonable people can still be perfectly capable of dark, hurtful behaviour, especially if they are backed into a corner. It also brings into focus how one person’s thoughtless, inconsiderate actions can potentially have dire consequences for people thousands of miles away who they’ll never meet. We see that Adam was completely right to be so rude and unwelcoming to Ava. We see that, sometimes, 87 years really isn’t long enough.  

45. Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

Now we tackle what is probably the most infamous movie on our list, one whose reputation was preceded, at least initially, by the industrial strength of its sex scenes. You can’t really review the film without addressing them, so it only seems fair that one starts there before moving on to the actual ‘substance’ and ‘depth’ of the film- presuming, of course, that sex scenes generally lack these two things.

It was my initial feeling, when I was maybe around an hour into the film’s three-hour running time, that the sex scenes did not only serve as a diversion from the story of our main character, Adele, and her coming-of-age, but actively detracted from it. We have to keep stepping away from the story to see her and her girlfriend Emma fucking wildly, grabbing each other frantically, breasts and hair flying around, squeezing, licking, writhing, breathless.

Is it necessary? And does it matter whether it’s necessary or not, if this is the way the filmmaker has chosen to tell the story? There are other films which have depicted lesbian sex in decidedly steamy fashion- Mulholland Drive, for example, the Wachowskis’ 1996 movie Bound, or Atom Egoyan’s Chloe- yet not felt the need to go anywhere near as far as this. Those films, however, were noirish and stylised, very tonally different from this one, with sex used more as ‘spice’ to enhance plot intrigue.

In any case, now that I have finished the film, my feelings about the sex scenes are more mixed. I can see now that there is a more pronounced narrative context for them than I thought there was. For one thing, Kechiche insists on an almost-forensic level of intimacy that extends beyond mere sex. In the movie’s intense final hour, when Adele is at her most nakedly vulnerable, we are treated to multiple shots of mucus running down her face, a choice that is less a question of taste or decency than it is an assertion of a director’s willingness- some would say insistence- on a warts-and-all intimacy between character and audience that a filmmaker would more typically choose not to explore. At one point she tells her girlfriend that she eats her own scabs. Another frank scene shows Adele’s emotional turmoil manifest itself in the sucking of Emma’s hand, in public- properly sucking it, really giving it a good old slobber, in full close-up.  

There is a question, at least in my mind, as to whether LGBTQ movies tend to more explicit than their heterosexual counterparts (Andrew Haigh’s Weekend comes to mind, as does Below Her Mouth). If so, then there are further questions as to why this might be, and the possible socio-cultural ramifications. Then there are further questions as to how far these ramifications are felt outside the LGBTQ community, or if they are largely confined within it. This film’s themes, for example, would be potentially very relevant and valuable to 15 and 16-year-olds, who, because of the film’s explicit scenes, would be too young to see it (although, it must be said, it is rated 12 in its native France). One wonders, then, to what extent this film is intended as a statement, or a document of a specific socio-cultural moment in time, rather than a ‘regular’ film that one sits and watches and digests without any thought to non-diegetic subtext.

None of this addresses, though, what I am actually supposed to be doing- talking about whether this is a good movie or not. And it is. It’s pretty good. I found it a frustrating experience at times- a little loose, a little uneven, but peppered with powerful moments that generally rendered these sorts of shortcomings minor. One plot-oriented frustration, though (spoiler ahead), centred on the fact that Adele’s reaction to the breakdown of her relationship makes her decision to have an affair, in retrospect, completely bizarre, inexplicable. The man she cheats with is not a full, proper character, he’s not given a personality, and it’s not elucidated convincingly what exactly drove her to do this; our only explanation is that she felt ‘alone’. Interestingly, the cultured Emma reacts by, quite shockingly, slapping Adele and using epithets that would be more readily heard coming from a male mouth. This may be an element of the intimacy- we are now privy to a side of Emma that her urbane circle of friends and colleagues are unlikely to ever see.

The film ultimately becomes another meditation on sadness, loss and regret, themes that have reared their heads many times over this series of films so far, and I’m sure will many times again in the forthcoming reviews. In particular, I used very similar words when I was summing up The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a film populated by characters living completely different lives, on a different continent, in a completely different century, a clear indication of just how universal these themes are, and their place as an indelible part of the human condition.

In echoes of Ida and Fish Tank, our final shot sees Adele simply walking away, her future uncertain, poignancy implied rather than stated outright. Notably, Adele finishes the film with her back to the camera whilst Ida, with firmer steps, strode toward it, implying a level of self-control and focus which the raw, hyper-sensitive Adele generally tends to lack. All we can do is make assumptions about these young women’s futures- we assume that Ida will live a spare life of piety and discipline, at least for the foreseeable. We assume that Adele will carry on with her teaching job, and at some point, sooner or later, begin another relationship with a new partner. Fish Tank’s Mia is the outlier of the three. Conventional wisdom would dictate that it’s Ida- she is forty years removed from the other two, the only one whose life has been ravaged by war, and the only one of the three who will ever even go near a convent, let alone join one. But Mia is the one for whom assumptions and conjecture are far harder, whose future could take almost any direction imaginable. She is the only one of the three who is not alone in their film’s final moments- her friendship with the benign-seeming Billy may turn out to be brief and ephemeral, but she is not alone. And finally, she does not, unlike the other two, feature in the final shot of her movie. She has already left the area. Her next chapter- whatever it is- has already begun.

5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)

Following quite neatly on from Blue is the Warmest Color, Boyhood is another film which is almost three hours long, and is another coming-of-age tale which examines the trials and tribulations of a person’s transition from teenager to adult. It’s unquestionably a very different film than the lesbian melodrama, but I nevertheless saw several small parallels, one of which is that both films examine heartbreak.

Boyhood is much more interested in its main character’s relationship to their family members, though, and is far more of an ensemble piece. And it just…ingratiates itself into your psyche. It doesn’t jump and shout. It establishes itself at a low level and gradually evolves from there, never overreaching, building its stature little by little, step by step.

This is, I suppose, apt for a movie which has at its heart a central conceit as pronounced as this movie’s is. For those who don’t know, it was filmed piecemeal over a period of 12 years and the principal character, just like the film, actually grows before your eyes. Prior to viewing it, I had apprehensions; I feared it was going to be a gimmick. I also, for some reason, thought it was going to both duller and more contrived than it actually was, despite a great fondness for several of Linklater’s previous films, especially Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, and his little-seen 1996 cut, Suburbia, a Kevin Smith-meets-Samuel Beckett tour de force and well worth a look.

Anyway, as with other films covered previously, Boyhood is notable for what it doesn’t show you as much as for what it does. The ‘big’ moments are missing- christenings, weddings, divorces, funerals, graduation ceremonies, birthday milestones. There is no uplifting sequence where Mason learns to ride a bike without training wheels. There is no use of montage. There is no onscreen ‘first kiss’ for Mason, no life-changing loss of virginity. There are no heart-rending scenes where he finds out his best friend is gay and promises him that it won’t change anything and he’ll be by his side forever. He doesn’t find out his sister or mom has been using drugs and make the wrenching decision to get her into rehab. We don’t hear voiceover extracts from Mason’s private diary. There is never any formal indication that we have moved forward in time, and we are never told exactly what year it is. This technique- if you can call it a technique- is so subtle and such an intrinsic part of the film’s tapestry that I didn’t even notice when I was actually watching it.

Nor did I realise how much I liked the film until it was over. That’s how smoothly it ebbs and flows. One could argue that there are little imperfections- at one point, Linklater hands us a character who we are quite clearly supposed to hate, and in this it’s possible that some nuance has been compromised. People like this do unquestionably exist, though, so he has every right to portray them; in any case, one doesn’t feel that he was trying to create the perfect movie, necessarily, or a ‘masterpiece’, but just one that was meaningful, relatable, substantial, and honest.

In this, he passes with flying colours, and the film is, arguably, something of a masterpiece. It’s also one of the easiest, most digestible movies on this list so far, a great ‘entry-level’ film for those tired of the usual studio fare, but relatively uninitiated in arthouse stylings.

Highly recommended.

31. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

This is the third film in a row which deals, at its centre, with a person who is notable for their youth (this time named Lisa, played by Anna Paquin), and is much longer than your typical movie. In this instance, the film was released in two versions- a 150-minute studio cut, and a three-hour director’s cut which I am to believe is much closer to Kenneth Lonergan’s original vision. I have just watched the shorter version, so I will review that one here and view the longer one at a later date, giving it a second review.

It’s a strange one. On the one hand, it’s quite mainstream, with its roster containing some highly recognisable names. I also felt, especially in its early scenes, that it was somehow filmed and presented in a ‘mainstream’ manner- the bus crash death scene is harrowing, but also a little glossy, a little overcooked, kinda like a Lifetime TV movie.

This is one of those rare films that I feel is at its strongest in its midsection. Around an hour in, it seemed the film had found its feet and steadied itself upon its slightly shaky foundations. Then it sort of lost me again in the final third. Like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, A History of Violence, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, or, to a lesser extent, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, it is difficult for me to say what exactly the ‘point’ of this movie is supposed to be. I know how damning that sounds, and I know it strongly infers that I didn’t like it. That’s not necessarily the case. To a reasonable extent, I did like it. There were certainly aspects, and individual scenes, that I admired, and I do believe it’s an uncommonly brave and unusual piece of filmmaking, especially considering context. But more prevalently than any of this, I was underwhelmed and confused.

Let me give you an example. I believe that the character Matthew Broderick plays, a teacher, could have been completely excised from the movie without losing anything. This is not meant to be a reflection on either the actor or the character, but I think he’s only in three short scenes anyway. Harsh? Well, I feel the same about Kieran Culkin. And the father character, played by director Kenneth Lonergan himself. And, perhaps most boldly and divisively, Matt Damon. Ostensibly, Damon features in a ‘pivotal’ scene, but aside from showing us how mercenary and unpleasant and immature our lead character can be, I don’t know what the ‘point’ of his inclusion was.

I wasn’t completely sold on the Jean Reno character, either. Where does that leave us? Let’s say we cut out every one of these characters- all male- and look at what we’re left with. The Mark Ruffalo character, undeniably vital in essence, could nevertheless have possibly functioned as an offscreen character. He’s also, like Broderick, hardly in it. Let’s lose him too.

By my reckoning, you’d now have a film that was about 90 minutes long, maybe even 100- a pretty standard length. And, with the exception of Olivia Thirlby’s minor character, it would be filled with strong, flawed portraits of females that you couldn’t remove even if you wanted to. Lonergan explores Lisa’s harsh, discordant relationship with her mother, which, maddeningly, doesn’t seem to need to be that bad. He explores the adolescent Lisa’s attempts to engage with a fully adult, experienced, resourceful woman, played by Jeannie Berlin, as if she is her peer and equal, and despite flashes of valiant brilliance, failing.

Lisa is a character who deliberately and pointedly tries to transcend her adolescence. Perhaps this is a reason for the strained relationship with her mother, who would probably rather she be a ‘normal’ 17-year-old girl (whatever that is). One could point out that Blue is the Warmest Colour’s Adele does this too, entering the world of sex and relationships when she doesn’t necessarily have the wherewithal or maturity for either. In Anna Paquin’s distinctly spiky, finely-realised Lisa, one gets the feeling that her attempts are more ‘performance-based’ than others we have seen in Fish Tank, Ida, or Boyhood. She is ‘performing’ adulthood- performing for her mother, who is thoroughly and understandably exasperated by this woman-child, performing for her handsome teacher, Matt Damon, who is initially irritated but eventually somewhat succumbs to it, and performing for her potential role-model and mentor, played by Jeannie Berlin, who doesn’t succumb to it at all, but, at least for a while, entertains her, for reasons of practicality, civility, and decorum.

Like I said, it’s a strange one. How many other movies could you name whereby you could, at least hypothetically, cut out all the male characters but none of the major female ones, and has been both helmed and written by a male director? And features several bona fide Hollywood stars? It passes the Bechdel test so conclusively that it almost pummels it into the ground.

Like Blue is the Warmest Colour, Margaret makes pointed references to high art. In the former movie, these took the form of passing, insubstantial mentions of Sartre and Klimt which felt like little more than name-dropping. In Margaret, it’s theatre, opera and literary quotations making up the backdrop. Again, I feel that there are question marks over whether this necessarily adds anything, or if there is any ‘point’ to it. Are Lonergan and Kechiche deliberately, perhaps even cynically, trying to gild their films with vicarious prestige?

Earlier, I called Leviathan novelistic, and I also touched on this quality when I unenthusiastically discussed Uncle Boonmee. I mentioned Leviathan’s ‘discordant notes’, receiving them much more favourably than those that are struck in Margaret. One feels that if this were a novel, possibly written from the viewpoints of several different characters, then it could potentially work very well. If it were an album, it would be a double, like The White Album, and it would have tracks that were superb, and others that were divergent, distinctly off-centre, and largely unloved- Wild Honey Pie, say, or Why Don’t We Do it in the Road. Or perhaps it would be, at least spiritually, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album full of idiosyncrasies, discordancy, and nuances, very distinctly American, rejected by its label, and a critical darling when it eventually did see the light of day.

21. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

I have a problem relating to movies where people act in ways that people in real life rarely, if ever, do. I touched on this briefly when I reviewed Mad Max: Fury Road, and the theme resurfaces, somewhat unsurprisingly, here again.

I say ‘unsurprisingly’ because in the past I have found other Wes Anderson movies an alienating experience. I don’t really know how I am supposed to feel when I watch them, though I suspect the effect is meant to run along the lines of ‘whimsical’ and ‘delightful’.

I don’t know. The film reminded me of the Coen Brothers, a la Raising Arizona, in its melding of OTT kooky characters, arresting set-pieces, overtones of absurdity, and Rube Goldberg-esque plot devices which included MacGuffins. All this is whipped up into a hot, steamy brew and served to us with a wink-wink, a twirling baton and a top hat and tails. Again, I feel there is a huge gulf between how I am ‘supposed’ to receive this material and how I actually do, and that brings inevitable further questions as to whether that is the filmmaker’s ‘fault’ or whether it is, somewhat, mine.

And, y’know, maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s just a question of personal taste. Ralph Fiennes’ performance was enjoyable enough, although I would wager that you’ve never met anyone who actually behaves like that here on Earth. And there is a certain amount of pleasure to be taken when a film’s roles, no matter how small, are filled to the brim with famous faces.

There is slightly more ‘excuse’ than usual for the film’s affectations. They are couched in a framing device and presented as a story being told in the form of memories, over dinner and drinks, from one man to another; one could reasonably propose that the events have been embellished, albeit mildly, and the movie’s more outlandish moments did not occur exactly as depicted. Either way, this framing device, a very small portion of the overall picture, happened to be my favourite part. F. Murray Abraham, ultimately holding the dramatic heart of the film, was excellent in a small but perfectly controlled, exceptionally dignified role.

The ending- tragic and undeniably effective- was abrupt. That was most likely a purposeful narrative tactic. Overall, though, the film left me cold and unmoved; disenfranchised, irritated.

79. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000) 

How do you review your favourite film? Do you try to review it ‘like any other film’ and take pains to put passion to one side, analytically discussing its pros and cons before dutifully moving on? Or do you let the reader know from the outset that it’s your favourite film, openly admit that your angle may be different than usual, your tone perhaps less studious, and indulge yourself with a review that allows you to enthuse?

I don’t think I can completely avoid the second option, and I don’t really want to take the first one- that sounds needlessly dry and maybe even somewhat dishonest. Anyway, you can take my review with a pinch of salt if you want. Or a lorry-load, as the case may be.

So firstly, what is Almost Famous? Well, it’s an ensemble piece. It’s a road movie. It’s a bittersweet comedy-drama. It’s a coming-of-age tale. It’s a love letter to music, and it’s a love letter to the 1970s, particularly the first half of the decade. And if you happen to listen to the movie’s commentary track, or read into its background, you find that it’s also an autobiographical piece that fictionalises yet nevertheless closely documents writer-director Cameron Crowe’s real-life experiences when he was a teenager.

In this, the sensitive, earnest William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is his avatar. Frances McDormand, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Lee, Noah Taylor, Anna Paquin, Fairuza Balk and Zooey Deschanel all play mesmeric supporting roles (particularly Hoffman), but it’s in the triumvirate of William, love interest Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) and lead guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup) that the real heft of the movie lies.

I think it may be a habit of mine to almost unconsciously try to identify a ‘most important’ principal character in a given film, but it would be pointless, and not particularly helpful, to pick out a ‘most important’ character from these three. If you took any one of them out, the film as we know it would completely collapse, and if the filmmaker was determined to make it anyway, they would have to restructure it from the ground up and present it from a completely different angle. Nevertheless, I do feel that it’s on Russell Hammond, and Crudup’s subsequent portrayal of him, that the movie’s success, or potential lack thereof, most heavily rests. He surely has the trickiest role- he plays a man who is both friendly and aloof, both temperate and unpredictable, both sensitive and inconsiderate, both reasonable and rude. The film lives and dies on whether the audience can relate to Russell, and like him, yet despite being married, he offhandedly fucks a teenage groupie who might not even be legal, and uses her, and is stupid enough to think that everything will turn out fine with the situation.

I don’t know if other actors could have achieved this kind of balancing act; I assume that some probably could, considering the wealth of talent in the industry. But it would, of course, have resulted in a different performance- not necessarily worse, but different. In any case, I feel that Crudup works wonders with the role- his Hammond is infuriating, lovable, assured, idiotic, deadpan, and, most crucially, cool. He’s effortlessly charming, always seems to know his line, and he’s cool. He even looks cool when he’s standing on top of a boathouse with his arms to the sky, trying to impress teenagers after a night of regaling them with rambling psychobabble. He even looks cool when he’s literally imploring someone to make him look cool. Next to Crudup’s collected Hammond, Jeff Bebe, openly seething with jealousy and in his own way something of the movie’s antagonist, looks like an ass.

The film has occasionally been criticised for its cosiness- Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer, for example, opined that ‘too much of the dark side has been left out.’ Someone like myself who unconditionally loves the movie would counter that it’s just not that type of film- it’s not about ‘the dark side’, it’s about character, it’s about story, it’s about nostalgia. And it’s not as if these rock stars’ lives are perfect- they bicker, they struggle. They have secrets. William’s relationship with Russell is far from straight idolisation. In any case, there is some bleach mixed in with the Ovaltine- Kate Hudson’s heartbreaking delivery of the line ‘Why doesn’t he love me?’ just as she’s about to get her stomach pumped being the most obvious example.

As the movie ends, we have yet another young female character who is leaving the scene. She has had two prospective suitors in the film, and for reasons that are by turns solid, practical, and somewhat out of her control, she is not building a future with either of them. In this case, her exit is pronounced- she is actually boarding a plane, and we know her exact destination- another country, another continent, a place with completely different customs and a completely different way of life. She isn’t just ambiguously ‘walking away’. It’s perfectly feasible that neither Russell nor William will ever see Penny again, adding a sour note to a denouement which is otherwise, to my mind, one of the finest closing sequences of all time. Incidentally, this is a movie that can take a middling, unheralded track from one of Led Zeppelin’s least-loved albums (Tangerine, that is, from Led Zeppelin III) and make it into one of the most wonderful, life-affirming things I’ve ever heard, then immediately repeat the exact same feat with Feel Flows by the Beach Boys, from Surf’s Up.

A quick word about time. William Miller would be in his early-to-mid 60s now, just like the real-life Cameron Crowe. The groupies would be in their late 60s and early 70s. Russell Hammond would be aged around 75. The band’s manager, Dick, would be in his eighties. William’s mother would be about 90. Some of them, statistically, would be dead- and the real-life Lester Bangs, whom Hoffman brings to life so magnificently, has in fact been dead since 1982 (that’s not to mention Hoffman himself).

This is not just to bemoan what a merciless and unforgiving beast is time. It’s also to bring into sharper focus that Almost Famous is a snapshot of a particular moment. I watch this film and Lester Bangs and Philip Seymour Hoffman are alive again, and always will be. William Miller will always be 15, untouched by cynicism, and have his whole life ahead of him. Sometimes snapshots, especially ones where everyone is smiling, can be concealing uglier things out of the frame, just as this movie is purported to do. But no matter. You treasure the snapshot anyway. It reminds you of a time when you were younger and thinner and you had more fun, and lots of friends, and music was at the centre of your life, and everything was simpler and sweeter.

At the risk of being cloying, I’m just thankful that Almost Famous exists. Every time I watch it there is a small part of me that wonders if this will be the one time that it disappoints. It never, ever is. And I’ll spend the rest of my life getting back on that bus with William and the gang.

61. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

Under The Skin is in two distinct parts. Unlike Tabu or Melancholia, there are no title cards to tell you this, no announcement. But something happens, almost exactly half-way through, that dramatically changes our principal character, and I don’t know what that something is.

I was aware beforehand that Scarlett Johansson was playing an alien. The film doesn’t tell us this, as such, until the very end, and if I hadn’t known, I don’t think I’d have worked it out for myself as she spends the first half of the film driving a van around Glasgow and making amiable, if occasionally awkward, chitchat with the natives- all male. She’s a little odd, a little distant, and seems relatively unaware of how attractive she is, but nothing that screams ‘alien’ to someone, like myself, who doesn’t tend to be very good at that kind of lateral thinking. The scenes are punctuated by images of Johansson and the suitors, naked, against a sheer black backdrop and entering pools of water. This was apparently supposed to be Johansson’s ‘alien’ killing and consuming the men, though again, it’s so open-ended that if I hadn’t known I’d have probably assumed that these were simply visual representations of seductions and the sex act.   

None of this material was bad. It was unusual, perhaps a little confusing, but it was generally fine. I might even go so far as to say I quite enjoyed it. Then the movie’s second half sent me sideways. Suddenly, Johansson’s character becomes mute, almost catatonic, for almost an entire hour of film-time. The impetus for this seems to be the encounter she has had with the deformed man- I’m not being cruel, that’s literally how he’s described in the credits- in which she evidently does not kill or consume him, but lets him live. Suddenly our principal character is not our character anymore.

I queried what the ‘point’ of Margaret was, so it would be unfair to that film if I didn’t mention that I often asked the same question when I was watching this one, or assert that it spends significant periods flirting quite heavily with tedium. Margaret, though, was a character study, something which, one could argue, is a ‘point’, a purpose, in and of itself.

So, is Under the Skin a character study? Well, Scarlett Johansson is in practically every frame, so you would have to at least theorise that it is. What else is it? Well, it’s not a comedy, I can tell you that much. Is it a drama? Yeah, a bit. Is it a suspense film? Again, yeah, a bit. Is it sci-fi? Well, technically, but it would be unlikely to satiate any purist fans of that genre. Is it, as has been put forward by other critics, an essay concerning gender politics? Well, possibly, but not in any way my feeble brain could elucidate on.

I don’t know. Against my better judgement, I looked at other reviews and the kinds of things other critics had to say about it, before writing my own.  I saw the film compared to works by Michelangelo Antonioni and Stanley Kubrick, amongst others. You could add Andrei Tarkovsky to that mix, if you wanted to- Stalker, for example, which features characters who, just like Johansson, have entered an uncomfortable landscape that they don’t belong in and can actively hurt them. But just because I can draw a superficial parallel, it doesn’t mean I’m sure the film is redolent of Tarkovsky, or any of these other directors, on any deeper, more meaningful level.

I’m not really sure of anything, really, except to say that Under the Skin is a perplexing piece. And unfortunately, I don’t recommend it. There are too many things about it that don’t make sense, and I’m not just talking literal, linear sense, but logical sense, too (spoiler ahead). At the end of the film, Johansson is attacked in the woods by a man who wants to rape her. She runs away, terrified, desperate to escape. Why? She’s apparently killed several men over the course of the movie, why can’t she kill this one? If I wanted to look for possible metaphors, then maybe she represents someone who has looked back at their last few years and decided they don’t want to be that person anymore, who resolves not to do any of the things they used to do, and starts to behave completely differently, over-correcting their past indiscretions by acting in a way that is unnecessarily silent and withdrawn. Johansson’s reaction to her potential rapist would then represent an unwillingness to hurt him, to break her vow, and not, in fact, an inability. If this is the case, then this would encapsulate emotions that were distinctly human, and don’t really hold up against the character’s ‘alien’ status.

Like I say, I don’t know. I could point out that this is probably one of the bravest roles I’ve ever seen a Hollywood megastar take, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Johansson’s performance. But the film left me cold, and bored; I think I was supposed to find it disturbing, especially in its abrasive final act, and I didn’t.

69. Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

In Todd Haynes’s period piece Carol, the titular character, played by Cate Blanchett, is having lunch with a younger woman, Therese, played by Rooney Mara, and suddenly remarks ‘What a strange girl you are.’

‘Why?’ asks Therese.

‘Flung out of space,’ replies Carol, in a faraway, dreamy tone.

Therese’s reaction could justifiably have been confounded, even annoyed, but instead she smiles politely, shyly, looks down at the table, and the scene, for the viewer at least, ends.

It seemed oddly coincidental considering the film that I had just finished reviewing, one where Scarlett Johansson had, quite literally, been flung out of space. There’s nothing particularly otherworldly about Therese, but the statement is apparently significant enough that Carol feels compelled to repeat it later, during the film’s big love scene.

We’re aware from an early stage that these two women are going to become involved romantically. It’s evident from the way they speak to each other, even though neither of them say anything remotely suggestive, Carol’s odd remark being perhaps the sole slight exception. The only questions, then, are what the surrounding circumstances are going to be regarding their tryst (this is 1952, so we know that there are going to be problems), and then, of course, how the story will ultimately all turn out in the end.

Carol is a stately film which oozes class. All the period details are on-point, it’s extremely well-photographed, and the performances are all of a high standard. It was also, to these eyes, a little dull. This is a film that moves at its own unhurried pace, and that’s fine, but I thought maybe the dialogue was just a little too dry, the tone just a little too understated at times.

There are echoes of Ida in the way the two women, one around 20 years older than the other, get into a vintage car and embark on a road trip through the landscape of a thoroughly bygone era. Rooney Mara was 30 when she shot this film, but looks decidedly younger, and I would posit her character Therese to be around 24. It’s young, to be sure, but it’s comfortably older than the five young women I’ve been recently discussing- Ida, Mia (Fish Tank), Adele (Blue is the Warmest Color), Lisa (Margaret) or Penny Lane (Almost Famous). She certainly has the nous to enter into a relationship with Carol- we are in no question that our character is a woman, not an adolescent, and despite her repeatedly-stated uncertainty regarding her life’s direction, she is in a position to make considered decisions, and capable. Therese carries with her a quiet but unmistakable maturity, though at one point Carol remarks that she’s ‘blossomed’, possibly in reference to the latent notion that the younger woman is not quite fully-formed yet, that she still has a certain amount of growing to do before she is the finished article.

I feel somehow that Carol is a film that is neither good nor bad. If you go into it determined to like it, then you definitely will; it’s incredibly well-made, and it pulses with restrained, dignified beauty. But if you’re looking to find fault, then you also will- it’s enamoured by its own worthiness, and its ability to construct entire scenes, entire relationships, from decidedly small seeds.

I myself began the film neutral and I ended it neutral- nothing lost, nothing particularly gained. I don’t feel the film was a waste of time, and I don’t wish to imply that it was- if you like this kind of period drama, then it comes unconditionally recommended. But I felt it was more akin to a museum piece, or an artefact, than an actual, full-bloodied movie that had insight, substance and depth. I didn’t dislike it; I might even watch it again at some point. But as the credits rolled, I shrugged and wondered how I was going to turn my indifference into an adequate, coherent review.

93. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007) 

There’s an egalitarian spirit behind Brad Bird’s irrepressible Ratatouille that stands in marked contrast- but perhaps, conversely, compliments- the Nietzschean undertones of his similarly superb previous movie The Incredibles. That film seemed to say that if you have special talents, use them, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t or that you shouldn’t, especially when they don’t possess any of those talents themselves. We can see parallels of this in the special talents of Remy, our hero, who could well be the greatest culinary mind of his generation. Unfortunately, though, he is a rat.

But he perseveres. Through one spellbinding set-piece after another, he does it- he achieves his dreams, he overcomes all the obstacles and he shows the world exactly what he is capable of, whilst conclusively proving the movie’s oft-repeated mantra that ‘anyone can cook’.

If this sounds cloying and syrupy, it isn’t. Everything is handled deftly. The film hums with an intelligence and assurance that permeates every frame, rendering the vast majority of other children’s movies facile with its lavish abundance of wit, style, and verve.

You can see from the choice of voice talent that for all its fun and games, this is a serious movie that is meant to be taken seriously. Patton Oswalt, Ian Holm, Peter O’Toole, Janeane Garofalo, Brad Garrett- these are not stunt-casted Hollywood hotshots, nor names that are flavour-of-the-month or flash-in-the-pan, but performers who have occupied their own corners of pop culture for years, and have their own specific types of appeal forthwith. Crucially, every one of them has built their careers on appealing to adults, more so than, say, Will Smith, Jack Black, or Angelina Jolie, who were all cast in 2004’s Shark Tale, or Ben Stiller, the star of 2007’s Madagascar. 

Either way, I enjoyed Ratatouille immensely. It was a delight from start to finish. Gold stars all round.

30. Oldboy (Park Chan-Wook, 2003) 

(Spoilers immediately).

As we reach the end stages of Oldboy, during the grand finalé in fact, our protagonist Oh Dae-su gets on his knees and starts barking like a dog before licking antagonist Lee Woo-jin’s boots and then, of his own volition without anyone compelling him to do it, taking a pair of scissors and cutting out his own tongue.

Yes, he’s in a terrible situation. Yes, he’s spent the entire movie being put through one searing, wrenching hardship after another and is under unimaginable emotional strain. But come on. Why does he do that? And why has Lee Woo-jin just shot his own loyal henchman in the head?

There are parts of Oldboy that feel like a surreal fever-dream, and a viewer has to ask themselves how well these elements convalesce with the heart of the movie, which generally felt like that of a tough, gritty, uncompromising thriller. There is a certain amount of restraint in the film; it’s not as violent as I thought it would be, considering its reputation, and the worst moments- the teeth-pulling, the tongue-cutting- occur out of frame and are dealt with swiftly. Then all notion of restraint goes out of the window when Oh Dae-su is on all fours, barking, and waving his ass at Lee Woo-jin, exclaiming ‘Look! I’m wagging my tail!’

Yeah, I wasn’t sure about Oldboy. I know I’ve been saying that a lot lately. I looked into its background a little, and found that the film’s sequence of events apparently alludes to Greek mythology; this actually does put it in a better, more illuminating context. But one has to judge how effective this transposition of Greek mythology onto the streets of modern-day downtown Seoul has been. Are they worlds that were ever really meant to meet? The Greek myths are meant to be timeless, but we rarely see plots with their level of bombast and contrivance in our movies today.

It’s an eccentric film, reflecting its eccentric central character, a man pointedly and profoundly removed from the Stallones and Stathams who populate the exciting revenge thrillers that I thought this was going to essentially be a more challenging, high-class, arthouse version of. Maybe the fact that I just wasn’t expecting such eccentricity, or melodrama, is the key to why I ultimately didn’t like this film. Or maybe it’s the fact that the relatively straightforward- and relatively enjoyable- first hour gave way to narrative incoherence and inconsistency of tone in the second. Ratatouille, which of course I reviewed very favourably, contained absurd elements too, completely divorced from reality, but the movie actually begins with a premise that involves rats being fully anthropomorphic- one of them is in fact our main hero, and he is giving us a voiceover. Any flights of fancy the movie takes from that point on are unlikely to be incongruous. In any case, it’s a children’s film; it is expected to possess a certain level of off-road invention and exaggerated energy. It is one thing to see animated representations of humans and animals caught up in wild situations; it is quite another to see the live-action likes of Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum doing it in The Grand Budapest Hotel, especially when the movie is aimed squarely at adults and appears to be soaked in an unpalatable brand of self-satisfied irony.

Oldboy didn’t strike me as ironic, or overly self-satisfied, it just struck me as uneven and bizarre. There’s nothing wrong with bizarre, per se- after all, I loved Toni Erdmann, and you only have to take a look at the film on the very top of our list to see that bizarre elements certainly have their place in modern cinema. But as one compares these disparate movies, there comes a point where the arguments cease to be about context and become about content. Ultimately, I loved the content of Ratatouille; I didn’t love the content of Oldboy or The Grand Budapest Hotel. I wasn’t too crazy about the content of Mad Max: Fury Road either, but I still found it more fulfilling, and certainly more cohesive, than Oldboy.

99. The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)

‘It’s not ‘O rage’, it’s not ‘O despair’, it’s not ‘Old age- my enemy’,’ says Agnès Varda only five minutes into her documentary piece, expressing a sentiment that might have been easier to believe if she hadn’t chosen to soundtrack it with mordant string music. ‘It might even be ‘Old age- my friend’,’ she continues, ‘but still, my hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near.’

The end, incidentally, wasn’t so near; she lived until 2019, almost two decades after she made the film, having reached an age more than ten years older than any of my grandparents managed and which I am highly unlikely to ever reach myself.

Her point, nevertheless, is made. Death is death, whether it happens in two years or twenty years, and it’s an indelible part of art and life, something which retains a constant relevance even in films that are, ostensibly, about people who spend their time scavenging for leftovers. 

This is one of the oldest films on our list, and some of it was filmed in late 1999. We are, in a very real sense, seeing the dying remnants of the last century, and as Varda’s interviewees- some gleaning as a hobby, some through grim necessity, some out of principle- discuss their pastime, we sometimes get the sense that they are also, in their own way, in these nondescript spots of rural France, indirectly saying goodbye to the 1900s, and looking uncertainly at the century to come.

It’s a quiet, gentle movie, even when it touches on topics like poverty and degradation. There’s not much of The Gleaners and I- less than 80 minutes- and subsequently it feels slight, a little like a poem you might catch fragmentarily on the wind; here one minute, gone the next. Fittingly, the cover star of my DVD, a dog that only appears in the film for mere seconds, wagging its tail, will, here in 2021, be dead now. Shot on hand-held digital video, it has a DIY, low-fi aesthetic quality that is accentuated by Varda openly embracing accidents and mistakes; it also ends abruptly. These idiosyncratic factors stand, not incongruously, in slight contrast to the portions of the film which are sober depictions of real lives lived in a certain way, and the people in question quite simply and unsentimentally just getting on with it.

I wrote of Fish Tank, ‘On one level, a viewer’s interest in the film would appear to largely rest on their interest in what life is like on British council estates’. In this instance, one could theoretically transfer that sentiment to foragers in the French countryside. In the ensuing film, it would appear to rest on their interest in what life was like in German villages just before the First World War broke out. The question seems to be whether a given film can ‘transcend its material’, so to speak, but it would appear just as pertinent to ask whether it, in fact, needs to ‘transcend’ its setting or theme to become valid and worthwhile; whether there was anything ‘deficient’ with its basic framework in the first place.

These issues are often completely subjective. Ultimately, I found that The Gleaners and I did outperform its basic premise, albeit modestly; it was touching, bittersweet, and filled with moments that I was able to relate to and connect to in various ways, aided by the fact that it didn’t outstay its welcome. I didn’t feel the same about, for example, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The Thai forest is still as alien to me as it was before I watched that film. Maybe more.

18. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)

Early in Michael Haneke’s shimmering White Ribbon, a young boy asks his older sister about death. Is everyone going to die?, he asks. Everyone? Including me and you? It’s a conversation that is both frank and tender- she tries to sugar-coat the news by smiling sweetly and saying that it will not happen for a long time, but she is honest with him.

Yes. Everyone is going to die. Everyone we know. All of us. There is no way out of it.

Everyone.

This sets the tone, really. The White Ribbon is a piece that examines, amongst other things, the way people interact with each other (verbally and otherwise), and what it means to be a human and why we make the kinds of decisions that we do. This is but one of the many conversations that occur across the movie in which characters speak to each other in a manner that is strikingly direct. Sometimes these conversations are antagonistic, sometimes they are relatively civil, but there is an openness to the dialogue which I found served several purposes: it afforded the film realism, it gave a compelling edge to its narrative and characters, and it allowed the viewer a ‘way in’, so to speak, and to effectively get to grips with material that could so easily have been impenetrable, infuriating, tedious.  

The film concentrates on a single German community in 1913 and 1914. Their lives are insular- the inhabitants rarely seem to leave the village, and when they do, they don’t go far. With this kind of material, immediate touchstones would seem to be Béla Tarr’s Satantango and Ermanno Olmi’s Tree of Wooden Clogs, both of which I think The White Ribbon surpasses. But they’re different beasts, anyway- for one thing, The White Ribbon operates on a far more caustic level than Olmi’s slice-of-life movie; it doesn’t have a documentary flavour, even when it depicts conversations that have a high degree of verisimilitude. Leviathan might be a more pertinent reference point, although Haneke’s scope is wider than Zvyagintsev’s, and we get to see far more of this microcosmic settlement than we did in that film.

In any case, The White Ribbon is quite the masterwork. Practically everything about it is absolutely superb. The cinematography is stunning, while the pacing and general structure of the piece possess the precision of a finely made pocket-watch.

Director Michael Haneke has commented that his decision to shoot in black and white enabled him to create a ‘distancing effect’. Despite this, I found the film to be a deeply immersive experience, almost to the point that there were times when I felt like I was actually living in the town. Not unpleasantly, either; these people may lead incredibly staid, austere lives, and they are often cold, hard people who behave disagreeably, but there was something about this mesmeric, magnificent film that I found oddly soothing. I enjoyed the sweet, quiet courtship between our narrator, the schoolteacher, and the shy young Eva. For me, it was just as important a part of the movie as any of its political, philosophical or sociological themes. Maybe more.

It was only after I had finished the film, and done some background reading, that I understood the film is meant to comment on the rise of the Nazi Party. I didn’t think about this once when I watched it- after all, the film is set just as the First World War is about to start, not the Second- and subsequently I believe that you can watch the film, and appreciate it, without any thought to Nazi subtext at all, just as you can, for example, take William Basinski’s album sequence The Disintegration Loops as a general lament on death, decay and, indeed, disintegration just as much as you can listen to it as a specific artistic reflection of the September 11 attacks. Perhaps more controversially, I also believe you can watch 25th Hour with that same spirit.

Anyway, as with many other aspects of this movie, the exact ties to Nazism are ambiguous, and involve the viewer exercising their own judgements. Few of the characters or their actions are shown to be outright evil; the exception is the doctor, about whom we are left in no doubt, and his scene of astonishing yet casual verbal cruelty served, for me, as one of the movie’s darkest and most portentous moments. Things are less cut-and-dry when it comes to the pastor. He is tough with his children, yes, and emotionally cold, and some of this toughness may possibly cross the line into cruelty, but his intentions seem to be decent enough, and this is 1913, and we’ve been led to believe that that’s what things were like back then, so it’s to be expected, right?

The White Ribbon is a probing, questioning film, disguised somewhat as an elegant period piece, and leaves these sorts of issues nestling in its undertones for you to pick through and analyse yourself. I wrote of Melancholia: ‘Maybe von Trier is making a direct comparison between the literal end of the world and instances where peoples’ own small, insular worlds ‘come crashing down’, and purposely making the point that the latter can somehow feel just as bad.’ There is something of a parallel here in The White Ribbon’s latent suggestion that the kind of everyday cruelty we have all seen and experienced is part of the same behavioural tapestry as the Holocaust; one may be far more extreme than the other, but they essentially draw from the same stagnant well of human impulse. This is a bold proposal, and one which has the potential to draw a storm of criticism from those factions who believe that if you compare one thing to something else, it is automatically saying that these two things are just as bad as each other, that they have an equal level of insidiousness. But the Holocaust simply wouldn’t have happened were it not for the in-built human tendency to bully and to subjugate, and consequently I am among those who think that these theories and hypotheses have genuine sociological weight.

I called Almost Famous ‘a snapshot of a moment’, and of course this is too, as we engage with a world that is teetering on the precipice of the most momentous conflict modern civilisation had ever seen up to that point. As the screen fades to black on an ensemble shot of the whole town’s populace, we again find ourselves in a position of making presumptions about these characters’ futures. We know their lives will be unimaginably upended not once but twice over the next thirty years; for some of the adults, old age, if nothing else, will have done for them by the time 1939 rolls around. What we’re seeing are the final moments of peacetime, and regardless of whether you like these characters or not, or whether they necessarily deserve to live their lives undisturbed, there is a deep, icy, melancholic beauty in that.

57. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) 

There’s nothing wrong with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a highly intelligent and very grown-up thriller- an unfussy, unsentimental work with an emphasis on terse, tense dialogue, punctuated by concise action sequences that are discreet but very apparent displays of technical panache. We find out nothing about our characters’ personal lives, because they don’t matter in the context of the film. If it could be described as more of a solid movie than a spectacular one, it’s still a piece of work that is striking and strident, and achieves exactly what it set out to do.

It could easily have been directed by a man. Names that most readily sprang to mind for me were Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone and David Fincher (though it sensibly withholds the frenetic agitprop and hyperbole of your typical Stone film). I mention this specifically because I recently read the non-fiction essay collection White by Bret Easton Ellis, in which he tackles this issue head-on, coming at it from a decidedly negative standpoint. He opines that Kathryn Bigelow films are being received ‘too well’; that their standing is artificially high based purely upon her gender, which may be true, but not something I will worry myself about unduly. If The Hurt Locker, which I haven’t seen yet, received an undeserved Best Picture Oscar, then it wouldn’t be the first film and it won’t be the last. More interestingly, I feel, Ellis talks about the fact that ‘in the work of Sofia Coppola, Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Mia Hansen-Love, or Claire Denis you were aware of a much different presence behind the camera.’

That’s fine. But is it necessary to be acutely aware of a director’s presence? Should you always know what their gender is? I’ve already discussed how much I dislike the directorial presence in Wes Anderson films, how performative this aspect of them appears to be. Incidentally, if you had told me Fish Tank had been directed by a man, I’d have believed you, and seen no reason to doubt it. The same applies, probably more so, for We Need to Talk About Kevin. On the flipside, if you had told me Carol had been directed by a woman, I definitely would have believed you. Other movies on our list which also cover real events and share Zero Dark Thirty’s air of journalistic professionalism, Spotlight and The Social Network, could perfectly feasibly have been directed by women (though perhaps not Zodiac; I do feel that one had a decidedly masculine tone).

Maybe I’m misrepresenting his comments, but it seems to me that Ellis wants all female-directed films to feel like female-directed films, a notion that not only do I feel no need to subscribe to, but I’m not sure I fully understand. If you really wanted to commit to this, you would have to define what exactly female-directed films feel like, something which Ellis hasn’t really done, and I’m certainly not going to try to do. For me, without wanting to sound obsequious, I think there is something quite refreshing about a female director who- quote unquote- ‘directs like a man’, and I would find it alarming if, instead, all of them without exception insisted that their every film was a profoundly personal vision of searing, uncompromising intensity, as if anything else would somehow be betraying their sex. Kathryn Bigelow is making her gender a non-issue; she’s placing her skills, and the movies that are subsequently produced from them, first.

Zero Dark Thirty didn’t blow my mind; I won’t pretend it will. But it was sharp, highly focused, single-minded, and well-structured. I do feel that it has, like the aforementioned Spotlight, Social Network, and Zodiac, tried to make real-life events play like a thriller, and yielded mixed results. Nonetheless, of the four, this is the one that I found most successful in its apparent aims, and the most satisfying.

24. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)        

Freddie Quell is a strange guy. He’s obsessed with sex, and in our opening montage we see him masturbating, in broad daylight, on a beach. In other moments, he lies inert and clinging to the figure of a nude woman fashioned from sand.

He’s not relatable or sympathetic. Neither is Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, or the vast majority of the characters in Boogie Nights, so this seems to be a trait with Paul Thomas Anderson films.

Still, there’s something different about Freddie. Daniel Plainview could act like a regular person when he wanted to, and so could the Boogie Nights cast, but it doesn’t look like Freddie can. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to feel embarrassment, or shame, or self-consciousness. He appears to go around doing whatever he wants, the very embodiment of impulsivity, or the id.

There are traces of Joaquin Phoenix’s later performance in Joker here, but in that film there was a sweetness to Arthur Fleck, a desire to befriend and to be liked that, amongst other things, attracts bullies and isn’t really present in the more macho, less sensitive Freddie Quell, outsider though he is. In any case, Freddie meets Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, who runs a cult, and the two of them form a close bond. We don’t know why. Dodd is everything that Quell isn’t: he’s temperate, he’s sociable, he’s academic. He’s well-fed. He’s ambitious. He has a decent, respectable home life and he dresses smartly.

Their relationship seems heavily co-dependant. That can happen sometimes, even with two people who apparently have very little in common. But there is an aberration in Dodd’s personality that could go some way to explain why this connection has come about. Quell is aberrant, Dodd is aberrant too; maybe somehow, some way, they can be aberrant together, and negotiate around the fact that Dodd still has to answer to his wife. Hoffman applies a level of sleaze to his portrayal that is never acknowledged by anyone, not even by Anderson’s camera in private. Moreover, he is a man who is aware of how charm works, and, through obvious practice, is very, very good at imitating it, but doesn’t actually have any genuine natural charm himself. Neither is he comfortable or relaxed when he is addressing crowds, though again, he can do a thumpingly convincing impression of someone who is.

When films are essentially a two-hander, one runs the risk of employing supporting actors that, when looked at from a mercenary angle, don’t really need to be there. I feel that that is the case in this picture. Amy Adams gets a decent-sized role, but Laura Dern, Rami Malek, Jesse Plemons and Kevin J. O’Connor are little more than stage dressing.

For the most part, this is a character-driven drama with the occasional idiosyncratic flourish. Then, intermittently, Anderson will throw a scene at us that is thoroughly bizarre. One is the two men grabbing each other in a show of affection and proceeding to actually get on the floor and roll around on the lawn in front of everyone. Another is a song-and-dance routine that Hoffman performs while flanked by an assortment of naked women that were, just a moment ago, clothed. Like Under the Skin, we are ostensibly seeing things that didn’t actually occur and the camera itself is an unreliable narrator; unlike Under the Skin, we don’t get huge chasms of screentime played out at an excruciating pace with barely any dialogue, and subsequently I didn’t find The Master’s digressions as alienating (pardon the pun).

Nevertheless, it was often difficult to know exactly what to make of all of this. I couldn’t really decide if I actually liked the film or not. I admired it- it was brazen, it was uncompromising, and it strikes a note that I don’t think I have ever quite seen in any other film- but I don’t know whether I liked it. It’s instilled with the same subversive spirit that saw There Will Be Blood, after two and a half hours of turgid, challenging drama, end with Daniel Day-Lewis screaming about milkshakes and throwing bowling balls around. The Master similarly ends on its own free-jazz rhythm, with scenes that also echo No Country for Old Men’s non-sequitur denouement. This is the chaos of life, I guess, or perhaps the chaos of the psyche, as we appear to be seeing everything through Freddie Quell’s broken filter. Hoffman’s character, for the second time, breaks into song. Then a sex scene arrives out of nowhere. And the final shot shows Freddie right back where he was at the beginning, on the beach, clutching at a woman made from sand, which seemed to imply that everything in between- the entire film, basically- was a hallucination. This actually makes perverse sense within the film’s internal logic, such as it is. It would explain away conveniences in the plot- the fact that Dodd immediately takes to Freddie, for example, with no warming-up period, or the fact that his status as a cult leader allows him to move a stranger into his family’s house without it seeming all that unusual.

Or of course there may be metaphors there. It’s possible that the camera-eye is not comprehensive- far from it, in fact- and Quell and Dodd have given in to their bizarre chemistry and actually had sex with each other off-screen. It’s even possible that they are the same person, and our ending represents Dodd, at his wife’s behest, reluctantly telling the feral side of his character to leave forever. This interpretation would also mean that the scene where Dodd ‘processes’ Freddie was actually Dodd analysing and/or having an internal dialogue with himself, in a manner which, to varying extents, we all do.

Either way, The Master comes mildly recommended for people who want a piece of odd, against-the-grain cinema with a decent budget and great actors, although I occasionally found Joaquin Phoenix’s mumbling performance a little overcooked. As for Hoffman, I have never had a favourite actor, but if I did, it could well be him, and in The Master he makes another strong posthumous contribution to that possibility. I didn’t like his performance as much as the ones he gave in Almost Famous, 25th Hour, or The Savages, but then I liked those films more, and in them he was playing kind, decent people.

38. City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)

City of God is executed with such technical skill that it almost feels like exhibitionism on the filmmakers’ part. We get split-screens, we get sharply edited montages, we get scenes shown twice from different perspectives, and we get some long, magnificent tracking shots, often through crowds, that must have been almost impossible to pull off. It’s really slick.   

But what is it? Is it a brutal gangster flick, or a social drama about degradation that carries genuine anthropological weight? The easy answer would be to say it’s both, and the vast swathes of critics and fans who think the movie’s terrific would be sure to express such a sentiment. I’m not so sure. Especially in its second hour, I felt the movie leaned more heavily toward the first description than the second, as its plot became denser and its level of sensationalist violence intensified. 

Thematically, and often in execution, too, it’s very similar to the TV show The Wire, and I can’t be the first to point that out, though contemporary critics would not have had the luxury of such a comparison. Inevitably, it is not able to say as much in two hours as The Wire was able to say over five seasons and fifty episodes. But, for one thing, The Wire breathed human life into its antagonists, and showed us that their actions are not always motivated by greed or viciousness. This cannot be said for City of God’s principal villain Lil Ze, who laughingly dispatches crying children on-camera and for whom passing jealousy is a perfectly good motive to rape a stranger while making her boyfriend watch. Sympathetic characters- Benny, for example, or Rocket, are conveniently never shown engaging in violent acts at all; we are left in no doubt which characters we are supposed to like and which characters we aren’t. Subsequently, it lacks The Wire’s more complex, incisive dynamics.

On a cinema screen in 2002, when here in the UK I was still technically not old enough to watch it, it might have been pretty wild. Oldboy too. But though I did prefer it to Oldboy, ultimately I felt that, with its swathes of characters, its whip-smart edits, its proliferating abundance of death and carnage, the film was using sensory overload in an attempt to steamroller me into exhilaration. As it is, on a small screen 20 years later, I don’t feel the film had the kind of power that it appeared to be striving for. It’s not a bad film- far from it. It’s actually a very good one if the material happens to resonate with you. But what does it have to tell us, really, other than that the slums of Rio are terrible beyond belief, where the police have no power, and where the most amoral of a given generation tend to be the ones that rise up through the ranks and end up essentially running the place? I don’t know, really. That does seem to be the main heft of the piece. And there’s a titillating aspect to City of God that sits uncomfortably with its apparent status as a social document, a ‘message from the front line’.

50. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015) 

It took me around ten or fifteen minutes to see that a pattern was being established in The Assassin.

A scene will ensue. It may involve some dialogue, it may not. If there is dialogue, it is likely to be highly expository.

The speaker will finish speaking.

The scene, for all intents and purposes, appears to be over.

But Hou Hsiao-hsien holds his camera on the scene.

And holds it.

And holds it.

And holds it.

Surely he will edit away now. The scene is over.

He doesn’t. He holds it.

Holds.

Holds.

And he does this over…

                                 …and over…

                                              …and over…

…and over…

…and over…

…and over again.

He does this with practically every single shot in the entire movie.

Everything we see, whether animate or inanimate, whether beautiful or mundane, is given this treatment. The viewer is obliged to stare and stare and stare at it. My dad asked me at one point if I was watching the film with the audio muted.

It’s absolutely interminable. It makes Once Upon a Time in Anatolia look like some sort of lively commercial enterprise, brimming with incident. If you get one or two scenes like this in a film, then it might function as an effective tool to create mood and contrast. But an entire film of it is bewildering.

If you’re expecting martial arts in the movie, you’ll likely be disappointed. It does contain martial arts, but only in the way The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford contains gunfights, or Under the Skin contains sci-fi elements, or Almost Famous contains sex and drugs.

If you are well-schooled in slow cinema, if you like Béla Tarr and Terrence Malick, then maybe you can find something here to appreciate and enjoy. If not, I would generally advise you to avoid it. This one is for the hardcore arthouse only.

62. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) 

This is the second time I’ve seen Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. I liked it well enough the first time around, but I was relatively indifferent, and I preferred his follow-up Django Unchained, which for some reason I considered an ‘easier’, more straightforward, and ultimately more exciting movie.

Watching it again, I found it altogether more seductive. Maybe it’s because I now know that its standing is such that it can appear on a scholarly list like this one, and I was quite pleased for the old populist provocateur, who, mixed feelings aside, has entertained me very much over the years, to be getting his slice of critical kudos.

It is a more convoluted film than Django Unchained, but that’s not a detriment. In fact, I liked the diversions, the long subtitled sections in French and German where Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger and Mélanie Laurent- all excellent- are given full rein to exhibit their tremendous multilingual skills. The ample supporting cast of native German actors, complete unknowns to a layman like me, are all great too. It took chutzpah for Tarantino to insist that the real languages were spoken, and we all know he’s not lacking in that, but it also indicates, if there were ever any doubt, that he cares about the films he’s making, he doesn’t want to put out movies that are tossed-off or half-baked. It would have been, at least in theory, quite tricky to find actors that could switch between French, German and English at will- in Christoph Waltz’s case, he segues seamlessly into Italian, too- but Tarantino does it anyway, because that’s the film he wants to make.

And it pays off. There’s an argument to be made- a strong one- that Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s finest movie. There’s an even stronger argument to be made that it’s his most mature; some would claim that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood deserves that title, but I would posit that it’s this one. I certainly found it a richer and more satisfying cinematic experience. Whether you like Tarantino or not- and I’m not necessarily his biggest fan- he is unquestionably a filmmaker of considerable talent. Sometimes that talent takes the form of films that are less effective than this one- in my opinion, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is in that category, and so is The Hateful Eight, even though the latter movie made my own personal 21st Century Top 100.

Then again, perhaps I was just relieved to find a film that was so openly and unashamedly trying to entertain me after my experience watching The Assassin.

46. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

In yet another coincidence, we have two movies in a row which amply feature full conversations that flit from one language to another and back again; I couldn’t recall a single one that I had seen prior to Inglourious Basterds, which may have been why I found its interplay so enthralling. Now I have seen two.   

We have a French woman, played by Juliette Binoche, and an English gentleman, played by William Shimell, both somewhat quintessentially representing their respective nationalities, in Tuscany. They don’t know each other, but she- an antiques dealer- is an admirer of his intellectual, theoretical writing. She comes to one of his readings, buys six of his books to give to friends and subsequently manages to arrange a meeting with him. They go on a small road trip. They lightly discuss philosophy and art. They slowly start to get to know each other. They share the kind of push-pull, gently probing conversation that two erudite people do when they are in the embryonic stages of a potential friendship or possible romance. It’s all very charming.

Then, around the film’s mid-point, something changes completely. It’s not announced in any way, but suddenly the two are a married couple that have just traversed their 15th wedding anniversary. Binoche’s son, a precocious irritant who we meet at the beginning of the picture, is now ‘their’ son, and they have baggage.

A lot of baggage.

They air it all out for us to absorb.

What does it all mean?

Well, as usual, it’s pure speculation. This could simply be a piece of formal experimentation, designed to provoke thought in the viewer. It could be that the two characters are, for some reason, role-playing, and they have managed to catch some shared wavelength that they together take to exuberant extremes. Maybe they are playing a Wittgenstein-esque language game. Or maybe the film is running on some sort of dream logic. Maybe they never really meet at all, and Binoche’s character, who was initially awestruck at the thought of meeting Shimell’s, is indulging an extended fantasy about driving through the Tuscan landscape with him which, for some unknown reason, turns sour, as dreams often inexplicably do. In fact, maybe everything that transpires between them is a reflection of her real marriage and this writer, this figure of admiration, is serving as a stand-in for a completely different man.

There’s a sadness to Certified Copy in the way it comments on how love can turn into indifference and hostility, especially when fragments of the love still survive and emerge intermittently, serving to remind you of what you don’t have anymore. But I wonder if I would have preferred the film that would have resulted from a following of the first half’s framework; it might not have been particularly substantial, and it certainly wouldn’t have been taxing, but I suppose that I am, almost subconsciously, always craving cohesion. I often don’t mind movies where nothing much happens as long as the characters are engaging enough (as we will later discover when I review Lost in Translation), and in this case, the scenery would have been beautiful, too. Kiarostami could have made two separate films from this, and he could have used the same two actors if he wanted to give them a definitive, formal, ‘twinning’ juxtaposition. In keeping with the film’s title and themes, they could have been ‘copies’ of each other, just as the other couples we meet across the movie, all at different stages of their marriages, are ‘copies’ of our central pair. As it is, Certified Copy feels like these two hypothetical films stitched together, and not always with the highest level of care. Of course, Kiarostami is overtly taking risks, producing material that he knows has the potential to disconcert, jarring us out of our malaise, and purposely, if not necessarily purposefully, pushing at the foundational tenets of character-based drama. That’s all fine. But as it is, I was left with another cinematic experience that, on many levels, I enjoyed and respected, but left me feeling unfulfilled and relatively unmoved as the credits rolled. The resigned sadness that the picture managed to evoke was exactly that- resigned. Listless, taciturn. Inert.

4. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) 

The explosion of acclaim which accompanied this animated Japanese movie on its release prompted me to watch it at the time; I would have been about 16. Typically, I didn’t really know how to take it. It certainly wasn’t the enchanting maelstrom of wonder that I’d been expecting.

Spirited Away is, of course, suitable for children, but apparently aimed somewhere above their heads, in a way that films such as The Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or The Neverending Story are not. Adults can enjoy those films, of course, and many do, but they’re not shot through with the same symbolism and obvious allegorical content that Spirited Away is. Conversely, though, those films are also arguably more ‘adult’ in that they contain scenes that are genuinely frightening, and there isn’t much at all in this movie that would scare children, even very young ones. I mean, there’s a slimy monster at one point, but he doesn’t do anything alarming, he just wants to come and take a bath. The villain- an old crone called Yubaba- is more crotchety and bad-tempered than she is vicious or evil, and a world away from the terrifying Disney antagonists like Ursula, Jafar or Scar, who genuinely wanted to maim and kill our heroes.

So yeah. I don’t think the kids would be scared. They might be bored, though. That’s another issue, I suppose. The phantasmagorical wonderworld that the film seems to promise as it presents us with an abandoned amusement park coming to colourful life at dusk becomes a narrative about…an enormous bathhouse that our plucky heroine, Chihiro, works at. Like, y’know, actually works there. As a job. In lieu of adventure.

So are we given some strong characters to get our teeth into? In my opinion, no. Chihiro’s friends, Haku and Lin, are both bland; Haku spends much of the film MIA and then reappears in the second half as a non-verbal, non-anthropomorphic dragon. Another ‘friend’, the spirit No-Face, fades in and out of visibility and, despite a grand, gluttonous and ostensibly dangerous mid-movie set-piece, is effectively mute throughout.

I didn’t understand any of the allegory back then, and unfortunately now, at the age of 36, having watched it again, I still don’t, even after reading the movie’s Wikipedia page, which has a section entitled ‘Themes’ with five separate sub-headings. None of these explain the bobble-heads in Yubaba’s chamber, or the enormous baby, or why a bath-house that was so enamoured by No-Face’s gold had no time for the cash that Chihiro’s parents would have given them.

I don’t wish to give over the impression that there’s anything inherently wrong with Spirited Away. There isn’t. For what it is, an amalgam of overt arthouse style and animated children’s film, it’s probably better than the attempts most filmmakers, even great ones, might be able to achieve if they tried to merge those two worlds (Wes Anderson’s ghastly Fantastic Mr Fox springs to mind). Unfortunately, I don’t really see or appreciate anything beyond that. I just don’t feel any of the profundity that I’ve been led to believe I’m supposed to.

80. The Return (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2003) 

I began my Leviathan review by stating that it was ‘a grim Russian drama that focuses grimly on a small group of characters who struggle, argue, threaten, betray and sometimes even physically attack each other as they attempt- and fail- to find some peace or equilibrium in their harsh existence.’

Well, here I ‘return’ to Andrey Zvyagintsev, and these same themes again. Maybe I shouldn’t be talking about Leviathan at all, and instead be trying to judge this film entirely on its own merits, but although this is very much a distinct work with its own distinct qualities, the parallels with the director’s later movie are too numerous and too strong to be ignored completely.

And yes, this is another grim movie, evidenced from an early stage by the incredibly sparse, austere décor of the house that the unnamed mother character and her two sons live in. It is also one which is characterised by disagreements and tension. They haven’t seen the father for 12 years, which is unexplained, and he has now come back, which is also unexplained. We are never told where he’s been, what he wants, or what his relationship with the mother was like. This technique of omission, when handled well, can be very effective, and in Zvyagintsev’s hands, it speaks to a level of narrative control and craftsmanship which is outright masterful. In any case, these omissions mirror the story itself, which is centred around a certain amount of confusion and dislocation.

This is a more simplistic movie than Leviathan, and it generally feels like a slighter one- not necessarily a bad thing, especially when Leviathan was such a weighty piece anyway. With 11 years between the two movies, one would naturally conclude that Leviathan represents an artist who is operating at a higher, more developed level of maturity. But a viewer has to ask themselves if The Return really is slighter, necessarily, or just happens to have a more minimalist dynamic, though it’s probably both. I commented on the narrowness of Zvyagintsev’s focus when reviewing Leviathan, and here it is even narrower; essentially, we are only given three characters, two of whom are adolescents, and their story covers only a few scant days.

There are echoes of The White Ribbon in its questioning of how valid a disciplinarian parenting style is; where we identify the point at which a parent is administering too much discipline, too harshly, and a sense of balance has been lost. Then, there is a counter-argument that Vanya, the younger brother- a terrific, focused performance from the young Ivan Dobronravov- is needlessly hostile to his father, makes a conscious choice to ignore the warnings and punishments that are doled out, and is ultimately responsible for the film’s chain of events to a degree that cannot be fully excused by his youth.

Leviathan was the first movie in which I compared the filmmaking technique to that of a prose stylist. I’ve touched on this theme a few times since, perhaps most notably with Margaret, but of all the directors so far that I have looked at and covered, Zvyagintsev is definitely the one whose movies I feel most strongly resemble novels; in The Return’s case, a novel that is short, stark, and suffused with a singular strain of natural imagery both exquisitely beautiful and hopelessly unforgiving.

90. The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)

I haven’t seen many holocaust dramas. The only one I can think of off the top of my head, before The Pianist, is Schindler’s List. That is, then, my first point of reference as I try to sum up what is, necessarily, one of the most serious and historically important films on our top 100.

The first thing to notice was that The Pianist was more immediate and involving than Schindler’s List. We are given insight into family life and interpersonal minutiae that was, to my memory, completely absent in the Spielberg film. We feel the creeping menace as the situation gets worse and worse; we see first-hand a Jewish person’s defiant refusal to leave- a decision that, reverberating across the annals of history, looks stupid, but makes perfect sense in the context of the film. People are complex- they don’t always do what they ‘should’, and they base their decisions on an intertwining melange of experience, circumstance, inherent personality traits and the influence of others. Spielberg took a different approach- his movie was far more consciously a ‘document’, and he portrayed man’s inhumanity to man through a series of impassive set-pieces which saw the camera-eye itself view the victims as nameless and, to some extent, disposable. I respect that approach, and I understand its worth, but as a piece of cinema, I preferred The Pianist, and I would proffer that if you had only one film to try to explain the holocaust to someone who knew nothing about it, The Pianist would perhaps be the more useful of the two.

Schindler’s List looks like a newsreel, and also plays like one at certain points, but in The Pianist, it is brought home more pertinently that these people are real characters, they could easily be your friends and neighbours, they could literally be you. It could have happened to any one of us. And this movie addresses far more directly the question: what would you do in this situation? You wouldn’t just be scared, you would be angry, too, and that anger would influence your thinking to some degree.

Something else happened with The Pianist, though, which I wasn’t expecting: I was entertained. It had a strong, solid narrative through-line, it was well-structured and it was technically impressive. It’s a considered piece of work which generally keeps emotional manipulation and melodrama to a minimum. Neither is the violence overstated- if anything, it’s sanitised, as we see people being shot in the head at point-blank range without any of the brain splatter or viscera that we’ve come to expect from such an act. This is an interesting decision, as we do not get the sense that Polanski is trying to present the events as less shocking than they actually were (although you could make the argument that no movie could ever really be shocking enough to completely capture the scale of this colossal blot on humanity). Rather, I suppose, the choice to downplay violence comes from a desire to keep the work tonally consistent, avoid alienating more casual viewers, and ensure that due emphasis is retained on its core substance- its maturity, its gravitas and general import, its use of dramatic irony, its scenes of excruciating fine margins and blind luck.

11. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)

Inside Llewyn Davis starts as an entertaining portrait of a life lived bohemian. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Issac) is a folk singer in 1961 New York, and we follow him as he couch-surfs, gigs, gets into scrapes, loses- and chases- his friends’ cat, and participates in a goofy recording session. He has a tendency to rub people up the wrong way, and these abrasive interactions are often charming and funny in a decadent, downtrodden sort of way.

I liked it. I’ve always had a frustrated, ambivalent relationship with the Coen brothers, and failed to connect with their sensibilities, but this one felt slightly different. For one thing, the directors’ predilection for caricature was subdued here, and minimal.

Things changed a little around the middle of the picture, when Llewyn is travelling in a car with two new characters- Roland Turner, played by John Goodman, and Johnny Five, played by Garrett Hedlund. Both of them irritated me, Turner with his larger-than-life, oafish behaviour which felt like it might have been beamed in from a different movie (one perhaps more akin to The Big Lebowski), and Johnny with his affected, overly silent James Dean persona. It was around this time, maybe slightly earlier, that I had started to question just what the ‘point’ of this film was supposed to be. Was it just going to be about this guy, who spends his days hustling, and trying to find cash, and having arguments, and annoying most everyone he meets?

Anyway, I didn’t have to spend long with those two characters; they’re only in it for a few minutes. With them gone, the second half of the movie unfolded and the ‘point’ of it became clearer as the cavalier, often overtly comic tone of its first half descended into a whirlpool of disappointment and despair. Llewyn Davis is a man who lets himself down just as much as he lets others down, and there doesn’t really seem to be very much he can realistically do about it. He’s at a stage in his life- his early-to-mid-thirties- when bohemian behaviour starts to run extremely thin, and he is expected to have much more control over his general situation. His Plan A isn’t working, no matter how strongly he believes in its veracity and subscribes to its values. His Plan B- the Merchant Marine- is a last resort, a regression, a resignation. And there isn’t a Plan C.

Like the characters of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, tragedy hangs in Llewyn’s background, and no matter what he’s doing or where he’s going at a given time, it’s never far from his thoughts. Like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the film is another meditation on unfulfilled expectations, sadness and loss. Like The Return, the film doesn’t have what a mainstream moviegoer might call a ‘proper’ ending; it doesn’t have any answers for us as it fades to black, any more than Llewyn himself has any answers, and it simply lets its themes speak for themselves.

32. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) 

I didn’t know anything about the German Stasi when I viewed The Lives of Others. I didn’t know what their goals were or what their purpose was supposed to be, so I was watching it blind as far as its socio-political context was concerned.

This didn’t seem to matter much as I absorbed the movie. Yes, it is steeped in a morose sense of cultural and personal suffocation, but it was essentially a character piece, and reasonably accessible throughout. It has some elements of a thriller, but only very lightly, and it be would more accurately described as a sober, mature drama.

It’s very solidly made, and subtly claustrophobic without having anywhere near the kind of searing grimness we have seen in films such as The Pianist or The White Ribbon. You could even say it was a lighter piece than The Return or Inside Llewyn Davis.

Again, Leviathan rears its head as that film’s villain was very similar to the one in The Lives of Others- they are both fat, sleazy public officials, despotic by nature, running their modest branch of local government like their own personal sovereign domain, openly contemptuous of those they consider to be beneath them and caring not a jot that their behaviour is deeply unedifying.

The film features a highly controlled central performance from Ulrich Mühe, who, like Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence or Muhammet Uzuner in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, is largely inscrutable. Unlike those two characters though, he is officious- repellently so- and is presented as a man without history, and next-to-no personal life; the perfect employee, basically. By contrast, Georg Dreyman is cultured, respected, with a high artistic pedigree, a comfortable home with a shelf full of books, and a girlfriend who is beautiful and famous. Sebastian Koch imbues Georg with a soulfulness that provides the movie with a heroic centre, and could easily have been overplayed by a less perceptive actor.  

So it’s possibly jealousy that has prompted Mühe’s character, Gerd Wiesler, to turn the attention of the Stasi onto Georg, though the movie chooses to keep it vague. God knows Dreyman hasn’t done anything to personally provoke the man, though it’s also hinted that this kind of surveillance was so pervasive that it would have come about for Dreyman, as a prominent and influential ‘creative’, whether Wiesler had instigated it or not.

The movie hits the right notes. It’s intelligent, thoughtful, imbued with tragedy, and ultimately satisfying, if perhaps a little on the slight side.

48. Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015) 

Brooklyn is a period piece, one that I found very reminiscent of Carol, right down to the fact that our heroine, Eilis, played by Saoirse Ronan, even works for a time in a department store, just as Rooney Mara’s Therese did. The year is 1951 and she has left her insular Irish town for the bright lights of America; it’s left fairly ambiguous as to why she has felt the need to do this, though it’s suggested that finding satisfactory employment would be a struggle where she is, and we can also assume that she just wants to have her horizons broadened in that general and fairly understandable way that young people do.

Like Carol, and many others that we’ve covered thus far, Brooklyn sets out its stall and then proceeds to play out at its own pace, on its own terms, under no apparent pressure from external forces. It’s not the slowest film I’ve ever seen- far from it- and it’s certainly not the dullest, but it basks in its own elegance, along with the sheer quality of its stage dressing and the precision of its period detail. It’s more eventful than Carol, with more incident, and the characters are generally more verbose and straightforward- blunt, even. Does this make Carol an emptier film than Brooklyn, necessarily, or merely a more minimalist one? Just as when this issue surfaced in comparing Leviathan and The Return, it’s one which I don’t feel has a single, definitive answer. What I will say, though, is that minimalism can be something of a risky move- it’s not always going to come across with the profundity or elegant understatement that the filmmakers intend.

Anyway, Eilis has a choice to make, and in this, I found, the most pertinent and relatable of Brooklyn’s themes emerged. Circumstance sees her return to Ireland, and she is then offered a new life to the one she has built in Brooklyn, one which is in many ways just as good, and in others, arguably even better. Therein lies the dilemma: should she stay, or should she go? Has she, essentially, been born in the right place?

There are men involved, and you could say they embody their respective countries. Back in Brooklyn, Tony Fiorello is extroverted, assured, wears his heart on his sleeve and is Italian in both ancestry and spirit, just as America is itself a nation made up of hybrid cultures. In Ireland, Jim Farrell is a man whose reserved, gentlemanly behaviour appears to be steeped in history and tradition, hinting at arcane, potentially very rewarding, hidden depths.

Eilis is a quiet, thoughtful girl with a mature head on her shoulders. She’s not prone to laughter or silliness, and doesn’t join in when others are exhibiting such behaviour. She’s not a dreamer and she doesn’t have any beguiling quirks. She’s very intelligent- the film makes that clear several times- and she’s polite and pleasant enough, if a little taciturn. But she doesn’t have any obviously engaging qualities that would induce not one but two suitors to fall quite deeply in love with her. I don’t feel that this shortcoming- if it is indeed a shortcoming- is something she should have aimed to change, and I certainly don’t feel that the men were ‘wrong’ to fall for her, I just wish the film had elucidated these processes in a more developed way, so I could have understood them better. Even as the film finished, Eilis still remained something of an enigma and someone I didn’t feel particularly close to, even though she’s in practically every frame and the film is her character study just as much as it is anything else.

Notably, Carol had three people serving in roles of principal creative force- the original novelist, a separate, autonomous screenwriter and a director. Brooklyn has this specific triumvirate dynamic too; in Carol’s case, two of those figures were female, whereas with Brooklyn, all three of them are male. Does this make a difference? I do think that they are very similar movies, both tonally and visually, and what little differences there are could very well lie in this gender disparity at script level. Or they could lie in the inherent directorial variance between Haynes and Crowley. Either way, I feel that Ronan had a more demanding role than Mara, and in this, she had the opportunity to give a more expressive performance that subsequently also felt more technically robust, making it, if anything, even more frustrating that I still found Eilis remote and difficult to fully empathise with.

There’s no doubting Brooklyn’s sumptuous aesthetics. Its vision of a 1950s New York is pastel-coloured, picture-postcard perfect. But overall I found the movie to be a curiously dour experience. This is not to say that the movie is bad- it isn’t- or even mediocre, but just that it didn’t resonate with me on any level that felt meaningful.

85. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, 2009) 

A Prophet is a French prison film. Like its central character, it’s lean, it’s mean, and it’s elusive. Like The Lives of Others, A Prophet eschews techniques that would have spoon-fed us information about our man- a voice-over, for instance, or flashbacks- and just leaves the sorts of questions they would have answered to the ether. As a consequence, Malik al-Djebena, like Gerd Wiesler, is a man without history, and also without family, although his prison cohorts insist on the relevance of his Algerian ancestry.  

There were certain personality traits that we were able to discern from Gerd Wiesler’s stony façade, such as officiousness and fastidiousness, but we don’t really know what Malik’s personality traits are, except that he doesn’t want to perform the murder that he is tasked with, even though it will bring about personal gain and, at least in theory, make his prison life easier. From this we can suppose that he is not pre-disposed to violence, and had he not committed his original, relatively minor crime, he could have quite feasibly had a completely different life, one which was perhaps somewhat ‘normal’.

Like other movies in this sort of mould that we’ve covered, such as A History of Violence or City of God, I liked the film well enough without being overly enamoured. It’s true that the similarities between these three films are largely superficial, and their respective approaches completely different, but they cover some of the same thematic ground, even representing as they do three different nations. If A History of Violence was a somewhat chilly, remote dissection of human (particularly male) behaviour with existential undertones, and City of God was, with its frenetic pace and technical wizardry, a piece that aimed to be as immersive and involving as possible, then A Prophet falls somewhere in between these two yardsticks, though I would say probably closer to the former. It also features abstract elements completely absent in those two films- dream sequences and hallucinations that brought to mind La Haine, a movie which also integrated such imagery into an otherwise realistic, overtly gritty context.

The cover of my DVD features a quote which compares A Prophet to Goodfellas and Scarface; my City of God DVD quoted a comparison to Goodfellas too. There are really only two scenes of significant violence in A Prophet; while both of them are very brutal, together they probably make up about seven or eight minutes of a 155-minute film. That, in itself, I suppose is comparable to the Scorcese picture. But the vast majority of this movie is brooding and introspective, replete with the kind of quiet moments and breathing space completely lacking in Goodfellas’ relentlessly busy cinematic tapestry which, amongst other things, contains a cavalcade of characters all jostling for screentime. In that aspect, City of God is much more similar.

Earlier, I recommended A History of Violence to those that might be ‘looking for a pulpy thriller that maybe has a little more brains and a little more of a cerebral edge than most’. I may as well repeat that sentiment here word for word. In that spirit, I guess you could also compare A Prophet to Michael Mann crime films such as Heat or Collateral, though it’s far more subdued, noticeably less commercial, and arguably less effective than either of those. Neither is it as compact a work as the Cronenberg piece- it doesn’t have its air of brisk economy, whilst from an art film perspective, its gloomy, pensive fabric shares some superficial similarities with Zvyagintsev without having the same level of overarching majesty or psychological insight.

64. The Great Beauty (Paulo Sorrentino, 2013) 

The Great Beauty is the only Italian film on our list, and it is one that reflects Italy in ways that an outsider such as myself would typically expect. It’s wild, it’s uninhibited, it’s decadent, and it is also a piece of filmmaking that is uncommonly tactile and profoundly sensory. It is, as the title would suggest, highly focused on aesthetics, and beauty in many forms, including, somewhat inevitably, the female figure. Copious nudity abounds, often from women who are only in the film for mere seconds; so cheerful is the film in its willingness to indulge in such imagery that any accusations of gratuitousness are steamrollered into limp submission.

The Great Beauty is like a chameleon in its restless and somewhat virtuosic shape-shifting. It’s a film which is philosophical when it wants to be, absurd when it wants, morose when it wants, erotic when it wants, and just generally waltzes through the lines that divide comedy, drama, tragedy and everything in between. Fittingly, its characters are not static- they are capable of both good and bad behaviour, depending on their mood, while weak-willed characters can be shown in moments of integrity and vice versa. It is openly in love with art, and is undoubtedly a piece of art in itself, yet also perversely and mischievously offers scathing sideswipes at the more obtuse, self-important excesses of the avant-garde.    

It’s a piece of cinema that is exhilarating on several levels, though I suspect its charms would be lost on a viewer who baulks at non-sequiturs and dislikes the sensation of being toyed with. Of all the movies I’ve reviewed so far, I feel that this one had the closest spirit to our first film, Holy Motors, which I called ‘something of a masterpiece’. There are significant differences, but what similarities there are I felt were too strong to ignore; these include a willingness to take huge, audacious tonal risks, style and verve in abundance, and dazzling technique. Like Holy Motors, it is not necessarily easy to say what The Great Beauty is actually ‘about’, so slippery are its dynamics, and it’s possible that emphasis is intended to be focused entirely on the journey rather than the destination.

Unlike Holy Motors, which was comparatively cold and surgical, The Great Beauty feels like a celebration. It celebrates decadence, indulgence and pleasure, not just in themselves, but also as tools to anaesthetise the wrenching, inexorable passage of time. It celebrates life, in all its terrible messiness, and in contrast to previous films that have touched on such subjects, it even seems to actively celebrate pain and loss and sadness as integral elements of our collective experience.

41. Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015) 

Speaking of which…

Inside Out is a film with a central conceit that has, at least to some degree, been done before- in 2001’s Osmosis Jones, for example. But it stands, amongst many other things, as a testament to what can be achieved with an existing idea if you come at it with an attitude and an approach which is overflowing with intelligence and invention. That first adjective may be the key word here- this is, maybe above all else, an intelligent film, just as Ratatouille was before it and The Incredibles was before that- a serious movie with serious intent, and not something with the sole purpose of keeping the kids quiet for an hour. We have always admired children’s films that have managed to also entertain adults- there are many over the years which have been able to pull off that balancing trick incredibly well, with flair and aplomb- but in Inside Out we have a film that arguably has just as much to offer an adult as it does a child, something I’m not sure applies to any other children’s film I’ve ever seen. To clarify, if I consider other children’s films that I hold in high regard- The Lion King, Coraline, and the original 1971 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to name but three- then they are films which comfortably and skilfully transcend their genre, and which an adult can quite easily enjoy, but that’s not to say that they have just as much to offer the adult.

The themes that imbue Inside Out, however, regard memory, the passage of time, and how it feels to see aspects of your past disintegrate or disappear completely- concepts that simply have more meaning to an adult than they do children or adolescents. That these themes are presented to us in a way that is colourful and energetic is incidental. One could even argue that the movie’s ability to broach these topics without the option to descend bleakly into tortuous existential quicksand is fully to its credit. Either way, it’s a superb film, one which seems to be in love both with the act of filmmaking itself, as evidenced most overtly by the segment which deals with dreams, and also in love with making clever little observations which garnish the film like sprinkles on an already rather magnificent cake.

As referenced at the top of this review, Inside Out takes a positive stance toward emotions like sadness and regret, asserting that they are valuable building blocks in our emotional constitution which serve a crucial purpose, in direct contrast to previous films on this list- Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, for example- which seem to present the inherent, unavoidable pain of advanced sentience as hopeless, grinding and tragic. Both approaches have their place, but Inside Out is the easier to enthuse about and like, though that may not have been the case if it hadn’t been so accomplished.

22. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) 

Lost in Translation is the story of two people, two Americans, played by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanssen, who enter into a friendship when they find themselves staying at the same Tokyo hotel. It’s also the story of two unsatisfying marriages. Some filmmakers would have chosen to keep these other halves offscreen, but Coppola makes the decision to show us their spouses- in Murray’s case, we don’t see his wife, but we hear her, first-hand, over the phone, and it’s more than enough to get a feel for his marriage’s flavour.

Both of them are astute enough to recognise that their relationship is of a non-romantic, non-sexual strain. It just is. If Bob was younger, he may have tried to shoehorn sex into the situation, and may well have succeeded, especially if Charlotte was simply too bored and disaffected to rebuff him. But as it is, he has probably done that kind of thing before, and knows that the lasting consequences are not worth it. He doesn’t need sex from her- he might want it, but that’s another story, and largely irrelevant. What he needs is her company, her counsel, and her conversation. Again, a younger man might convince himself that he could have both; Bob knows better. Instances where you could potentially have both are extremely rarefied, and this simply isn’t one of them.

They’re also both intelligent enough to know that such a capitulation wouldn’t help anything. It wouldn’t assuage any of the alienation that they have discussed with each other- it would, in fact, worsen it, and cheapen all the memories of the few days they had together. I guess, then, that it would have cheapened the movie, too. The obvious parallel to draw here would be with Ghost World, another film about an unlikely friendship between a young woman and a much older man, in this case one where the two of them do in fact end up sleeping together. Did that ‘cheapen’ Ghost World? No, it didn’t, but for one thing, Ghost World has a much different, much more irreverent tone than Lost in Translation. For another, that movie actually acknowledges itself that the act has changed things between its central characters, and not for the better. It wants to have a messy resolution that provokes discord. That’s its central thematic arc.

Lost in Translation, by contrast, is a piece that never deviates in any significant way from its own sweet, graceful rhythms, a decision which ultimately counts in its favour. That isn’t to say that there aren’t little complications along the way for our characters- a sulky disagreement here, an accident that requires a hospital visit there- but they’re woven into the fabric of the film with a steady hand and don’t detract from the film’s strong tonal control.

When I first saw Lost in Translation at the cinema in 2003, it was nothing short of a revelation. As a shy, sensitive, awkward 18-year-old who had no idea where my life was going and who felt profoundly removed from the more mainstream tastes and attitudes of my peers, I was enraptured by its open contempt for extroversion and exuberance, a theme upon which Ghost World also touches. I was overjoyed to see a film that was based purely on conversation, and character, and intellectual heft- no explosions, no CGI, no suspension of disbelief. No need for any plot twists. No pandering to any demographic. It was as if someone was simply speaking to me calmly and intelligently, with no transparent attempts to impress me.

2021, though, sees me view the movie with a slightly more critical eye. It doesn’t touch me as deeply as it once did. For one thing, Bob’s behaviour towards fans who recognise him and are really happy to meet him is just downright rude, and needless. But you get older, I suppose, your worldview adjusts, and sometimes certain themes and ideas- in this case, ennui with an elitist undertone- don’t always carry the same sort of weight as they once did.

That’s not to say that I can think of a film that covers that specific ground as well as this one does. There is a question as to whether this movie is somehow more than the sum of its parts. On the face of it, it’s just about lonely, insomniac expatriates living out a few days together in a Tokyo hotel. Was Sofia Coppola able to briefly- and somewhat fortuitously- bottle lightning? My disappointing viewing of her 2010 movie Somewhere would suggest yes. But I’ll always love Lost in Translation, and its beautiful soundtrack, and if my love for it is now a warm affection, tinged with nostalgia, and an awareness of the film’s few minor shortcomings, where it used to be akin to some sort of hot, heavy love affair- a state which Almost Famous, 25th Hour and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have more effectively managed to maintain- then it doesn’t change the fact that a slightly different type of love is still love. Watching it is a bit like getting into a warm bath; I’ll always come back to it, pleasantly living out those days again with Bob and Charlotte, and maybe even pretending it’s 2003, when my life was very different and still yet to really start.

7. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) 

Of all the films I’ve viewed so far, The Tree of Life is the one which opens itself up most broadly to accusations of pretension, and indeed, there was more than one moment when I was intending to outright call it pretentious when I came to begin my review. This compulsion was most keenly felt when characters solemnly intone short, fragmented phrases in voiceover- phrases that are often whispered, don’t really make much sense, either in or out of isolation, and generally come off contrived and precious, even to the point that they could induce small peals of cynical laughter. While Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, for example, had the ‘excuse’ of irreverent and absurdist undertones, should they be needed, to assuage potential accusations of pretension, The Tree of Life has no such safety net.

Brave, or stupid? Or neither? I don’t know. During the first half, which contains sustained periods devoted solely to imagery, deeply impressionistic, without characters or traditional dialogue, it is questionable whether a viewer whose tastes are exclusively mainstream would even consider this a ‘movie’, by the commonly understood usage of the word, and might assert that it would be more accurately described as a succession of images and sounds, without a unified purpose, or perhaps something more derogatory. The film appears to target areas of the psyche that lie dormant much of the time, areas that deal with memory, and matter, and primordialism, amongst other things, and that our aforementioned mainstream movie viewer is unlikely to respond well to in any way.

Some of it, almost by default, is mesmeric, and resembles what might transpire if Zvyagintsev dialled up the natural imagery in his films and dialled down the more traditional narrative elements, though a narrative does become more foregrounded in the movie’s second half. Then again, I don’t think it carries the inherent grace of Zvyagintsev- it’s kinda clunky. The storyline is weak by most standards- it’s the 1960s, there’s a family, and their three adolescent boys do what Sixties children do; they play, shoot toy guns, chase each other, bicker amongst themselves, and receive admonishments from their father. Most of the film’s second hour is bound up in this cycle. I feel that these scenes might have been more meaningful, and more interesting, if they formed a portrait of the man that this childhood had formed, but they don’t- Sean Penn’s role as the adult Jack is an entirely non-speaking one which didn’t really require an actor of his reputation and stature. I feel that practically any professional actor of the right age and look, certainly one with plenty of experience, could have handled it.

Again, like The White Ribbon and The Return, we see a parent- another male- who administers strict discipline, although in those films, with the exception of The White Ribbon’s clearly abhorrent doctor character, I found their behaviour to be relatively understandable. Not so in this one. There is something decidedly ugly when someone- anyone, but usually a father- is exercising control over a household, and pulling out arbitrary, impromptu new ways to exert power, clearly in exclusive service to their own needs despite any claim to the contrary.

Earlier, I namechecked Malick when reviewing The Assassin, and I can say at least that I did much prefer The Tree of Life to that film. There’s far more to latch on to for a viewer like myself who is not an art film connoisseur but wants to watch films that are thoughtful and substantial, even when I feel that they somewhat fail in their aims. We’re never impelled to look at a given image for more than around 10 seconds, and I would query as to whether this qualifies as ‘slow cinema’ at all; it isn’t what I would have in mind where the term is concerned.

Ultimately, my feelings on the movie are very mixed. It made more sense to me, and was more digestible, than Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, but still, I have full sympathy for someone who made sure they watched the entire film, so they could have an informed judgement, and made every effort to watch it with an open mind, then subsequently wondered what the hell Terrence Malick was playing at, and why the dinosaurs and the cosmos were necessary or relevant in the overall context of the piece. The extent, however, to which the movie is an entity unto itself is such that it almost seems impervious to criticism. It would be like criticising a rock formation, or a field, or a flock of birds. You might not always be stunned into silence by their majesty, but it matters none- it won’t change their course, they’re gonna do their own thing either way. Then again, maybe I’m giving the film too much credit in comparing it to indelible, and inherently beautiful, aspects of the natural landscape. I haven’t gilded any other film thus far with that kind of stately comparison, and there’ve been a great many that I’ve liked far more. Maybe it’s the flow of the film that gives off this impression, as it sometimes seems to reflect the organic progression of nature rather than conscious, contemplated, human choice.

I suspect that The Tree of Life might be better understood as part of Terrence Malick’s wider filmography, especially 2016’s Voyage of Time. This may have been the case, too, regarding the quiet, mild charms of The Gleaners & I, made as it was by a filmmaker with a sixty-year career whom Martin Scorcese called ‘one of the gods of cinema’. And Certified Copy may well make more sense as part of Abbas Kiarostami’s substantial filmography. In any case, like Margaret, The Tree of Life also exists in a second, significantly longer version, another potential source of clarity and context. Unlike Margaret, this longer version is not purported to be closer to the director’s vision, but is simply a new, different cut, which I will watch and review separately later.

81. Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) 

When I was an hour into Shame, a film which is ostensibly about sex addiction, I was struck by how little sex there had actually been in it. There’s a scene where our principal character Brandon, played by Michael Fassbender, hires a prostitute, and he shows her to the bedroom, we see her undress, and that’s it- the camera cuts away, and the sex act is not shown. At another point, he has an encounter with another woman outside, up against a wall, but the scene is shot in shadow and both of them are fully clothed. Fassbender goes full-frontal in that first hour, and so does Carey Mulligan, playing his sister, but in both instances these nude scenes occur in naturalised, non-sexual contexts.

In the final forty minutes, however, the sex quotient is increased significantly and graphic scenes abound. The aim of this approach, I suppose, was to draw us into Brandon’s world before showing us the warts-and-all version of what his life as a sex addict was actually like. It’s an effective strategy, and it’s an effective film- a little too serious, perhaps, a little too devoid of hope or joy, but effective nonetheless.

This kind of mordant solemnity is evident from an early stage. Brandon frequents bars with his boss, who is ostensibly more obsessed with sex and women than Brandon is, and fancies himself a lothario. A scene in which the guy’s overbearing, try-hard pick-up techniques go pathetically unheeded, whilst one of his prospective conquests instead elects for his quiet, collected, relatively respectful wingman, could easily have been played for laughs, and indeed has been played for laughs in sitcoms such as New Girl, How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory, all of them direct spiritual successors of Friends. One of the purposes of Shame, then, could be said to highlight just how little verisimilitude that particular strain of pop culture actually has, and how tenuously it reflects genuine experience. I doubt that was McQueen’s principal aim, but still. People don’t generally go around being incredibly sassy and quipping every few seconds, and those that do will probably grow out of it.

When reviewing Fish Tank, coincidentally another Fassbender film, I commented ‘these characters are real. They talk like real people really talk.’ Shame shares this unvarnished, slice-of-life dynamic, and, interestingly, is even set in New York, the very stomping ground of Ross, Rachel, Joey et al, despite there being no obvious reason why its English writer-director couldn’t have set it in London. This, however, is a very different New York from the one familiar to Friends viewers- one which is grimy, lonely, and infused with graffiti and police tape and sleazy late-night sex clubs.

In line with this stark authenticity, Brandon is a complex guy for whom audience sympathy is not a given. There are times when he seems decent and reasonable, and there are others when he’s a complete asshole. Again, this recalls Fish Tank as you could have used the same words to describe his character in that movie, too, though Brandon is quite pointedly shown in a better light than Fish Tank’s Connor, despite being more prone to outbursts of unpalatable anger. For me, the unpleasant and distressing sex addiction that dogs Brandon serves as a metaphor for a more general inability to find satisfaction or gratification in life, something we all must have felt at some point, along with an abstract impression that there is an extra level of pleasure which you have never felt but can somehow sense is there and remains perpetually unattainable. These feelings can be targeted with any range of stimulus- booze, drugs, literature, travel, yoga, stock-car racing, fireworks, or, as in Almost Famous, an insistence that you follow your favourite band absolutely everywhere. Of course, one gets the feeling that for Brandon, this problem is particularly bad- he seems unlikely to even have a favourite band, let alone devote any of his time to them- and that, I guess, is why his anger is fairly understandable, in contrast to his Fish Tank character, whose behaviour is more straightforwardly unacceptable. In arguably the film’s most crucial scene, Brandon is offered a way out- a real relationship with a worthwhile, desirable woman of substance, who likes him well enough and is willing to give him a try- and he blows it. This, again, may be a driving factor behind some of the more unpleasant conduct he goes on to exhibit.

Critics have found Shame an uncomfortable experience; Roger Ebert, in a highly positive four-star review, went so far as to say he didn’t think he could watch it again. My reaction to it wasn’t quite so strong, but that’s not to say that I was unaffected by its pulsating, often relatively subtle layers of discord and dread. Throughout, McQueen employs insistently held long shots, meaning we are at one point obliged to watch Brandon stare at a woman on the subway and continue to keep his unsmiling gaze trained on her even after being spotted, while she runs the gamut from being flattered, to perplexed, to unnerved, twitching, and beyond; I looked away, having felt like both starer and staree. A crass encounter with a young woman at a bar near the end of the film is similarly repellent, Brandon’s conduct standing in marked contrast to that which had earlier compelled a beautiful blonde woman to engage in impromptu, illicit outdoor sex with him or that which had prompted his co-worker Marianne to seriously consider him as a potential boyfriend. The point of all this? Well, I guess it is to impart that people contain multitudes, a theme I also touched on when reviewing The Great Beauty; their behaviour is not always going to be consistent, or fully comprehensible. It helps to mark Shame out as a work of maturity, complexity and power, though not one which will necessarily leave the viewer feeling satisfied. They are perhaps more apt to feel displaced and maladjusted.

33. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) 

I was compelled to watch The Dark Knight about three or four years after it came out by a combination of the hype surrounding its release, which I had ignored up to that point, and more pertinently, a love for director Christopher Nolan’s later movie Inception. Perhaps, I thought, this might finally be the mainstream mega-budget superhero film that I would respect and enjoy.

It wasn’t to be. I watched Batman Begins, the film to which this is the sequel, first, and thought it was passable, despite some reservations (this really isn’t my type of movie). I then began The Dark Knight with its higher reputation in mind and an expectation that it would be altogether bigger and better. Subsequently, underwhelmed by what I saw as weaknesses in theme, tone, characterisation and substance, and predisposed against any appreciation of its technical aspects, I found the film completely unengaging and consigned it to the dustbin of films I would never watch again.

This would have remained the case were it not for this project. So I dutifully but reluctantly settled down for a second viewing, declining to re-watch Batman Begins for context, justifying my negligence by telling myself that without it, I would be able to better gauge how far The Dark Knight works as a stand-alone film.

I liked it better the second time around. I’ll say that much. My ‘problems’ with the film, to the extent that they really qualify as problems, are about the same as the ones I had when I watched Mad Max: Fury Road- speaking broadly, I don’t like films that are too loud, have got loads of explosions in them, and feel like they are jumping and shouting for my attention. It seems like they’re trying to appeal to the teenage boy in me, one that has never actually existed; I happened to be a teenager whose tastes were already entrenched in the perennial triad of Almost Famous, 25th Hour, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (albeit somewhat in the late stages of my teens), along with, of course, Lost in Translation, and a fully established roster of firm favourites that also included Clerks, Groundhog Day, Dazed and Confused, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Doug Liman’s Go, Fight Club, Ghost World and Sideways. I’m aware of Ghost World’s origins as a comic book, but it’s profoundly not my area; I have literally never read a comic book in my life and simply don’t understand- have never understood- why a man who decides he wants to be a vigilante feels it is necessary to garnish these activities by dressing up as a pointy-eared flying animal.

Other than these gripes, which are utterly irrelevant in the context of its intended audience and eye-watering box-office receipts, it’s undeniably a solid piece of work. I mean, that’s the least you can expect from Christopher Nolan, I suppose, although I haven’t seen the far less well-received Dark Knight Rises (or, for that matter, Tenet). When a film, however, employs a framework of clearly-defined heroes and villains, then it necessitates an ability to be fresh and compelling within these parameters; if we say, for the sake of argument, that The Dark Knight achieves this as well as it possibly could, it nevertheless remains a movie which is, in my view, inherently limited. The presence of a character- Aaron Copland’s Harvey Dent- who occupies positions of both hero and villain in the film, does not, to my mind, present any real challenge to this hypothesis. Conversely, Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the most uninhibited characters to ever grace our screens; his portrayal, which made little impression on me first time around, became the key aspect of the movie on my second viewing, prompting, for one thing, questions surrounding the importance of motive in crafting a memorable and effective villain. It’s unusual for a villain- or any character, for that matter- to be given no motive, and who just wants to create as much chaos as he possibly can; the only antecedent I can think of off the top of my head is John Ryder in The Hitcher, whose activities, despite their stronger, more adult-oriented air of cruelty and viciousness, are on a much smaller scale than the Joker’s.

Compared to him, Batman is bland and flavourless. Putting aside the questionable message that villainy is altogether more interesting and fun than sticking to society’s rules, this is probably the most crucial sticking point when it comes to my ambivalence towards the film- I didn’t like the main character, I didn’t relate to him and I found him boring. To boot, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s role is underwritten, as is Morgan Freeman’s; ultimately, they play ciphers who are only there to move the plot along.

Is this a ‘bad’ film, then, in my opinion, or one that I would assert is basically a waste of time? No, my feelings towards it are more layered than that, and although many of them are negative, this is still the best film from the (admittedly very small) cross-section of superhero movies that I have actually physically seen (unless one counts The Incredibles, Super, or Mystery Men which, in this context, I don’t), with a palpable air of maturity and substance which was profoundly missing from the others. This was mostly thanks to its effective villain and his apparent embodiment of unmitigated nihilism, brought to life with great style, verve, and assurance by the late Heath Ledger.

94. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) 

Is Let the Right One In a horror movie masquerading as an art film, or is it an art film masquerading as a horror movie? Or is it just a film which was designed to hit very specific notes, and have a very specific form and meter, genre be damned?

The third description is probably the most accurate. But if I were to judge this question solely on which audience- the horror fans or art film enthusiasts- were likely to be the more satisfied, I would suspect it would be the art crowd. Maybe I’m selling horror fans short there by basing them on primitive, bloodthirsty stereotypes, but the excesses of the genre speak for themselves. Let the Right One In certainly does contain horror elements, sparing as they may be, but their presentation and framing operate outside the typical conventions of standard horror. That’s no surprise, I guess- these conventions are seen as hack, predictable, sometimes outright stupid, and highly unlikely to find any serious traction with critics. Consequently, they are ripe for subversion, with even small diversions appearing fresh and inventive.

This film, which notably pre-dates by several years The Witch, The Babadook, Get Out or It Follows, benefits from its smart, neat genre subversions too, and though it does not necessarily come across as a work of dazzling invention, it is, like a great many of these movies we’ve covered thus far, one which is spacious, subdued, thoughtful, very deliberately paced, unafraid of silence, and suffused with a heady plethora of atmosphere and general filmmaking panache. When violent, frightening things happen, they are presented in a steady, unaffected manner, often from a distance, semi-obscured, and accompanied merely by the ambient sounds that we would hear if we were actually there and witnessing the incidents ourselves. There are no squeals of discordant violin. The soundtrack is soft and sad, reminiscent of Brian Eno (particularly ‘Spring Frost’ from the 2020 album Mixing Colours).

Although the film is ostensibly set in a suburb on the outskirts of Stockholm, the city, as far as I can remember, is never mentioned, and instead this small town feels self-contained and decidedly insular. The locals look like they’ve lived there all their lives and hardly ever leave; the perpetual snow that covers the whole place also gives off a suggestion that it would be somewhat difficult to get in or out. It is against these sorts of foundations that the film crafts its hushed, careful synthesis of beauty and unease, predicated on notions of balance as well as craftsmanship; its arthouse elements are smooth, unforced and congruous with its other aspects. Earlier I commented that A Prophet lacked the overarching majesty of Zvyagintsev, an observation which was potentially unfair as there was no overt indication that the French prison drama was necessarily aiming for such a thing. Let the Right One In probably is, though, and it largely succeeds; just as I observed that Only Lovers Left Alive felt something like an Alexander Payne vampire film, so this one could be said to resemble a Zvyagintsev vampire film, or maybe a Tarkovsky one.

There were points when I felt the film was perhaps a little too slow, a little too dull, and as the credits rolled, I also felt that I could have gotten to know the characters better, and cared more about their decisions. But these were minor quibbles against a film that was so precise, and went about its business in such a meticulous and accomplished manner.

27. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) 

In The Social Network’s opening scene, Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica, played by Rooney Mara, breaks up with him. She also takes the opportunity to impart ‘You’re going to go through your life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.’

Because it’s so early in the movie, we can’t yet judge how justified this assertion is. It’s probably not necessary, strictly speaking, considering she doesn’t have to see him anymore, but it doesn’t come off wholly gratuitous either; the delivery is suggestive of a young woman who has come to the end of her tether with Mark, for whom the relationship has not just brought about an absence of patience, it’s also left her sad, and weary, and doubting herself. For one thing, she can’t argue with him- with his formidable intellect, he simply steamrollers anything and everything she says with inexhaustible, scattergun, rat-a-tat rhetoric.

This scene, for me, references the movie’s most pertinent issue: is Mark Zuckerberg an asshole? I’m very pointedly talking about the movie-Zuckerberg here, not the real one; there are striking distinctions between the two, not least the fact that this Zuckerberg looks nothing like his counterpart and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t really have his mannerisms either. Over the course of the film, a portrait develops of a character who is- almost relentlessly- snarky, defensive, insolent, impudent, solipsistic, aloof, ill-tempered and self-satisfied.

Some of his traits could be read as positive. He doesn’t seem to care if other people like him and is far more intelligent than most of them. He shows no interest in the parties that his cohorts throw around him, in the very house that he lives, and doesn’t indulge in the booze, the drugs or the womanising that would have been manna from heaven for most 19-year-olds. He’s focused, highly motivated, and unafraid to say what he thinks. Ultimately, it’s highly debatable as to whether these personality pieces, pound-for-pound, make him an asshole outright, and, like Shame, there is no definitive answer- it would likely be a weaker, less interesting movie if there was.

This is another film which I saw quite soon after it came out, didn’t really like, and have found myself watching again around a decade later. At the time, Facebook was a relatively new behemoth, fresh on the scene, and although it was already huge, I still didn’t know how big it was going to become or the full extent to which it would ingratiate itself into general life. Back then, I regarded social media in itself as a fledgling concept, though some took to it much quicker than I did, and because of its novelty, it was an intriguing topic, if not necessarily one that would naturally lend itself to effective cinema. The movie’s strong reviews, however, highlighted how well it was able to elevate itself above these potential issues, which I guess was what ultimately led me to watch it. What I saw then was a thin and over-stylised piece about bratty, shallow Silicon Valley types bickering and squabbling, and I believe you can still read the film that way if you want to. I found Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue style irritating- overwrought, Mamet-lite, and pertaining to some sort of fantasy regarding human speech and communication whereby everyone always knows exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to phrase it in ways that superficially make them sound very sharp and incisive.

On second viewing, I spent the first hour of the film feeling about the same. I thought that this was uninteresting material with uninteresting characters and a vortex where the film’s heart, soul and thematic heft should have been. However, at around that hour point, something changed and I started to like it more. It’s not easy to say exactly why, though the reduced screentime of the deeply dislikeable Winklevoss twins could have been a factor. The film’s plot strands, which I hadn’t thought I cared about, came together in a cohesive manner and the ‘point’ of the movie became clearer for me.

Chiefly, was Erica right to call Mark an asshole? Is she accurate? And why exactly does he not seem to be interested in any other women? This may not have been the ‘point’ of the film for many other viewers, especially as in its final reel it arrives at something of a climax regarding financial betrayal, and touches on the fickle nature of friendship and loyalty, but it was the issue which I found myself most interested in, especially as the introduction of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake in a fey, unconvincing performance) gives us an extra yardstick of comparison; his cheery, sociable demeanour belies a character that is more mercenary and snakelike than Mark, and can be more straightforwardly considered an asshole.

Earlier I said that Mark doesn’t seem to care if people like him, and I think this holds true for almost everyone- everyone, that is, except Erica (and maybe Sean to a much lesser extent). We don’t know why she’s so special to him- she’s only in two scenes- but it’s possible that he’s in love with her and this is driving his unpalatable behaviour. Then again, it may not be love- it could be jealousy, anger or resentment at her having made such a comment straight to his face, but either way, he wants her to like him again. Despite his intelligence, he’s still naïve enough to think that he can chauvinistically insult her online and she will be okay with him- maybe even open to a reconciliation with him- if he later approaches her in a bar in front of her friends.

From doing some background reading, I find that there was no attempt made by David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin or Ben Mezrich, the author of the novel on which this is based, to reflect real-life events as they played out; they freely admit to The Social Network’s sensationalist nature, and that their version of Zuckerberg is exactly that- a version, a construct. Maybe they even cast an actor that doesn’t look like him on purpose. There is a part of me that cannot see why you would make a film based on real-life events if you haven’t tried to make it as documentarian as possible; I have had to consciously put this hypothesis to one side as I re-assess the film’s intentions and dynamics.

I would still hesitate to call this any sort of ‘great’ movie, though I will concede that it’s a pretty good one, even if it does sometimes come across like a particularly slick and well-produced version of The Junior Apprentice. It flows smoothly and it makes its points with the precision of a well-oiled and competently operated machine. For latter-period Fincher though, I would still take Gone Girl over The Social Network. Both films have a certain emptiness at their core that style and assurance can’t completely cover up- incidentally, I prefer his TV series Mindhunter to both movies- but Gone Girl somewhat compensates for this with its strong plot intrigue and thriller elements. The Social Network, to put it bluntly, doesn’t.

52. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) 

Of all the films I’ve reviewed so far, Tropical Malady is the one with which I can draw the most comparisons with others. This may run against the critical consensus that Weerasethakul is one of the most incomparable filmmakers currently active- incidentally, not something I would otherwise refute- but it nonetheless stands that I can compare Tropical Malady to more movies than any other. For one thing, it has a split structure, bisected completely down the middle into two overtly distinct sections; this in itself affords it parallels with Melancholia and Tabu, particularly the latter. The same characters from the first half are completely recontextualised in the second- this opens it up to comparisons with Certified Copy, Mulholland Drive, and, to a lesser extent, Under the Skin. Its pivotal motif is an illuminated tree- it can thus be compared to The Tree of Life, especially since it also explores a human’s place as part of primal nature, and shares that film’s arcane, cryptic aesthetic, arguably exceeding it. It can be compared to Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring in that it offsets meditative qualities in remote settings with undercurrents of violence. Finally, it can be compared to The Assassin, in that Weerasethakul insists, in the movie’s second hour, that all of the action grinds to an absolute halt and that the viewer is obliged to abandon all notions of entertainment or typical narrative structure and spend an entire hour in the Thai forest with no dialogue and a very heavy preponderance of gently rustling leaves.

Experimentation is fine, but did this sequence really need to be an hour long? Would twenty minutes not have sufficed? We’re entering perilous territory here, whereby I am effectively telling the artist how he ‘should’ have made the film, though I am attempting to broach the issue from an inquisitive angle rather than a didactic one. I’m aware that I’m not in any position to make such suggestions, especially when you consider that I didn’t really understand the movie. If I was to say anything praiseworthy about Tropical Malady, it would be that I did not find it quite as confounding as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and that I did, on the whole, like it more. This does not change, though, the fact that so far, my principal, overarching reaction to Weerasethakul films is unmitigated puzzlement, followed very, very closely by abject boredom. For one thing, I feel alienated from the material; I just don’t feel like it speaks to me in any way. The film’s first hour, with its relatively conventional structure, was mostly okay, but I was still struck by the mundanity of the director’s dialogue and perplexed as to why he left these banal exchanges in the movie or what, if anything, they are supposed to achieve or signify.

Anyway, the movie’s second hour can be interpreted in any number of ways. On a most basic level, it could have been a dream. Or it can be seen as an abstract visual representation of the relationship between our central characters Keng and Tong, and the ‘danger’ it potentially signifies for the more reluctant Keng, whose family and friends may not be so accepting of the relationship as the other man’s. Another possibility is that, as Tong walks away at the end of our more standard narrative, Keng, for whatever reason, never sees him again and the ‘ghost’ of his memory follows Keng around for an unspecified period of time while he subsequently feels ‘exiled’ and completely isolated from the world around him. When someone extremely important to you walks out of your life forever, and there’s nothing you can do about it, even if you haven’t parted on poor terms, then sometimes the hole that they have left can take on complex and unforeseen shapes. Sometimes they might feel close enough to touch, as when Keng wakes to find himself face to face with the animal that Tong has become. Sometimes, maybe, they are naked. And sometimes you are quite literally chasing their memory, trying to catch it, desperate to pin it down.

These ruminations may give off the sense that Tropical Malady, through perceived depth, is an inherently ‘interesting’ film, maybe even fascinating, and if that’s the case, then by all means watch it. But to me, this would raise a query as to whether a film can be both interesting and boring at the same time- if it can, then Tropical Malady unquestionably achieves that feat. Not many films can say that.

13. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)

The principal attribute of Children of Men is its technical excellence. When technicality supersedes acting, character development, dialogue, and everything else, it can accentuate perceived flaws elsewhere, even if relatively high standards have been upheld in these areas too. This posed a problem for me when I tried to appreciate movies like Mad Max: Fury Road or City of God; I can’t say their technical proficiency was a detriment, exactly- that would be illogical- but it served to remind me that I wasn’t being drawn into the films, or affected by them, as much as I would have liked.

Children of Men doesn’t really fall into that ‘trap’, such as it is. For one thing, it has noticeably more breathing room than those other two movies- characters have time to sit and talk every so often, and these conversations can even be somewhat relaxed. This isn’t really a character piece- far from it, in fact- but its willingness to calm things down and provide intermission gives the impression of a rounded experience and offers balance to its high-octane action sequences. By contrast, the characters of Mad Max: Fury Road represented purely generic traits, irrespective of acting quality, and while the decisions made by Children of Men’s characters also somewhat serve plot convenience, as does unlikely happenstance, its more polyphonic approach make these aspects more digestible and less obvious.

This is another film which I saw around ten years ago and haven’t watched since. Unlike The Social Network, or The Dark Knight, I didn’t outright dislike it, but I didn’t think it was anything special, and I was surprised to see it on this list, especially in such a high position. It struck me as essentially a vehicle for the filmmakers to showcase their ability in crafting extremely long and impossible-looking single takes- a conceit later taken to even more ostentatious extremes by Birdman- and little else. I was also alienated by its idiosyncratic approach to storytelling, its willingness to kill off sympathetic major characters (in cruel ways, no less) and its dour, muted ending which I, quite palpably at the time, perceived as a significant let-down- I actually said out loud to myself ‘Surely they’re not just going to end the film there’. But as I’ve mentioned previously, you get older and you start to appreciate these sorts of techniques more, especially when so much popular entertainment can be characterised by its homogeny. The dystopian world created in the movie largely remains in the background, augmenting rather than overwhelming it, despite the magnificent technical aspects of its realisation. One understands that the film is not aiming to satiate typical fans of sci-fi or speculative fiction who may expect a world to be as involving and immersive as possible, potentially at the cost of character development. Lesser films may have also opted to use voiceover to spoon-feed the social detail of this setting to the viewer, in the process telling us that our main character is flawed, world-weary and booze-soaked instead of just letting us see it for ourselves. As it is, the film merely gives us a cross-section of this dystopia, set over a couple of days and refracted through the experiences of a relatively small group of people. It tells us simply what we need to know, and no more. This gives the impression of a piece which is brisk, quick and highly focused despite the aforementioned breathing room.

If I was to criticise it, I might mention that perhaps the film felt a little too dystopian, though that sounds silly, considering the very point of dystopia; almost like criticising a comedy for being too funny or a documentary piece for having too much authenticity in it. I just feel, however, that the film could have made the same points and had a similar effect without painting its world in tones that are quite as harsh as these. But this is, of course, nitpicking.

Recommended.

70. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) 

Stories We Tell is a documentary piece about family- thoughtful, considered and erudite to a fault. Sarah Polley interviews her relatives about circumstances surrounding her birth, her deceased mother, and a range of other historic events- divorces, for example, and child custody issues- that have affected the family in various ways.   

Everyone in Stories We Tell is eloquent, expressive and fluid- they sometimes feel like more realistic and agreeable versions of Aaron Sorkin’s effusive character portraits. Polley seemingly interviews everyone in her large family, giving all of them a voice, something which is touched on with some consternation in the film’s latter stages. By this point it has become clear that the two most important interviewees are Michael and Harry, two grey men who are advanced in age; from Google, I learn that they have both now passed, and somewhat co-incidentally, both in the same year, 2018. What we are seeing, then, in a very real sense, are the testimonies of dead people, an aspect which is fully congruous with the resounding absence of Sarah’s mother and the melancholy with which the picture is subsequently suffused.

Polley has numerous siblings, and she interviews them all, and she interviews people on the fringes of her family who used to know her actress mother, or acted with her in plays. We hear from everyone- everyone, that is, except Sarah herself. We catch glimpses of her in tiny fragments, making hushed requests of her subjects or giving them gentle instruction, always with her film-maker hat on. This is an interesting decision, and ostensibly one of sound, considered judgement- Stories We Tell is already a pretty earnest movie, very much in touch with the raw emotion involved in its themes, despite its contributors’ penchant for cultured dignity, and having Polley address the camera directly, not in the same context as these interviewees but instead as a documentarian playing a dual role in her own process, might well have tipped the balance from earnestness into cloying. We can see that her feelings about the situations described must be extremely difficult and complicated and knotty; we don’t really need her to tell us outright. It also seems fitting that she allows Michael and Harry to be expressing themselves onscreen as amply as possible because they have so much less time left than she does, and may never get this sort of opportunity to tell their stories again.

It’s a lovely piece, though if one was in cynical mood, they might argue that it was almost too heartwarming, its tone just a little too syrupy-sweet, despite its open acknowledgement of her mother’s flaws, and its interviewees’ candid admissions of their own shortcomings too. With its sorrow offset by affability, it’s also a very cohesive piece, which Polley augments by including silent, constructed footage of her mother, played by an actress, and treated to look like it is from the 1970s. This technique, especially with its absence of audio, is very reminiscent of Tabu, and serves once again to lament an era long since concluded, and memorialise people who aren’t with us anymore, making them living, breathing humans again, albeit ones whose colours have faded, that we are unable to actually hear, and whom quite palpably belong to the past.

36. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014) 

Timbuktu is seemingly a fairly simple picture, one that has a simple tale to tell, tells it simply in a shade under 90 minutes with the minimum of fuss, and when it is ready, fades out and ends without any great amount of fanfare. In this, it could be compared to The Return, and though I certainly think there are parallels with Zvyagintsev in Sissako’s approach and sensibility, I would say that it would be more pertinent to draw similarities with Leviathan.

This is due to Timbuktu being another story about normal lives being interfered with and eventually uprooted completely by human forces that have, through the toxic influence of low-level power, or the indulgence of controlling impulses, taken on an inhuman face, assuming authoritarian positions they do not deserve and refuse to exercise with any decency or common sense. It’s all the more frustrating, then, that these antagonists are, in fact, quite human; Sissako has the bravery and the wherewithal to show these characters in guises that are, by turns, bumbling, uncertain, shy, and sometimes exhibiting qualities that appear reasonable and temperate. Consequently, the line between good and evil is not as solid, or as excruciating, as the one presented in The Pianist, and some would argue that their transgressions are less serious, too; this observation is in fact true, to a large degree, but try telling that to those that have lost loved ones to this thoroughly unwelcome regime- who have, for example, seen their son or daughter’s head stoved in with rocks.

It could be said that one important difference between Timbuktu and Leviathan is that Timbuktu’s transgressors are driven by religious ideology, but that would be overlooking Leviathan’s final sequence at the church, where the film’s villain is presenting himself as the very picture of pious local official. In any case, Timbuktu is, of course, its own movie, and the order of the day is restrained understatement with overtones of lyricism, and impossibly crisp cinematography. Sissako could have gotten another hour out of this, and some filmmakers would have- Malick, for example, or Nuri Bilge Ceylan. But one understands that, like Zvyagintsev, his particular brand of austere, bittersweet poetry is rooted in brevity. The work subsequently feels vital and sharp, despite its quietude, its use of everyday conversational exchange and its absence of exhilarating set-piece. These elements result in a film that doesn’t feel particularly manipulative even as it engages with levels of tragedy which call to mind Shakespeare or Sophocles.

It’s a film that teeters, tastefully, on the precipice of despair, and hangs there with tantalising subtlety, whereas The Pianist went off its edge into the beyond; there is, however, an argument that both films leave the precipice, and conversely, there is yet another argument that neither of them do (though that one would be decidedly more difficult to craft). It all depends where you judge your own personal precipice to be. Regardless, Timbuktu is an exceptionally mature, cultured, and relatively accessible picture for the discerning and artistic-minded cinephile.

Classy.

77. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007) 

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a movie which is based on true events and concerns itself with a Frenchman, Jean-Do, who has suddenly and cataclysmically been almost completely paralysed by a stroke. He finds himself at the utter mercy of the (thankfully angelic) medical professionals at the hospital he now lives in, contact with whom constitutes maybe 90 or 95 per cent of his life from that point. Small things- sitting on a balcony in his wheelchair and looking out at the modest view, for example- understandably come to represent greater significance, and he tries to take these little pleasures wherever he can.

As we progress, scenes from Jean-Do’s past life are presented to us, presumably because they are, for whatever reason, running through his head (the book, I imagine, would clarify that). The scenes re-visited by Jean-Do don’t even seem all that poignant- in one, he shaves his elderly father. In another, he goes on a bad holiday with an ex-girlfriend, a sequence which the cynic might argue is incongruous with the overtones it’s apparently afforded, including the use of one of U2’s most straightforwardly euphoric tracks. Incongruity, though, is not necessarily a bad thing if it is delicately- perhaps even masterfully- handled, and especially when, on closer inspection, it might not even be incongruity at all. Did it, for example, harm Boyhood to show us bygone scenes with significance that was not altogether clear? It reflects a very human, and relatively inexplicable, predisposition whereby sometimes your strongest memories pertain to events that didn’t really mean much at the time, and probably aren’t even all that noteworthy to the other people who were there themselves and were involved in the making of the memory just as much as you were.

Consequently, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a piece which is both fragmented, like sifting through scraps of love letters or old photographs, and deeply elegiac, a movie that somehow captures both the screaming boredom and mundanity that must come from living with such a condition and the inherent- and inherently painful- beauty of being alive. Beauty may be the key word here, like all my favourite pieces of art, though this is a movie which is, for the most part, intellectually beautiful rather than aesthetically, and doesn’t really delve into the ugliness of the human psyche, as Shame did or our next movie will go on to do. This is not to say that Jean-Do is perfect- if he was, I would almost certainly be describing a melodrama, my tone tepid to say the least. Rather, he has his less-than-stellar traits, an example being the cold manner with which he treats his ex-girlfriend, her indifferent response notwithstanding. He’s just a guy. He is a fairly genial guy whose breezy life of affluence has completely and utterly collapsed, and though we ourselves are crushingly unlikely to experience a dissolution anywhere near as comprehensive or dramatic as his, we can relate in our own much smaller, more personally specific ways.

It’s a movie which is unafraid to exhibit an artistic sensibility far beyond what the hypothetical mainstream moviegoer would ever tolerate, let alone enjoy. This level of single-mindedness was, in overwhelming likelihood, a contributing factor in my overall enjoyment of the film. As Jean-Do stands up to kiss the ghost of a long-dead nineteenth-century French empress, amongst other highly stimulating abstract passages, I felt that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was achieving the same sorts of artistic heights that The Tree of Life had also been aiming for, with less success. We would all love to stand on that sandy beach and have the people we desperately miss approach us one by one so we can have exquisite reunions, and Malick gave us that fantasy, but it didn’t strike me with the profundity that this magnificent movie was, I felt, rather more able to realise. There are also parallels with The Great Beauty here, another movie with a distinctly European tonal fabric which approached the human condition from a multifaceted, existential angle that referenced both wrenching despair and bittersweet joy, by way of momentary pleasure. And if Jean-Do perhaps represents rather more of an ‘everyman’ than the carefree raconteur Jep Gambardella did, then that barely seems to matter- I mean, we’re all ‘everymen’ in the end, aren’t we?

100. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) 

More than any other film I’ve watched on this list thus far, Requiem for a Dream is an absolute nightmare, especially in its second half. However, it’s a nightmare that is shot through with zip, panache and pure filmmaking exuberance. Aronofsky aims to replicate the sense of having your reality chemically altered, and so utilises techniques such as blink-and-you’ll-miss-it montage, sped-up sequences, and flat-out hallucination. The features that I criticised somewhat in Mad Max: Fury Road and City of God- frenetic editing, sensory overload- make more sense here, with more contextual justification for them; I mean, one could argue that Mad Max: Fury Road’s genre of exciting action thriller is contextual justification enough, but hopefully the point I’m getting at stands as reasonably coherent nonetheless.

In any case, it’s difficult to see how a film can be so unpleasant, and so overtly trying to unnerve the viewer, and yet so eminently watchable at the same time. Some of its compelling quality is akin to the morbid curiosity of a car crash. Some of it is in the wondering of quite how far Aronofsky is going to take this material, and how graphic his depiction of rock bottom is ultimately going to be. The answer- not too much, really- doesn’t detract from the film’s power, and arguably works in its favour. The film doesn’t need to indulge in overly transgressive imagery to make its point. In this sense, it is more notable for what it doesn’t show you than for what it does, sometimes employing that deft filmmaking sleight-of-hand that fools a viewer into thinking they’ve seen more than they actually have, and aiming- very successfully- for a strong sense of disquiet rather than revulsion.

That’s not to say definitively that you won’t be revulsed when you watch it, but if you are, your revulsion is most likely to come from its tonal elements, its use of harsh auditory and sensory techniques and the open cruelty with which it treats its characters. All the performances are considered and mature; special praise, I feel, should go to a surprisingly subdued Marlon Wayans. The highly technical performance that Ellen Burstyn offers is a decidedly different beast, and something of an acquired taste; what starts out as an impressively immersive portrayal rises in intensity to become positively unhinged. On the one hand, this can be read as fearless and committed; on the other, a viewer may suspect that she has over-egged her particular pudding, though I suppose this sort of thing is all quite apt for a film which itself steadily and firmly descends into a nightmare vortex of hell.

Its portrait of addiction is, quite fittingly, far less sober than that which we saw in Shame, but even though it paints its world in much more horrifying colours, the respective thematic cores of the two films have significant similarities. To put it very bluntly- addiction is a pig. By extension, life itself is kind of a pig, too, but especially when you are struggling with these addictive tendencies which complicate everything and that, maddeningly, stop being pleasurable after a certain point. As we delve deeper into figurative theorising, we could even compare the lack of control that these characters have over their impulses to the lack of control that Jean-Do Bauby has over his body in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

What is Requiem for a Dream, though? Wikipedia describes it as a psychological drama, a tag which I guess is reasonably accurate, all things considered. But more specifically, how does it operate as a piece of realism? The first hour or so feels very realistic, notwithstanding the occasional hallucinatory flourish, and indeed Hubert Selby Jr., the original novelist who is credited as co-writer of the script, was highly noted for the rare, unvarnished authenticity of his literary oeuvre. In the second half, though, as Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb starts thinking that her refrigerator is coming to life, amongst other flights of finely-realised and devilishly creative fancy, can we really call this piece ‘realistic’ at all anymore? I even detected possible notes of absurd, coal-black comedy as the movie strayed further and further from its relatively sane first reel. But whatever the case, it’s a work of supreme and precocious power from Aronofsky, who was just 31 at the time of its release and for whom it was only his second feature.

I quite enjoyed this movie- like Melancholia, or The Pianist, I don’t know if I was really supposed to ‘enjoy’ it, as such, but I did. Many aspects of it were outright superb. It was well-crafted, well-paced, affecting, pulsating, and ultimately something of a twisted little pleasure.

83. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)             

The question comes up time and time again: what does it mean to be human? What even is a human, really? Do we ultimately have any more importance than dogs, cats, rabbits, or robots? Especially when we’re dead?

While we’re at it, what is love? Can it be synthesised? Should it be?

Questions such as these have been asked, directly or indirectly, by other films in a far more ponderous and portentous manner than this one. And just as the film is neither an art piece nor a dumbed-down megabucks crowd-pleaser, I am similarly moderate when it comes to describing my feelings about it. I liked it- I liked it quite a lot, in fact, and to that end it is most likely my favourite Spielberg (he’s never really been my cup of tea, not even as a child, and there are a great many of his films that I have never seen). But, on the other hand, I also saw a fairly standard piece which was intelligent without being particularly incisive, entertaining without being particularly enthralling, touching without being heartbreaking, and well-scripted and well-acted and well-directed without compelling one to rush off and recommend it to as many people as possible. The mildly experimental aspects of the film, most notably the narrative leap it takes in its final twenty minutes, I also received in this same spirit of modest but cheerful enjoyment and admiration.

If anybody thinks that I am trying to damn the film with faint praise, I’m really not- I genuinely did like it, and I can’t think of a single aspect that I would criticise. I didn’t even feel it was particularly overlong, despite its 146-minute runtime. It takes itself fairly seriously, just as Spielberg, with films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is wont to do. But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t- as I said, it’s a good film, and it touches on themes that hold significant philosophical weight, albeit lightly. Neither is it as treacly or as cloying as a film like E.T., despite the inevitable John Williams score. It all looks pretty good, too.

For me, just a solid, thoughtful effort from one of cinema’s most consistently dependable filmmakers. And why not?

20. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)           

'Through the frayed curtain, a wan glow heralds the break of day. My heels ache, my head weighs a ton, my whole body is encased in a kind of diving suit. My task now is to write the motionless travel notes from a castaway on the shores of loneliness.’

So intones Jean-Do Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a movie which I considered theorising to be the one that, of all our films so far, dealt most directly with death, an observation borne out by an interview director Julian Schnabel gave to Charlie Rose: ‘I’ve been scared to die my whole life,’ he says. ‘[I’ve] had a huge problem with it…it was a self-help device making this movie, to help me deal with my own death.’

Well, if I had touched on these points when I wrote the review, and proclaimed it the most death-centred film so far, I would be unceremoniously pulling that morbid mantle from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s hands and passing it to Synecdoche, New York, a film that is absolutely saturated with death. It’s obsessed with it. It’s referenced in practically every line of dialogue.

When a film stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman and has support from the likes of Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Robin Weigert, Dianne Wiest and Tom Noonan, we know that the performance level is going to be about as tight as they come; in fact, that list strikes me as one of the most capable and finely-assembled supporting casts in recent memory, although I don’t think they were utilised to their full capabilities. Nevertheless, the quality of acting is never in question- one of the few outright positive comments I can make about Synecdoche, New York.

When I saw this film around the time of its home-video release in the UK, I would have been about 23 and watching it off the back of the luminous Kaufman triumvirate Being John Malkovich, one of the most audaciously outside-the-box films I’d ever seen, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in my opinion one of the best films I’d ever seen and an object of unconditional love, and Adaptation, which I didn’t love, but did enjoy. All three of them, crucially, were understandable; they subverted form in singular, extraordinary ways, but never handed me any information I couldn’t process.

All that was about to change. Synecdoche, New York may be many things, but intelligible it is not. Take this exchange, for example, presented as part of an otherwise quite normal conversation: ‘[I have] twins- Robert, Daniel and Alan.’ Or the one where Michelle Williams, in an annoyed, distracted tone, tells Seymour Hoffman, playing a distinctly male theatre director named Caden Cotard, that he ‘smells weird. Like [he’s] menstruating.’

Back in 2008, I possessed that strain of cultural arrogance that comes with youth, especially the period of youth that overlaps with adulthood, whereby it was incumbent on a piece of ‘entertainment’ to reward my time and limited patience. I thought that if a film bored me a bit, like this one did, then it was inherently the film’s ‘problem’, as it were, and I was perfectly justified in turning it off and never finishing it, especially if I did it in the affable, non-committal spirit of ‘well, not everyone can like everything’ (encouraged, incidentally, by passages in Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs which described his willingness to walk out of live music performances). I had, however, read to completion several books that bored me a bit, including the 700-page Of Human Bondage. So why the discrepancy? Maybe I was inadvertently exhibiting an attitude toward books, in relation to films, that I suspect is fairly widespread; we almost expect books to bore us a bit, especially big dusty ones like the Maugham opus, and it doesn’t feel like so strong an imposition. Films, however, are perceived to serve a quite different purpose, maybe because the cinema has a quasi-mythical cultural status as a place of wonder, something typically attributed far less to libraries. Or maybe because every one of us has seen several films that haven’t bored us at all, and we don’t really see why they can’t all be like that. To put it in a most basic, rudimentary way, maybe books remind us of school, and movies don’t. Movies remind us of Saturdays.

I didn’t turn the film off, I watched it to its end, but I don’t really know why. I certainly hadn’t enjoyed any of it. If I was to describe myself as more ‘qualified’ to review this film now than I was then, I would be playing fast and loose with terminology, and to self-gratifying ends, no less. If nothing else, though, I wasn’t really thinking about death back then (something for which I am retrospectively quite grateful), and I just don’t think I would have had the requisite wherewithal or the reference points to craft a functional Synecdoche, New York review.

Do I now? Maybe not, to be honest, but one does what they can. If nothing else, I can lean on certain cultural touchstones that I couldn’t then, such as The Disintegration Loops, which also reared its weary head when I wrote about The White Ribbon, and, like this film, is inextricably linked to the city of New York, or the paintings of the similarly New York-based Mark Rothko, incomprehensible and meaningless- even silly- for some, utterly, claustrophobically devastating for others.

As I begrudgingly approach middle age, the movie’s themes, which I might have struggled to even identify back then, do, somewhat unavoidably, carry more pertinence. I can note first-hand that as you get into your thirties, you do start to feel that your body may be slowly but surely beginning its descent towards obsolescence- a niggle here, an ache there, ailments that never bothered you before becoming more and more prominent. No, I didn’t think it would start to happen that early either. Kaufman, as with the relentless references to death, lays this on with a trowel- Caden complains about his health constantly throughout the picture. He is also very vocal about his own loneliness, which is why I felt it apt to begin this review with a quote from an entirely different film (imagine, if you will, a character that talks in that kind of meter all the time, and largely without the lyricism). The women in his life start out enthusiastic about him and become anything but, irritated by his mere presence. He spots a magazine article that refers to him, casually, as a ‘slovenly, ugly-face loser’, bringing realisation to a fear that your whole life- your hopes, your nuances, everything- could be refracted through such terse, unforgiving terms, and, excruciatingly, that they might represent a majority opinion. The aforementioned statement about Caden ‘smelling weird- like [he’s] menstruating’ brings to mind a prevalence for people to come at you with criticisms that don’t make the blindest bit of sense, stated with infuriating assurance and made all the easier for them if, like Caden, you are highly sensitive, open about your own weaknesses and generally expect others to behave better and with more empathy than they actually do.

When Seymour Hoffman played characters like this in movies such as Boogie Nights and Happiness, it was as supporting cogs in massive ensemble casts, screentime proportioned accordingly. Here, however, we get two full hours of raw, undiluted neurosis- in some ways, I suppose, a logical extreme of his exploratory career. I described Requiem for a Dream as a nightmare, and though this film isn’t as lurid, and marks its unpleasant territory through decidedly more subtle and generally less conventional means, it’s pretty much an unmitigated nightmare too, and not one which I could ever describe as ‘a twisted little pleasure’ either. In fact, in my efforts to fully express my basest reactions to it, I might even stoop to swearing- it’s fucking horrible. A friend, on hearing that I was going to watch it again, attested to me very positively that ‘it was scarier than any horror movie he’d ever seen’, in obvious admiration of the feelings that the film had elicited in him (and the palpable expectation that I was going to share this enthusiasm).

Mark Kermode, in a contemporary review characterised by a frustrated apprehension congruous to my own, opined that ‘If you went into it wanting to find a masterpiece, you might be able to do so,’ sentiments that, incidentally, also echo those I expressed earlier about Carol. This reflects just how many approaches you can take towards this movie and just how many angles you can view it from, in ways that work frustratingly against the reviewer’s usual, and perfectly useful, catechisms of ‘I really liked this movie- you should watch it’, ‘I didn’t like this movie- you shouldn’t watch it’ or ‘Y’know, I’m a little undecided’. He also says that a producer should have told Charlie Kaufman to ‘cut it in half; come back when you’ve taken out half the lines and it’s half the length’. There are not many films- good, bad or indifferent- about which a reviewer advocates chopping it in half, especially when it only hovers around the two-hour mark in the first place.

These quotes hopefully help to give clearer elucidation to my own difficulties in summarising a picture that was just too bleak, too downtrodden, too wilfully obtuse and too inundated with pain for me to really appreciate, despite clear flashes of high artistic merit. At least when No Country for Old Men did this sort of thing, it was as part of a piece that was commenting on genre convention, subverting the action thriller and the noir, and asking questions about the nature of violence. The lunch wasn’t quite as naked as it is in this one. Maybe there’s a part of me that just wants to be lulled into some sort of cosy ignorance, but Synecdoche, New York presents me with a portrait of our existence that is just too stark and too unremitting for my particular sensibilities.

68. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

Like many of the films I’ve covered recently (Synecdoche, New York being one, Requiem for a Dream being another), The Royal Tenenbaums is a film that defies easy categorisation, presenting itself to the viewer without allying itself with any specific genre and issuing imagery which alludes to some sort of dream-state rather than a full engagement with our reality. In this instance, far more than those two specific films, it looks like a comedy, and for me, it also feels like a comedy, but it isn’t funny. None of the films on this Top 100 are, really; if I had to pick a ‘funniest movie’ from the list based on the films that I’ve seen, it would probably be Ratatouille, though The Wolf of Wall Street also has its moments, and I guess a film like Amélie could be said to have something of a comic tone too.

When I touched on this quality regarding Spike Jonze’s Her, I stated outright that its lack of comedic elements wasn’t a problem. Would it be remiss of me, or hypocritical, to consider it more of a problem here, as I also do with Anderson’s 1998 effort Rushmore? No, I don’t think so. Why? Well, because I thought Her was a more cohesive piece, with a far more consistent tone, an interesting storyline and generally more digestible dynamics.

That’s not to say The Royal Tenenbaums is a bad movie. It isn’t, even though, as usual with Anderson, I had to exert a certain amount of effort just to try to ascertain what the film was supposedly saying to me and exactly what it wanted in response. From Wikipedia, I see that the film contains ‘fashions and sets combining the appearances of different time periods’. I don’t really see why that’s necessary, if I’m completely honest, but this sort of approach nevertheless contributes to making the film feel more slippery and more elusive than The Grand Budapest Hotel, and for me, ultimately more difficult to dislike or criticise. After all, it wants to have something of a muddled tone. It wants you to feel out-of-step, out-of-sorts, out-of-time, just like its cast of characters do.

Crucial to my relatively positive viewing experience was Gene Hackman’s superb, sparky performance, which I felt somewhat carried the film. Grounded, relatable turns from Anjelica Huston and Danny Glover, playing people who you could feasibly meet in real life, didn’t hurt either, despite being offset against the inevitable ‘kooky’ aspects of the film, which included a grown man erecting himself a tent inside a house, with a bed, and filling it with trinkets and looking like he’s generally living in it as well as sleeping there.

Like previous movies such as Ida and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, the film contains a suicide scene which is sudden and somewhat out-of-context. It’s also bloodier and more explicit than those two films felt any need to be. I wondered if the film had ‘earned’ this narrative lurch into such serious territory, or even if it constituted a cynical attempt to afford the film supplementary import and gravitas; the movie also touches on drug abuse without much in the way of purpose or insight.

Despite these minor concerns, I generally felt that The Royal Tenenbaums had more going for it than against, though I could have done without the baritone voiceover and the ‘imaginary novel’ conceit. Its most prominent themes- redemption, regret, still being in love with someone who barely wants to look at you anymore, and a general malaise that settles upon people, pervading their thoughts and attitudes without any obvious identifiable cause- are rendered in effective strokes. I still think it was a relatively thin piece which didn’t explore the characters’ psychological depths in any meaningful way. I still think you could remove Owen Wilson’s entire character without losing anything, and Bill Murray’s too. But as its final scenes achieved a modest but valid amount of poignancy, and its personae stepped one by one out of frame to the strains of Van Morrison’s Everyone, under the implied spectre of death, I finished the film in a spirit of genial moderation that stood in marked contrast to the rather more apprehensive one I’d had when it started.

56. Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzgy, 2000)

Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr says that he despises stories. It’s a sentiment that strikes me as both decidedly strange and pointedly, perhaps unnecessarily, strong, and not one I can readily imagine many other filmmakers, even ones who make experimental, non-traditional movies, ever making.

If nothing else, it’s a portent for the kind of bloody-minded, unforgiving experience we are in for. Werckmeister Harmonies is imbued with a fully comprehensive, and some would say self-important, seriousness. There is no levity in this film. None. Previously, when this quality was present in the movies of Zvyagintsev, I reviewed them very positively. Why not now? Well, for one thing, when watching Leviathan and The Return, I always knew what was going on, even when he wasn’t explaining anything. Same with Haneke and The White Ribbon. But the plot points of Werckmeister Harmonies don’t, to my mind, follow a logical progression. Our protagonist Lanos, a likable but indistinct everyman, is visited by his aunt, who blackmails him and his uncle into doing some canvassing for her around the town. Events somehow spiral wildly- it’s unclear if this is the result of their efforts, or why they ever would be- and culminate in Lanos being a fugitive in his own town, despite not having done anything to anyone and being consummately mild-mannered throughout.

Roger Ebert comments ‘For all its phantasmal themes, Werckmeister Harmonies is resolutely realistic’. Is it though? When circuses pass through Hungarian villages, does it typically mean that the townspeople have to go and smash up the hospital? Janos’s uncle theorises that all music has been in a state of disharmony since composer Andreas Werckmeister put forth faulty theories in the 1600s; the inference is that the very world is in a state of disharmony and the movie itself is a visual representation of the discordancy that we all live in- as Godrey Reggio put it in the subtitle of Koyaanisqatsi, ‘a life out of balance’. ‘Representation’ could well be the key word here, as it seems to me that the whole film is a ‘construct’, taking place in a simulated world that is connected to our real world in an allegorical sense only. In this simulated world, the circus is not a circus at all, but an ‘ill wind’. Aunt Tünde, who arrives out of nowhere and spells nothing but trouble, is an ‘ill wind’ too. Lanos is not really a man, but an amalgam of concepts and ideas, chief among them ingenuousness, and the subjugation thereof. It’s the kind of area that I would posit Apichatpong Weerasethakul also operates in, as he too presents us with material that appears perfectly real juxtaposed without overt distinction next to imagery that cannot possibly be real; Synecdoche, New York played with this sort of tension, too, as did Under the Skin. In Werckmeister Harmonies’ case though, I feel that there is no juxtaposition- it’s all simulation, it’s all symbolism.

In any case, I found the movie arduous and unrewarding, as if you’ve visited a Michelin-starred restaurant which boasts one of the most well-respected chefs in the world, and in an act of uncompromising artistic integrity, he puts gravel in your food and tells you he ‘despises cooking’. Obligingly, you eat it, and it scratches your throat on the way down. It’s an allegory for all the times people have had their ‘throats scratched’ by corrupt political systems, meaning your unedifying experience is in fact a piece of penetrative socio-political rhetoric. Are you, then, filled with admiration at the chef’s purity of vision? Or are you annoyed that you’ve just eaten gravel, nutrient-rich as it may theoretically be?

91. The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella, 2009)         

The Secret in Their Eyes is an Argentinean thriller based around the rape and murder of a young woman and the hunt for the perpetrator. It’s noticeably less arthouse than most of the films on this list, and for me, it generally resembled a police procedural TV show, at least on an aesthetic level.

The rape scene is brief but brutal, going far beyond what crime shows, even gritty, resolutely serious and decidedly adult ones like The Wire would typically portray. This is, unfortunately, something which I found to be one of the most notable and striking aspects of the film. Personally, I feel that I should be more occupied with the characters and the plot points and whatever other interesting nuances the movie may have rather than how nasty they were able to make the rape look (with a generous helping of nudity, to boot). Am I saying that this rape and murder should have looked ‘nice’? No, of course I’m not, but I didn’t feel that the movie- sober, solid, and relatively average- provided a convincing enough contextual buffer for this particular content. Having said that, there is a perfectly valid argument that since the entire film hinges around this single incident (and it really does), that it is perfectly logical for the scene’s prominence to be so high, and if it ‘overshadows’ its characters, well, that’s because it’s overshadowed their lives.

In any case, The Secret in Their Eyes struck me as a particularly male film. It views its events through a recognisably male lens; it tries to come to terms with this heinous crime through the struggles of men who can’t accept that they don’t have any control over the situation, and feel their own failings through it- a husband who wasn’t there when his wife needed him, a judiciary agent who is unable to deliver effective justice. Subsequently a certain rage takes root in the background of their everyday emotions- rage at themselves for being ineffectual, rage at the unconscionable transgressions of their own gender, rage at a system that declines to properly punish those who commit such acts, rage at the world that they have to live in and the evil inherent. Rage at other people for appearing to take a more blasé attitude than theirs. The movie’s sole significant female character, Irene, is like an archetype of a strong female character as rendered by men- impeccably attired in power suits, she is calm, controlled, extremely capable, ages well, and always looks great whatever is thrown at her.

There are elements of noir around the film’s midsection as our heroes, their cards marked, find themselves unsafe in their own homes. And there is a truly breath-taking single-take shot, redolent of Children of Men, which one can’t praise enough and really must be seen to be believed (though also, like the rape, perhaps sits somewhat awkwardly amongst its more ‘standard’ surrounding context). 

It’s all very stylish. Like Irene, it’s well-presented, it’s intelligent and it strikes its notes efficiently, sometimes even with a little finesse. Still, I wasn’t particularly persuaded by this one. It was fine when I was watching it- it’s still fine now, in fact- but another of those films like A Prophet or The Lives of Others wherein there was nothing specifically wrong with the movie but my reaction to it was middling and subdued. If you’re looking for a crime drama, however, with elements of intrigue and suspense, then this could well be the one for you. You’ll have seen worse.  

42. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)

Amour is about an elderly French couple, married for many years, who are living out a quiet but satisfying retirement in a spacious Parisian apartment, filled with books and other indications of the intellect that has thus far defined their lives. One day, the woman, Anne, suffers a stroke. It doesn’t look too bad at first.

But it is. And physical incapacitation soon becomes mental degradation. And Anne’s slide into dementia is swift and merciless. As it progresses, Amour carries with it the uneasy feeling that Haneke is deliberately crafting a cruel picture that is as feel-bad as possible. But perhaps it serves to show us just how much sugar a typical movie has in it, to the point that we barely notice, and just how unwilling a typical director is to make one that has nothing in the way of comfort. We’ve seen films before that didn’t offer any easy answers- Lost in Translation was one, and Inside Llewyn Davis, with more pointed levels of anguish and despair, was another- but both of those examples featured far more in the way of general filmic vibrancy; for one thing, the characters in those two movies move around, they visit places. We’re not just staring at the interior of the same apartment for two hours.

Another potential problem is that Haneke’s sympathy for these characters is underplayed and sometimes barely in evidence at all. Again, maybe this is just an indicator of the amount of ‘sympathy’ most filmmakers will readily shoehorn into their movies and spoon-feed to the viewer just because that’s the standard, that’s what’s expected. Maybe they’re worried that if they make a film that’s not warm or tactile enough, it won’t make as much money, something that doesn’t seem to concern Haneke at all, or other artists in this mould such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

It is alienating though. For one thing, there’s something too intimate about how closely we are shown Anne’s condition; a condition that, were she real, she would want kept private from her family and friends, let alone the general public who are able, under these circumstances, to observe her like a bug under a microscope- pitilessly, should they choose to. There’s also something decidedly unfair about all this- she’s led a cultured, dignified life, and all that is irrelevant as Haneke’s camera chooses to show us these wretched days instead. Her husband, Georges, is depicted at his worst too. The inference, amongst others, is that this is what we all become in the end, even if we’re lucky enough to avoid dementia- shells of our former selves, regressed to a quasi-pathetic state, taking up space and arguably better off dead.

It shares some superficial thematic fabric with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but its approach and the conclusions ostensibly drawn by the respective movies are diametrically opposed. One important difference is, of course, that Jean-Do Bauby had a full team of medical professionals tending to him at all times, and Anne Laurent doesn’t. Another, possibly even more crucial difference is that he hadn’t lost his mind- on the contrary, one of The Diving Bell’s most defining characteristics was the power and vitality of Jean-Do’s psyche, and how much solace he was able to take in its vigour.

My DVD is rated by the British Board of Film Classification as a ‘12’. I think a ‘15’ would have been more appropriate, even though the movie contains no sex, very little bad language and no explicit violence. Why? Well, I suppose because it’s shocking. It’s a shocking film which I found to be deeply unpleasant, containing themes and concepts which are far too mature for a 12-year-old to process, that even someone of my rapidly advancing years struggled with.

Yeah, I had a hard time with this one. Enter at your own risk.

76. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003) 

Dogville is one of the most formally experimental movies on our list. It is set in a small town based around two or three streets and about 15 inhabitants, except, however, there is no town- lines are drawn on a sound-stage, and the actors move around them, pretending that non-existent buildings, and sometimes other relevant props, are there. That’s the first thing that confronts the viewer, and they immediately have to decide how they feel about it.

Well, maybe not immediately. Maybe they can give the movie 20 minutes, or half an hour, and see where things go from there. As someone who knew from the start that they were obligated to watch all of it- almost three hours- that’s the approach I generally took, instead of making any snap judgements.

It might have been interesting to note that once you get far enough into the film, these things cease to matter and you stop noticing them, but I didn’t find that was the case. I was always aware of the conceit, and moreover I think that I was supposed to be. Sometimes, at points in the film where significant and meaningful aspects of the movie’s story and message are being foregrounded, this formal staging briefly becomes less important, but it is always quite undeniably there and always has a central role to play in the movie’s tone and feel.

Did it ‘add’ anything? Debatable, but I don’t think it was a detraction, and in my opinion, viewers who reacted negatively to this particular artistic method probably still wouldn’t have liked Dogville even if it had been filmed in a regular manner and presented as a regular movie. There is, however, no question that we would have been dealing with a quite different film if that had been the case. I’m struggling to imagine exactly what that would have looked like, or how it would have come across- redolent of American Beauty, perhaps, or Blue Velvet, two other movies in which the respectability of suburban life is merely a veneer for something darker and much more noxious? In any case, this is how Dogville has been filmed, and it’s up to you, on these terms, whether to take it or leave it. Personally, it was a film that I liked and respected very much. I thought it was clever, it was cohesive and it was compelling. I had to ask myself, however, why I was so receptive to this grim film, with its mordant message of despondency and hopelessness, when I had felt so lukewarm towards other recent films that covered similar tonal territory, namely Synecdoche, New York, Werckmeister Harmonies and Amour. Well, for one thing, Dogville has a storyline- it’s not the most emphatic storyline you’ll ever see, but it nevertheless has an actual storyline that runs solidly through the film and takes the viewer from A to B to C and doesn’t pull any tricks with them or spring any bizarre asides (though there is something of a revelation in the film’s final stages which I think constitutes a twist).

The ‘simulated world’ that I theorised about when covering Werckmeister Harmonies is, of course, in full evidence here. I mean, it’s absolutely front and centre. Despite this, I felt that the characters were quite real, certainly to the extent that I was interested in their motivations and behavioural qualities. Like Werckmeister Harmonies, it appears that the whole town moves as one and is almost like an entity unto itself, without individualism; unlike Werckmeister Harmonies, these characters are nonetheless individuals with their own voices, set against, though not necessarily in contradiction of, the apparent hive mindset, and thus creating fissures of narrative complexity and juxtaposition which I generally thought were missing in the Hungarian think-piece. The editing is also very quick- all of the scenes, even the most simple and straightforward ones, are a restless cluster of rapid, succinct shots, a technique I had previously found most noticeable in von Trier’s 1998 Dogme film The Idiots (if it’s present in Melancholia, it’s far more understated). Some viewers will undoubtedly find this irritating and needless, but if nothing else, it relieves the static quality the movie might otherwise have had, and in this aspect is the absolute diametric opposite of Béla Tarr’s adamantly torpid vision.

Roger Ebert kinda hated this film; although he gave it two stars out of four in his original review, he went on to include it in his worst films of the year (spoilers ahead). In particular, he viewed it as having an anti-American message, opining that ‘I doubt that we have any villages where the helpless visitor would be chained to a bed and raped by every man in town.’ Really? Not any? Not even Jordan, Minnesota? So these sorts of things, in essence, can happen in Germany, and Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain, and Pinochet’s Chile, and Gaddafi’s Libya, and Vietnam, and the former Yugoslavia, and Cambodia, and Uganda, and Rwanda, and Haiti, and Mauritania, where in 2012 20% of the population were estimated to be slaves, and here in the UK, where in 1992 Suzanne Capper was tied to a bed and tortured for several days and eventually set alight to burn to death, with six different people involved, but not in the USA? I mean, really. What utter poppycock.

Von Trier actually said himself that the movie addresses the idea that ‘evil can arise anywhere, as long as the situation is right.’ It couldn’t really be any clearer that these themes are universal. If you really wanted to read the film as anti-American, then I suppose the most prominent sequence would be its final credits, which display a photographic montage of US poverty and degradation over the jaunty, inappropriate strains of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’. It’s a passage completely at odds with the movie’s overall tone and, as far as I can see, is just a facetious little wink-wink gambit from a filmmaker noted time and time again for these sorts of proclivities; from my angle, I’m surprised Roger Ebert- whom, I should probably point out, I still love, and always will- was daft enough to rise to it.

Anyway, if you’re seeking any ‘validation’ for the kinds of points von Trier makes in this film, then there is an established cultural base for them in works like The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies and The Crucible, as well as Pasolini’s Salò at the (much) more extreme end of the scale. That’s not to say you have to like these points, insomuch as you have to like anything, but to call him a ‘crank’ or compare him to ‘a raving prophet on a street corner’ simply for making them, as Roger does, is, in my opinion, seriously misjudged.

What I took from Dogville was that people are opportunists- not all of them, I guess, but a great many- and if they’re given the chance, a nauseatingly high number will abuse the position they’ve been given, ostensibly undeterred by conscience, especially if they’ve also been engaged in a groupthink mentality. The film has been called misanthropic, and if it was this specific notion that brought about such a charge, then I guess I’m a misanthrope too. For me though, what I found most fascinating about the evil shown in this movie is its gradual progression- it comes along in fits and starts, just as the Nazis didn’t get the gas ovens out the very day they were elected. The townspeople behave as if everything they are doing is right and proper, that their actions are necessary in defence of a threat to their values, whatever they are, and, incredibly, that it is in fact Grace (a highly effective and commendable Nicole Kidman) who should somehow be ashamed of herself. The town’s most reasonable and moral figure, Tom, makes excuses for their behaviour and downplays it. If you don’t recognise this kind of conduct, and you’ve never been on the wrong end of it, I consider you very lucky.

In an echo of The Secret in Their Eyes, the movie’s climax gives us a slice of wish-fulfilment. We get to see the transgressors receive their just desserts, and in this instance, it is less dignified and more overblown than that of the Argentinean drama, as you squirm uncomfortably in your seat and ask yourself if this is, after all, what you really wanted.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, it was intriguing for me to see a town being razed to the ground when there is no town and nothing is in fact being razed at all. Perhaps this is a comment on the transparency of the peoples’ moral fibre, which they all pretend is real when it isn’t, a possible parallel that is at its most visually suggestive when people are knocking on non-existent doors and tending imaginary gooseberry bushes, implying that this artifice underscores every single aspect of their daily lives.

Ultimately? A sprawling, singular, searing missive from one of cinema’s most incendiary and inimitable polemicists.

35. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) 

Sometimes, when working through the films on this list, I wonder if a movie has been lauded primarily because it contains shots or entire sequences that must have been really difficult to pull off, requiring an awful lot of time, effort and skill to orchestrate. This has been most observable in the action films of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Dark Knight, though it was also present in more serious, less easily definable works such as City of God, Children of Men and Zero Dark Thirty. 

Anyway, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon contains such sequences, and they’re pretty impressive. You can’t really have any other reaction other than excitement when you see people running up and down buildings in a live-action setting, like a flesh-and-blood version of the free-running feature in the video game series Assassin’s Creed (I would not be surprised, in fact, if this very movie was where the game developers got the original idea).

Elsewhere, the film aims for successes in a variety of areas. If nothing else, the emphasis the movie places on story makes it clear, in and of itself, that this is not supposed to be a swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery extravaganza and nothing else. It wants to be a love story. It wants to be a meditative think-piece. It wants to document Jen Yu’s coming of age, and possibly even allegorise the struggles a young person goes through in the process of self-actualisation.

Jen Yu’s portrayal is erratic and immature, yet simultaneously sympathetic. This character-based nuance, and others, add depth and dramatic substance to a piece which, as a direct result of its ambitious reach, sometimes errs on the wrong side of trite. Providing yet more distinction and anchorage are the central performances from Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh, whose respective heroic qualities exude dignity from every pore, nicely underplayed by both. The same cannot be said for Cheng Pei-pei’s turn as the pantomime villain Jade Fox, or the buffoonish henchmen-esque adversaries that are summarily dispatched across the movie, but these elements also contribute to the picture’s polyphonic, versatile quality, as well as making our heroes look even more sage.

When watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I had to bear in mind that this is an eastern film, and if it features elements that a viewer like myself might find odd or disconcerting, in this case a tendency toward the overcooked and the melodramatic, then a certain amount of effort should be made to receive them in the spirit they were intended, one which may quite feasibly be outside my sphere of comprehension. Here, this was a process I found much easier than those which accompanied Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, Oldboy, The Assassin and Spirited Away, all experiences which, to varying extents, left me decidedly nonplussed. Not so with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This was an enjoyable movie whose perceived faults did not detract from its overall impact and generally came over as idiosyncratic charm, sitting with relative comfort within the film’s robust, vibrant and altogether rather ravishing tapestry.

88. Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015) 

Spotlight is centred around a group of journalists who are investigating the Catholic Church and its decades-long practice of aiding and abetting the paedophilic acts of its priests, when they occur. It’s clear that the abuse is multi-dimensional- the film isn’t just addressing child abuse, it’s also addressing abuse of power, and it doesn’t pinpoint which one is worse. Why would it? It’s moot. They’re different limbs on the same dragon.

I’ve seen this film before, but didn’t pay as much attention as I probably should have, and generally found it dry and unremarkable. It’s certainly a talky one, and does not lend itself to casual viewing. Not for the first time, then, we have a movie that stood up far more solidly on a second take, and subsequently I felt like I ‘got’ it much better than I had done first time around.

I enjoyed Spotlight when I was watching it. It was only afterwards that mild, slight apprehensions suggested themselves. The concept of ‘normal’, ‘everyday’ heroes was perhaps a little too overstated, I feel, and the characters themselves perhaps a shade too perfect. Having said that, if one of them had been given an edgy flaw- alcoholism, for example- then we might have ended up with a worse, more contrived movie, one which overshot its emotive manipulation when it is already very open about what it wants you, as a viewer, to think. It also would have muddled the tone; it’s systemic and institutionalised corruption that the movie is concentrated steadfastly around, and the struggle that virtue goes through to combat it- ergo, it’s a film which is concerned with concepts, not interpersonal nuance, and when it does feature small amounts of character development, they are set firmly against this framework.

It's a film that asks how decent people process the indecent behaviour of others. The answer, as always, is with great difficulty. They steel themselves and muddle through as best they can. The Secret in Their Eyes asked the same question, but Spotlight forgoes the veneer of gloss that coated the Argentinean thriller, a movie that I referred to as ‘sober’ at the time. Spotlight, with its lack of incidental music, amongst other things, aims for an altogether more elevated, unsullied level of sobriety.

Earlier, I distinguished Werckmeister Harmonies from your average film by claiming that it took place entirely within a ‘simulated world’, one that existed only to make allegorical points, and stated that certain other films also, to lesser extents, created their own ‘simulated worlds’ and employed these effects to their own ends. Ostensibly, Spotlight is positioned at the very opposite end of this particular spectrum than Werckmeister Harmonies, aiming to imitate reality as closely as it possibly can, and forgoing any sort of ‘simulated world’ at all. However, on a most basic, fundamental level, every film takes place in its own version of a ‘simulated world’, just as all the dreams we ever have do too, regardless of how closely they resemble real life. The same is also true of every instance you’ve imagined the future, or hypothetically re-arranged your own past, or any time you’ve wondered what other people might be saying about you when you’re not there. From a filmic perspective, the nature of this simulation is at its thinnest and most tenuous within the documentary format, of which our following movie is an example. But in Spotlight’s case, its simulated world is one where, in echoes of The Social Network, people never stumble over their words and all of their conversational exchange hums with taut efficiency. One difference, though- people talk slower in Spotlight than they did in the Fincher piece; their speech patterns are more recognisable, and generally easier to swallow. They don’t engage in the sass or verbal grandstanding that would threaten the film’s verisimilitude and gravitas. We don’t see them, in fact, engage in anything other than the tireless commitment to finding and uncovering the truth. They make sacrifices in the process. They are unlikely to get the opportunity to do something so unquestionably moral, on this scale, ever again.

The movie itself reflects their level of focus. It never allows itself to get side-tracked, not even a little, and as such, aptly resembles a piece of strong, professionally minded journalism. Not the most evocative piece we’ve seen, then, or necessarily the most life-changing, but one that aims for a very specific note, and hits it directly, dead-on, with assurance to spare.

14. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012) 

The Act of Killing is a documentary piece centred around a group of Indonesian ‘gangsters’ who have committed historical atrocities centred around a political purging of Communists. These self-professed gangsters don’t seem to lead very interesting lives; they sit around, they drink, they smoke, they play cards, they laugh and joke with each other and at the filmmakers’ behest, they talk about the things they’ve done. If the movie’s intent was to show us the mundane reality of evil, I thought, then it’s succeeding.

One of the gangsters, Hugo, runs a campaign in an attempt to be appointed as a government official. He is perfectly open with Oppenheimer’s camera as to how corrupt and self-serving he intends to be if elected. This was a scene that, perversely, I found more disturbing than the descriptions the gangsters gave of the murders they’d committed. Why? I think because the murders were, at least in theory, driven by ideology, and Hugo’s cheerful wish to ‘get money off everyone’ and threaten to tear down buildings isn’t. Also, we’re kinda numbed to depictions of genocide; it doesn’t feel all that unusual to hear tales like these, even in this idiosyncratic setting, whereas I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone standing for election talk so casually, and with obvious relish, about how bad they would be for the community if they got in.  

The movie’s key narrative arc centres around Anwar, who is the only one of the gangsters to show any real feelings at all, remorse or otherwise. It is his story that was my main point of interest, rather than the more general concerns regarding man’s inhumanity to man and how grim and corrupt the vast state of Indonesia appears to be. We see a man who, in the opening stages of the picture, is just as blasé about what he has done than any of the others, yet even then, for some reason, Oppenheimer’s camera seems to focus on him, as if it is consciously waiting for this man’s layers to show themselves. His contemporaries just don’t have that same presence.

As we get into the latter stages of the picture, Anwar’s behaviour becomes more and more irregular, and subsequently more interesting. He appears on TV to promote his ‘beautiful’ movie about killing, wearing a Stetson hat and smiling broadly, a physical embodiment of the point at which rugged swagger meets dutiful, civic-minded heroism. Yet away from these public endeavours, he cuts a doubtful figure, one who is apt to talk about his nightmares and generally appears to be undergoing a process of serious re-assessment regarding his actions, though something- a version of perceived self-respect and pride, probably- keeps him from actually apologising or outright admitting fault. This all culminates in a remarkable sequence which sees him retching and dry-heaving on his murder-roof, looking for all the world like a man that the ghosts have finally caught up with.

He comments that he consciously imitated old movie-stars, prompting the age-old question as to whether movies can directly influence violent acts. If we take Anwar’s comments as read, and there isn’t really any reason not to, the answer would appear to be an unambiguous yes, though complicated by the fact that when Anwar saw the films in question he was probably committing murderous acts already. If there is a message to this film, and there are likely several potential messages should you be searching for them, then one dispatch certainly seems to be that if you want to imitate movie stars, then by all means do so, but be prepared to spend your twilight years chucking your guts up on some godforsaken rooftop and discussing your nightmares with a documentarian when you should be relaxing and enjoying your retirement.

For the most part, this is all very subjective material that will affect different viewers in different ways. It’s clear that I am supposed to react to it with abject horror, and I can see exactly why so many viewers will have that very reaction. It is, by its very nature, horrifying. But for me, my overriding perception of the picture was as a handful of key scenes surrounded by the ample documentation of people whose daily lives- and often, viewpoints- didn’t really warrant being documented. I was bored. These gangsters aren’t articulate, and their utterances are banal. I understand this must have been a very difficult picture to make, not to mention dangerous, and I fully appreciate that. But I would also question the film’s anthropological value, just as I did with City of God- I don’t really feel like I’ve learnt very much about Indonesia, other than that the people there live lives of squalid austerity profoundly removed from the comforts of First World living; crucially, I don’t really feel like I’ve learnt much about the nature of evil, either. That might not have been the case if I’d seen the film back in 2012 when it came out, but here in 2022, as I approach my late thirties, this material was little more than a pedestrian re-affirmation of views that I already wearily held, albeit presented in an unconventional manner, and didn’t hold the same weight that it might have done for a younger, less soured viewer.

This is another film which exists in a significantly longer version, in this instance a 160-minute ‘director’s cut’ which carries with it the implication that it is Oppenheimer’s preferred edition. Since I feel he could have easily lost at least half an hour of his theatrical cut, I can’t see myself sharing this apparent preference, but we will find out nonetheless when I revisit it later.

26. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002) 

Monty Brogan, a drug-dealing criminal played by Edward Norton, is tough. There’s no doubting that. He is, as a DEA agent character puts it at one point, a ‘hard-ass’.

We’ve all seen these hard-asses onscreen. Some of them can be thrilling, especially when given strong motives and a strong plot to work with, though as many commentators have also previously noted, they would most likely be insufferable in you encountered them in real life.

Monty wouldn’t, though. Monty would probably come across quite normal if you met him. He has a firm, solid grasp of social exchange and appropriate situational behaviour, and he’s good at it. ‘People like you, Monty,’ his father tells him late in the picture. ‘It’s a gift.’

25th Hour isn’t an action movie, and it’s not a gangster piece either. If it was, I guess Monty’s toughness would be more pointed, and have far less dimension to it. But in Monty’s case, this character element isn’t there to serve genre conventions, though it’s certainly necessary in the context of the film’s narrative direction, and I guess it’s necessary to make its comments about male behaviour, too.

Ed Norton seems to be something of a master when it comes to portraying vulnerability without being too vulnerable, without negating a given film’s emphasis on his character’s steel. There are echoes of his roles in Fight Club and American History X in Monty Brogan, though direct comparisons would generally serve, I feel, to make Monty look even more grounded and agreeable than he already does. He is willing to express feelings that do not necessarily befit a stoic, unshakeable vision of undiluted masculinity, among them doubt, uncertainty, fear and regret, and he is able to do it without looking at all delicate or feeble.

One senses that Monty’s drug-dealing is a means to an end, in contrast to the characters in a film like Goodfellas who seem to engage in these vocations partly because it’s an indelible part of their culture but also because they like the lifestyle and they get a thrill from their self-appointed autonomy, operating outside the law, being bad-boys. Monty isn’t defined by his criminality to that extent, making his predicament look, amongst other things, almost unfair. Is he an everyman? Can we read his circumstances as a metaphor for any intense difficulties a viewer might have experienced or be experiencing? Debatable, but it would nevertheless appear that he is much closer to the proverbial everyman than his two best friends would theoretically be- Francis (Barry Pepper), an alpha-asshole, insistent and tedious in his single, overriding personality trait, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman on his usual scintillating form), a shy and awkward intellectual who resembles a more moderately rendered, and therefore more relatable, version of Synecdoche, New York’s Caden Cotard. The very fact that Monty can be friends with two such wildly different people is a testament to his depth of character. He hangs out with Jacob because he likes him, and despite appearances, they have plenty of common ground, although there does seem to be a sense of principled loyalty involved too.

Just like Monty, 25th Hour is a tough, hard film, brazen and profane. Also like Monty, it’s layered, employing a delicate, though sometimes decidedly indelicate, range of tones and shades across its duration, as Terence Blanchard’s apocalyptic score broods ominously over everything. Its portrayal of machismo is studied and analytical, avoiding any neat or easy supposition. The women in these men’s lives (played by Rosario Dawson and Anna Paquin, both highly effective) are alternately adored and resented, partly it would seem because of the surplus complications that they bring to lives already riddled with conflict, both internal and external. The three friends could be seen as almost different ‘stages’ of man, or failing that, three different ways in which a man can deal with his own testosterone- Jacob is embarrassed by it, Francis chooses to absolutely revel in it, and Monty occupies something of a balanced, temperate middle ground between them; he is also the only one who is in a steady, committed relationship, making it even more remarkable that of the three, it is his life which is completely out of control and on the very brink of collapse.

As previously noted, 25th Hour has been a huge part of my life for two decades now, even when I go several years without watching it; by the same token, when I watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again later, it will be the first time since 2015. I’ve never had to explain before, however, exactly why this particular movie pierces me so deeply; as the years passed, I simply loved the movie, and I largely took that love for granted. It seemed to say things to me that were very pertinent to my own life, despite me never having visited New York, let alone lived day after day in its very bowels, and having never been a drug dealer. So I could point to the quality of the acting and call Norton’s performance career-defining, though he’s given other, comparable performances that he is ultimately better-known for. Hoffman’s role, in a more supporting capacity, probably isn’t ‘career-defining’ either, in the literal sense of the term, especially considering the more lauded portrayals he would later go on to give. I could maybe declare it a career-defining film for Spike Lee, though I suspect most cinephiles would posit that this is something of an off-brand movie for him, and that he would be ‘defined’ more accurately by other areas of his filmography; it’s not necessarily prudent to get bogged down in such semantics about these individuals anyway. I could instead focus on those points about masculinity that I touched on earlier, and say that other films rubbing shoulders with 25th Hour in the uppermost echelons of my own Top 100, such as Calvary, Wild Bill, Sideways, Looper and The Wrestler, also in their own ways explore what it means to be a man, identifying something of a theme. Or I could, of course, take the more obvious option of identifying key scenes, in this case the notorious ‘rant’ that Monty delivers at himself into the mirror, and, more pertinently I feel, the breathtaking ten-minute sequence that ends the film, in my view one of the greatest cinematic denouements of all time.

Is it enough to just say that 25th Hour really does it for me, on a cerebral level, on a visceral level, on an artistic level, on an aesthetic level? On an ‘everything’ level? Do I need to give much more explanation or justifying detail than that? It’s a piece that, on the one hand, seems to blaze through its celluloid with fiery resolve, leaving streams of blood, sweat and tears in its wake, yet on the other could be easily- and quite accurately- characterised as a series of talky, episodic sequences set in classrooms, apartments, parks, restaurants, police interrogation rooms and nightclubs. In engaging with such everyday ephemera, I feel that Lee gets close to the heart of what New York is really all about, far more than a film like Shame did, or indeed Synecdoche, New York; Shame engaged, I guess, with these sorts of locales too, but as I said in that review, its city-setting came across somewhat anonymous. In 25th Hour, New York emerges as a landscape whose collective cultural mood, especially considering the era, includes profound anger, and as we see in the ‘rant’ scene, a love-hate relationship with your own city- a hulking metropolis that hangs heavy over its inhabitants, packed like sardines and living in the perpetual shadow of skyscrapers, who insist that they ‘wouldn’t have it any other way’ but perhaps also sometimes dream of living lives that are slightly less intense.

Rotten Tomatoes headlines this as ‘an intelligent and well-acted film despite the usual Spike Lee excesses’, a comment that I don’t feel is entirely fair. I’ve never considered 25th Hour excessive, ever, despite passages in this very review that might suggest otherwise. I mean, there’s the obvious rant scene, and then there’s the entire character of Francis, so I’m not going to make the case that the movie is completely devoid of excess. But I feel that one of 25th Hour’s defining features is how considered it is, drawing queries as to whether a movie can in fact be both considered and excessive at the same time; on reflection, they probably can, Holy Motors and The Great Beauty perhaps serving as decent examples. If the movie sometimes feels overwrought, well, the circumstances of its narrative justify that; not only it is depicting a time and place of profound social unrest, it’s also a portrait of a man on the very edge of unimaginable personal upheaval, who has been betrayed by someone close to him and also, on occasion, finds himself looking down the barrel of a gun.

As we say goodbye to Monty Brogan, locked forever in a state of both transit and transition when the screen goes black, a Bruce Springsteen track called ‘The Fuse’ starts up. Here, I feel that 25th Hour pulls the same trick that Almost Famous did, in taking a middling piece from the more obscure end of a major artist’s oeuvre and instilling it with a power that it wouldn’t otherwise have had. In 25th Hour’s hands, ‘The Fuse’ becomes a bruised, incantatory urban hymn that somehow seems to provide a full summation of the movie in all its inglorious tumult- its acute sense of sadness and loss, its direct, pointed juxtaposition of socio-political explosion and interpersonal implosion. As Bruce and his backing singers intone their solemn refrain, we’re left in another situation where characters’ fates are left in limbo and we have no idea how things will all turn out in the end. Will Jacob keep his job? Will he be able to find the comfort and happiness that his neuroses and impulse mismanagement are currently keeping him from? How long does Monty’s father have left to live, and will he ever see his son a free man again? And when everything is said and done, is all of this a comment on where ‘tough’ behaviour will ultimately get you?

9. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011) 

Earlier, when reviewing Boyhood, I commented that the movie was notable for what it didn’t show you as much as for what it did, going on to give several examples of the kind of tired, lazy, hacky writing that one might expect to see from a film in that family-drama genre, and that the Linklater movie was so successfully able to avoid. A Separation is a family drama too, and though it isn’t a coming-of-age tale like Boyhood, and it doesn’t take place over several years, I found that its incredibly smooth and fluid rhythmic progressions operated in a very similar way.

Boyhood, though, along with The Tree of Life, seemed to make poetical points about aging and our place in the universe. A Separation is markedly distinct from movies with those sorts of ruminations; though both Boyhood and The Tree of Life featured scenes of tension and conflict, they were far more incidental, whereas A Separation is built entirely around interpersonal strife, and is not a film where the characters would have time to sit down and reflect on the nature of existence, even if they wanted to.

In this, I suppose that A Separation resembles a more regular, everyday movie in its focus and concerns- certainly far more than The Tree of Life, anyway. However, I do feel that it shares with Boyhood that deft ability to avoid tired cliché, as it hands us characters that feel every inch like living, breathing, real people- your proverbial friends and neighbours- with full, complex motivations, and does all this with the same apparent ease and composure that marked out Boyhood for its effusive and well-deserved praise.

It really is just about a family- two families, to be more exact, strangers to each other, and a short period in their entangled lives where everything blows up and gets shot to hell, and how we deal with these sorts of situations which, agonisingly, sometimes just spring from nowhere and develop at a pace too rapid for anybody, even these mature, rational adults, to process adequately. It deals with crises that would, with foresight or luck, have been easily prevented. It deals with those feelings that arise when you lose power over situations that you should have been able to control.

Even under these circumstances, the film doesn’t ever descend to the kinds of saccharine melodrama that many issue-driven movies of this ilk do, especially when they’re written and directed with a specific demographic in mind. A Separation aims to give the viewer a slice of life that is ostensibly as real as possible, and distinguished from a film like Spotlight which had similar aims but also carried socio-cultural overtones bigger and grander than its relatively humble cast of characters, ultimately taking precedence over them. In A Separation, the characters are instead given the (ahem) spotlight, and firmly so; they are the movie, it lives and dies by them, and the viewer is given the opportunity to take a position akin to a fly on the wall, to sit in on exchanges that otherwise would have remained resolutely private. I guess you could have said this about Amour too, but A Separation, like the vast majority of cinema, is far less acidic than the Haneke piece, even as it engages with heady themes of moral relativism and the struggles inherent in parenting, despite the best intentions and every effort.

You could even compare A Separation to 25th Hour in that it presents us with a short, torrid period that this handful of people will never forget, yet will have little to no effect on those at the fringes of their lives- their work colleagues, their acquaintances- many of whom may not ever even be aware that these events transpired at all. In any case, it’s a film which is executed, like many others we’ve covered, with a light touch, minimal editorialising and consummate skill. The acting, in particular, is a high point, from everyone, including the young Sarina Farhadi, seamlessly holding her own amongst the more experienced actors with a performance of quiet conviction, and even the tiny Kimia Hosseini, whose expressive, wide-eyed picture of innocence adds genuine dimension to the fraught goings-on around her.

Recommended.

58. Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembène, 2004)

Moolaadé is an African film set in a small village cut off from the rest of the world, with a self-sustaining and self-governing air. Perhaps it would appear reductive to use Timbuktu as a principal reference point, as it is the only other African film on the list, but there is a narrative parallel too glaring to ignore, in that a relatively easy-going first half, with mere hints of trouble, gives way to full and open tragedy in the second.

I wrote of A Separation that it hands us characters that feel every inch like living, breathing real people, and Moolaadé widens that perspective to give us a community, a microcosm, that presents as almost a living entity unto itself, struggling for health as internal toxicities, mild at first, develop like infection and threaten its very lifeblood. The movie’s incidents feel like inhalations and exhalations of this communal organism, and if one villager cries in pain, then they all do, figuratively if not literally.

The vivid realisation of this community could be said to be the movie’s principal achievement, as without it, one senses that everything else Moolaadé aims for could easily fall flat. The entire movie revolves around this central underpinning, including the moments of levity and laughter that occur throughout and stand in contrast to the insistently serious and self-important tones, pre-occupied with prestige, accompanying the overt message-movies coming out of Hollywood (of which Spotlight is a mild, better-than-most example).  

Like we earlier saw with Timbuktu, the movie’s terrible events are rendered tastefully, and come about through an intertwined melange of misplaced ideology, blind adherence to custom and sometimes just plain old-fashioned foolishness rather than straightforward malevolence, in contrast with a film like Dogville, where evil was afoot. Still, the question of dominance rears its head again as we are presented with yet another faction of people, thoroughly unelected and with no concrete authority, who insist on dictating the behaviour and beliefs of others, exerting control over their lives, and leaving one to wonder why this particular aspect of human nature is so overwhelmingly prevalent, both in and out of the cinematic world.

On the one hand, the village is a vision of dusty desolation that conforms almost exactly to the kinds of conditions a pampered westerner like me expects Africans to live in (though perhaps less so in this current day and age). On the other, I feel that Sembène really gets to the heart of what drives these people, even when they commit acts that appear inexplicable and needless. The anthropological value, then, that I questioned when covering City of God and The Act of Killing was, I felt, much more prevalent in this picture- rich and substantial, notwithstanding the occasional scene which was perhaps a little lost in translation. Moolaadé is a full and lucid portrait of how ‘the other half’ lives- their concerns, their pastimes, the sorts of things that they hold to be important. A villager returning from abroad is a huge communal event. The radio is an indispensable aural window to the wider world. If nothing else, one gets the sense that life in a village like this, its prison-like tendencies aside, would never be lonely. Everybody knows everybody else, and they all interact constantly. They have to, really, as the turning wheels of the town, such as they are, rely on it.

If Moolaadé lacks a little of the haiku-like poise and majesty of Timbuktu, then that can hardly be held against it- it’s aiming for a different type of poetry anyway, even as it explores similar sociocultural territory. It offers us a slightly different angle on Africa than Timbuktu did, a fresh sensibility, and of course, a reminder that systemic violations of personal agency, even in these times, are very much alive and well.

96. Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003) 

Finding Nemo is yet another example of a children’s film that has been written and produced to standards of strikingly high quality. If I found Nemo to be a slightly lesser film than Ratatouille and Inside Out, then that is a reflection of the esteem in which I hold the latter two movies rather than any pejorative comment on this one. Indeed, for a third straight Pixar film, I would struggle to find anything pejorative to say about this film at all, even if I wanted to.

That Pixar have managed to repeatedly achieve such a feat strikes one as tantamount to alchemy. Indeed, these are magic movies, crackling with colour and invention, yet underpinned by the kind of artistic maturity and depth that only adults would have the wherewithal to fully appreciate. In this instance, there are shades of Homer’s Odyssey and Jason & the Argonauts in this wayfaring tale of high stakes, danger, obstacle and adventure across a vast expanse of unchartered territory. 

At one point in the film, a fish tank and its inhabitants form part of the narrative; in its own way, this is just as rich a rendering of community as was that of Moolaadé. The fish live lives that are based (fairly unavoidably) on extensive interaction and co-operation with each other as they make do with what small amounts of contentment and stimulus they can find in their close co-habitation; their restricted worldview results, by necessity, in a preoccupation with minutiae. But just look at the talent that was deployed to voice this ragtag group- Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney, Stephen Root, Brad Garrett and Austin Pendleton, as well as, outside the tank, Albert Brooks, Geoffrey Rush and Eric Bana; these are some of the most distinguished supporting performers of their era, and would have made one hell of a dramatic live-action ensemble.  

What more is there to say, except that Finding Nemo is an unmitigated triumph, and yet another perfect illustration from Pixar of what a children’s film can be, and all the things that others should by rights aspire to.

Pure class.

75. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

As I began this movie, as its opening scenes unfolded and I heard the immortal strains of Vitamin C by Can strike up, I thought ‘Yeah. This is groovy, man. It’s in the pocket. I think I’m gonna like Inherent Vice.’

I was right, for a while. Then doubts started to creep in. It’s an exercise in style, and silliness, and stylish silliness, I guess, or just, like, y’know, an exercise in, probably, like, just some weird shit, man, like some heavy shit or something, probably. They get Joanna Newsom in to do a coy, croaky, little-girl voiceover narration. They get the extreme porn actress Belladonna in to perform a small role (she’s not bad, actually). And the self-satisfied bizarro tendencies of the Coen Brothers and Wes Anderson run across the movie like meth coursing through a tweaker’s veins. The random female nudity from The Master has been dropped into it, all present and correct. The pointless supporting performances are back too- in this case, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Reese Witherspoon, Eric Roberts, Owen Wilson and Michael Kenneth Williams are all onboard to make appearances that register as little more than cameos.

This is real acquired-taste stuff, the kind of thing some people might call love-or-hate. It goes one way, then it goes the other, then it flips you upside-down and tries to tickle your belly. I didn’t hate it, but if we’re envisaging a spectrum, my feelings fell firmly on the side of ‘dislike’. It seems that Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who is uncommonly conversant with the rules of filmmaking, all the accepted standards and the touchstones that many of us barely think about, and knows he is, and uses this understanding to methodically and systematically thumb his nose at them, like The Goons, Monty Python and the Firesign Theatre did in a more overtly comedic context back in the 1950s and 60s, producing material that couldn’t have existed if a framework of tradition, recognisable reference points and consumer expectation hadn’t been laid down first.

This is, nonetheless, a remarkably comic film, striking in its willingness to engage in knockabout set-piece. Frustratingly, I felt that there was a movie hidden somewhere inside Inherent Vice that I would have really enjoyed, one which was crackling with invention and in which its particular strain of absurdist deadpan humour was hitting some genuinely very funny notes. If we were to look at There Will Be Blood, The Master and Inherent Vice together, chronologically, then it would seem there is a pattern in which comic elements are steadily increased whilst coherence levels summarily drop off.

As a long-time lover of some deliberately strange and abstract music- My Bloody Valentine, for example, or Boards of Canada, artists who regularly employ distortive elements to re-create a removed reality that exists only with the involvement of memory, medication, insanity or sleep, I have only recently begun to ask myself why I’ve spent decades neglecting to apply these same principles to other artistic mediums (in this instance, Inherent Vice seems to want to simulate the marijuana haze that our principal character perpetually walks around in). I couldn’t have told you exactly why My Bloody Valentine, when performing live, had to spend 20 minutes of their concert- often more- pummelling the audience with an endurance test of horrendous feedback, but I unquestionably accepted their right to do it as part of a creative statement. After all, it was their gig, playing their songs- they could do whatever they wanted within those parameters, I concluded. I didn’t want to sit and listen to the wild squalls of John Coltrane’s outer limits, but I felt like I understood the context in which they were being performed. Yet I found the work of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Piero Manzoni, amongst others, impossible to appreciate on their own terms and nigh-on ridiculous.

I had to address such issues again when I considered scenes in this movie which were the filmic equivalent of a song with its melody, harmony and structure all collapsing in on themselves and featuring lyrics of complete obfuscation. Earlier, I compared Margaret to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and like that film, I feel Inherent Vice might have gone down easier if it had been an album, in this case maybe something by Frank Zappa, who, like Anderson, looked at the fundamentals of his medium and decided to make confetti from them. Zappa, however, hated drugs, so- I don’t know- perhaps a Primus album would be more apt, or Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, A True Star, or Beck’s Odelay, or (gulp) Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, albums which are, undoubtedly, full to the brim with prodigious wit and audacity but, if you’re anything like me, you couldn’t eat a whole one, especially where that latter album’s concerned. As already stated, an LP gives you the luxury of skipping tracks or even whole sections that you find indigestible- when I listen to Tago Mago, for instance, I never play the half-hour segment that comprises ‘Aumgn’ and ‘Peking O’, and honestly don’t really know why anyone would. But it’s fine, because if Can want to release material like that, it’s their prerogative, especially when they immediately follow it with two albums that are as supple and sublime as Ege Bamyasi and Future Days.

Is it Anderson’s prerogative too? Yes, of course it is, but when I watch Josh Brolin kick down a door that he could have very, very easily just knocked on and lift a silver tray full of marijuana to his mouth and chomp and chew on its contents, rolling papers and all, while making hard eye contact with Joaquin Phoenix before leaving without a word, and then very shortly after that I am sitting watching the end credits, feeling like whatever the joke is, it’s pointedly on me, can I really be expected to give the movie some sort of appreciative, enthusiastic review? It’s not even a short film- there’s a full hundred and fifty minutes of this bollocks, an entire hour more than Timbuktu, and 70 minutes more than Ida, The Gleaners & I or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, the latter of which will of course feature in an upcoming review.

Positives? Absolutely- there are bound to be in a film with so much style and talent on the table. Joaquin Phoenix is really good in this, playing a much more likable and much less psychotic guy than The Master’s Freddie Quell, and giving what is probably my personal favourite performance of his career so far. Doc Sportello is a character that, in the wrong hands, could easily have been forgettable and/or irritating, yet Phoenix inhabits him with such lovable, shaggy-dog charm that it feels as if he could play him forever, in swathes of movies that required bumbling stoner characters, whilst always maintaining these high levels of persuasive aplomb. The square-jawed Brolin is good too, a robust comic foil for our down-at-heel hero.

Overall, though? Freaky-deaky, man. Not jivin’.

Bummer.

31. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011) (extended cut) 

Going into this three-hour edit of Margaret, I expected to have much the same reaction as last time. I expected that the ‘problems’ I’d had with the first run-through would all still be there, especially when they largely revolved around what I saw as an unnecessary digressional proliferation of characters and sub-plots. I didn’t see how an extended runtime could possibly temper such perceptions.

I was wrong. This isn’t a perfect movie by any means, but it is one which is so much freer, and breathes far more easily, than its truncated edit.

This was apparent from an early stage. I wasn’t always able to remember exactly which scenes I’d seen before and which I hadn’t- the rising and falling tides of the film often render this irrelevant- but it just felt like this incarnation had far more oil in its joints.

On the one hand, a short scene of Jean masturbating, present in the shorter version too, serves no narrative purpose and seems a baffling decision (as does another scene where she’s topless in front of a mirror). On the other, it recalls the queasy intimacy of Blue is the Warmest Color, indicating that the character portraits in the movie are so unusually up close and personal as to risk viewer discomfort, perhaps a factor in why my original review was so lukewarm. In that review, I also called the movie ‘quite mainstream’, ‘glossy’ and ‘kinda like a Lifetime TV movie’. I don’t now think these statements are accurate; this isn’t really mainstream filmmaking at all, and my judgement was probably coloured by films I had just recently covered at the time, such as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, pieces that were striking in their individualistic lack of commercialism. Another factor was the movie’s willingness to indulge in melodrama, an aspect that I think was diluted in this longer edit.

It’s still episodic. I’ve seen this charge aimed at other movies and used as a pejorative, but one wonders to what extent all movies are ‘episodic’, as they move dutifully from one scene or set-piece to another. At one point does a given scene become an ‘episode’? Was not Finding Nemo, for example, a series of episodes placed together in a certain rhythm to form a whole? Or The Secret in Their Eyes? Or Only Lovers Left Alive? Or Leviathan? What is ‘episodic’, really, and can it be taken seriously as a valid criticism?

I dunno. I’m sure there are a multitude of different conclusions one could feasibly draw on such an issue. What makes the raising of it seem pertinent in this specific review is that I felt this three-hour version of Margaret might have worked very well as a mini-series of six half-hour episodes, or three hour-long ones. Lonergan could maybe even have expanded this material further and produced a longer-form series in the vein of Kieslowski’s Dekalog. This is the polar opposite of sentiments I expressed in my first review which advocated cutting the film down and accentuating its most ‘necessary’ elements, sentiments which came about through a largely fruitless search for the film’s meaning and general reason to exist.

These aren’t issues that I feel the film has anymore, if it ever even really did. In fact, I think that there are a wealth of potential core themes that a reviewer can identify and choose to focus on, should they be so inclined, and they’re all perfectly valid. For one, we have yet another portrait of New York- Lonergan’s camera gives us several lingering panoramas of the skyline which I didn’t remember being present in the first cut, set to the poetical strains of opera and classical music and reflecting the panoramic way in which our characters’ lives are being presented. Even without such inserts, this is not the rather anonymous setting we were presented with in Shame; instead, for me, it was far more similar to the prickly behemoth which came across in 25th Hour, one that keeps a daunting, incessant, watchful eye over Central Park, that seems to actively bear down on the people that are slaves to its machinations, emphasising their ostensibly paltry levels of direction and significance. Another point of comparison with 25th Hour, along with A Separation, is that the movie documents a short but momentous and extremely challenging period in our characters’ lives that will have huge emotional effects on them for years to come, yet will likely go barely noticed by their contemporaries, who are all living out their own personal unscripted dramas. One can imagine Lisa trying to talk through her experiences in one of the sessions resembling group therapy that occur at her school, while her classmates roll their eyes and resent the amount of attention and distinction she’s attempting to claim. Teenagers, being teenagers, are particularly unlikely to be moved by Lisa’s plight and will probably be more apt to think their own problems more pertinent.

It was issues such as this that this longer, more cohesive incarnation of Margaret served to clarify. At its heart, it’s a character piece, and like Blue is the Warmest Color- perhaps its closest contemporary on this list- it is also a film that centres around disappointments and let-downs. Lisa is disappointed that her quest for justice has been in vain. She’s been brought up in a world that’s told her that she can achieve anything if she puts her mind to it and is willing to put in the time and effort, especially if she’s got moral rectitude behind her, and she’s undergone a rude awakening. The horse-riding holiday she mentions several times and is clearly looking forward to doesn’t transpire, something which this extended cut points out far more clearly and which, when considering the circumstances of the accident, adds another acute layer of absurd cruelty to Monica’s death. Joan is disappointed that the great reviews she’s received for her acting haven’t brought the gratification she hoped they would, haven’t made her home life any more bearable, and haven’t elicited her daughter to take any interest in either this success or her new partner Ramon. The teenage Darren is disappointed that he can’t win Lisa over either, and that he has come up against a situation in which logic and debate skills mean nothing. Matthew Broderick’s teacher character is disappointed that his students aren’t engaging with his class the way he would like them to. Supplementary to these disappointments is the idea that your life can end at any time- one moment you’re crossing the street on the way to your next appointment, then suddenly you’re lying in the street bleeding to death with a leg missing, spending your final moments out of your mind and surrounded by random strangers. 

These characters are lonely. They can’t connect. They don’t see exactly what they’re doing wrong, but things just won’t fall into place. It’s not logical to be lonely in a city that’s teeming with so many people, so they push these feelings away and tell themselves they’re being silly. Lisa is asked several times why the bus accident has taken such centre stage in her life, and her answers are generally quite vague (though she alludes to feelings of personal responsibility at one point). It’s clear to this viewer that focusing on the event is filling a hole in Lisa’s life. She doesn’t appear to have many friends, especially close ones. It’s never mentioned what employment area she wants to go into- she probably doesn’t know. She’s living a life of emptiness and uncertainty, despite her feisty demeanour, and she hates it, and the bus accident has given her life temporary purpose. It’s also possible that she has somewhat felt her own death through the broken, incoherent visage of Monica Patterson, whose life she physically felt ebb away, whose blood she subsequently had to shower out of her hair. Lisa’s eventual death is unlikely to be as violent or as public as Monica’s, but it could quite easily be just as sudden, and even if it’s not, in the end, we all go the same way.

82. A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009) 

Earlier, I opined that maybe there was a movie hidden somewhere inside Inherent Vice that I would have really enjoyed, featuring a strain of absurdist deadpan humour that was hitting some genuinely very funny notes. Well, that hypothetical movie might have looked a lot like A Serious Man. It’s the kind of ‘kooky’ film I often feel a distinct aversion to, something which has characterised all my previous viewing experiences with the Coen Brothers bar Inside Llewyn Davis and the OK-not-bad noir essay The Man Who Wasn’t There. The fact that there had never been a Coen Brothers film before I began this project that I would say I wholly, definitively liked, and now there have been two in a row to have achieved this feat comfortably, seems remarkable in itself, and perhaps even more notable when A Serious Man is perhaps considered to be one of their more minor works.

It’s nowhere near as obtuse or digressive a film as Inherent Vice. In fact, its storyline is about as simple and straightforward as you can get, and though its latter stages start to engage with the imagery and aesthetics of surreal fever-dreams, these narrative choices don’t feel particularly out of place, and could be said to reflect the unravelling of our protagonist’s accepted norms and general life direction. Two concurrent episodes, both heavily portentous, end the film on a dissonant note, but I received this much more positively than when The Master did a similar thing, or Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or, for that matter, the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, which I will be dutifully but reluctantly watching again soon.

Is this hypocritical of me? No, I don’t think so. Unusual narrative choices are not the same as ones that are illogical or seem to exist just to baffle you. Another factor in my enjoyment of A Serious Man is that I liked Larry Gopnik, even as I found his wave of misfortune darkly funny. I liked Doc Sportello too, though, so such a thing can’t be used as any sort of failsafe barometer towards my overall appreciation of a movie. Still, it certainly doesn’t hurt, and Michael Stuhlbarg is terrific as the wide-eyed, mild-mannered everyman who just can’t catch a break. Also, if I can mention such a thing yet again, A Serious Man is 100 minutes long, a mere two-thirds of Inherent Vice’s luxurious runtime; The Master, meanwhile, clocks in at 137.

There are elements that might have bothered me in other films, and didn’t here. There are sub-plots that go nowhere and fizzle into nothing. There are shaggy-dog stories, there are mysteries that the movie establishes and never solves, and there is a neighbour character who is pretty superfluous, whose inclusion might only have been to inject a level of exoticism and fantasy into Larry’s pedestrian life, and to remind the viewer that beneath his submissive exterior, he has a sex drive that is just as active as the next man’s.

Any little question marks, though, that I might place over A Serious Man are trivial and trifling, and in any case feel like they might be a misunderstanding of its slippery, shapeshifting nature. It’s a film which is as gently and politely evasive as the numerous figures who provide useless counsel for Larry at intervals across the picture, who project a sage wisdom and helpfulness whilst actually providing neither. The final scenes remind us that this is not ultimately supposed to be a movie that you walk out of feeling refreshed and revitalised, despite the laughs that you may have had along the way; neither is it one that you were intended to take particularly lightly. Amongst other things, I guess this picture is a gesture of understanding toward life’s downtrodden whipping-boys, who may or may not be sleeping on their brother’s couch into their fifties, and gives them something of a voice. Inside Llewyn Davis covered similar ground, but less sweetly- Larry Gopnik is a nicer guy than Llewyn Davis, far less prone to outbursts of anger, and far more willing to compromise, often to the (undeserved) benefit of others.

17. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006) 

I wasn’t completely sure about Pan’s Labyrinth.

It concerns a young girl, Ofelia, living in a remote area of wartime Spain. She’s left to her own devices, and discovers a phantasmagorical underworld where she meets a small selection of otherworldly creatures, only one of which she talks to. To the extent that she knows there’s a war going on, she doesn’t seem to know the details and is essentially lost in her own world.

Just like actor Doug Jones, who plays both the relatively friendly Faun character and also the distinctly unfriendly Pale Man, I feel that this movie adopts different guises, and it works in every guise it inhabits. As an evocative period piece, it works. As a suspense piece, it works. As an examination of good and evil, it works. As an illustration of the pitfalls and wild uncertainty of childhood, it works. And ultimately (spoiler alert), as a tragedy, it works too.

The one thing Pan’s Labyrinth didn’t do was leave me with any particularly notable lasting impression. I don’t really wish to criticise a film which, from beginning to end, was absolutely fine, especially when these ‘guises’ that it simultaneously takes on should often, on paper, not work at all. The movie finds a way to make them work, and for that it should be commended. It was a risk to introduce fantasy elements into a film which also- albeit tangentially- depicts one of the most solemn and severe socio-historical events ever recorded (and still recent enough for living memory). Fittingly, this synthesis finds parallel in the movie’s melding of iridescent colour and profound shadow.

But I don’t really know what it all signifies or what the exact intent of this film ultimately was. As a piece of entertainment, I felt that it generally failed- perfectly acceptable as it all was, any enjoyment I experienced was mild at best. If I was supposed to find its closing scenes devastating, it also failed- I didn’t feel close enough to the plucky Ofelia for this to occur. She didn’t seem to have many overt traits, and those that were evident, such as curiosity, were underplayed; subsequently I thought it was a curiously blank performance from the young Ivana Banquero, though the language barrier may have had a hand in that. 

Why, then, did I earlier say that this tragic element of the film ‘works’? Well, because it does. It may not have left me inconsolable, but it is the right ending for this movie. It re-contextualises its fantasy and adventure elements and brings all of them crashing back to earth. This ending seems to represent the death of innocence, which I would guess extends to everyone, internationally, on whom the grim realities of National Socialism portentously dawned. But it also means that Ofelia will never lose her innocence, unless you count the few moments she has to similarly re-assess her entire view of the world, and see that it is far more cold and cruel than she thought it was; in this way, she also serves as a stand-in for all the other children who, for no reason, were never adults thanks to the deranged ideologies of vicious megalomaniacs.

Like The Secret in Their Eyes, this was a film that featured brutality designed to elicit horror without actually being a horror movie. It’s more restrained, more ambiguous, and also crosses far more genre lines than Campanella’s crime thriller. But the overall effect for me was very much the same. I thought it was OK without really having much of an opinion, and I was occasionally a little bored.

25. Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) 

Memento concerns a man with memory loss looking for his wife’s killer. It’s a thriller- albeit a talky one- and it’s a noir, and it’s a puzzle piece, with particular emphasis, for me, on that final description. The movie is metered out to us in segments of about ten minutes, and to replicate the levels of confusion our protagonist must feel, it starts at the end and works backwards, meaning that we as viewers are never in possession of everything we need to form a full picture.

I saw this film very soon after it came out, aged around 15, intrigued by its USP. I was then alienated by its icy distance and what I perceived as a lack of characterisation and noticeable filmic reference points. Earlier I opined that Carol felt more like an artefact than an actual, full-bloodied movie that had insight, substance and depth, and in that vein Memento felt something like a cryptic crossword or a jigsaw, not a film. Some viewers may have felt as if its final scenes were like the last pieces of a jigsaw falling into place, but I didn’t. It wasn’t seeming to function like a movie should, really- it didn’t have the compelling characters, or little bursts of comedy, or great plotline, or unmistakably good dialogue, that were delivered in one form or another in all the movies that I loved and were generally recognisable in my broader cinematic experiences. If these sorts of things are missing, what are you left with? Like material comprised of watching a technician build something, placing pieces together to form a whole, there may be plenty of skill involved, but it’s not going to make good cinema, and such passages in documentaries are heavily edited and sped-up.

I watched it again as part of a Media Studies course I was on in 2003, and felt the same. Now here I am, almost 20 years later, viewing it for a third time.

It’s a little better than I remember. I still feel like it functions more like a pocket-watch than it does a movie. A contemporary of Memento would probably be The Usual Suspects, a film that I used to absolutely love, and though that love has receded in the intervening years, I still respect it enormously. So I have to ask myself why I have such different reactions to these two films that are both rooted in noir and are both very deliberately playing mystifying games of concealment and evasion with the audience. Well, for one thing, where The Usual Suspects is concerned, you aren’t just watching a guy driving around, with relative aimlessness, and sitting in motel rooms tattooing himself (that’s a very reductive way to look at Memento, but it’s not wholly inaccurate either.) For another, John G., as a mythical offscreen boogeyman, has nowhere near the presence of the monumental Keyser Söze.

I guess it comes back to the short list of attributes I mentioned earlier- the compelling characters, strong plotline, and great dialogue that I don’t feel are in evidence here, but are observable in the darker, more devilish, more ominous Usual Suspects. Even though Guy Pearce is really good in the lead role, projecting a thoroughly convincing melange of childlike naivety and steely determination, this film just doesn’t do it for me. If I had been given more info, if I knew Leonard better, and if I cared about his plight, things might have been different.

If Memento has a principal achievement, it could well be that a movie with such a small budget and such a restricted number of locations looks so good, and is so sleek and slick and confident. But still, I see it as more of an efficient film than a particularly great one- clever, to be sure, ingenious even, but primarily efficient, and proficient.

49. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)

Well, that was abstract.

It really was. It was hands-down one of the most abstract movies I’ve ever seen.

If you look at the reviews for this film, some critics loved it- I mean, of course they did, its presence on this list is automatic indication of that. Nevertheless, another theme emerges, one in which the film has been actively and consciously conceived as an intrusive and uncomfortable sensory experience. Phrases describing it as ‘painful’ (Alex Casey, Flicks.co.nz), ‘anguish-inducing’ (Jonathan Romney, Film Comment), ‘intent on being as abrasive as possible’ (Ben Nicholson, CineVue), and ‘akin to forcing your brain to experience a violent re-birth’ (Scout Tafoya, rogerebert.com) are intermingled with the lavish praise.

‘It is there to jolt, to challenge, to disrupt’, writes Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian. And lo, the soundtrack drops in and out like a radio being haphazardly tuned from one station to another. ‘Scenes’, often only lasting a couple of seconds, begin and end, begin and end, stop-and-start, crashing into each other, crackling and popping, edited by an elephant. Multiple passages are shown where the actors’ heads- their actual heads, while they are actually talking- are out of frame. And all the dialogue- all of it- is outré philosophical investigation and metaphysical theory. At one point someone makes an onscreen visit to the toilet, accompanied by squelching and farty noises.

It's exactly the kind of thing people who hate art films would parody and laugh at. There were times when I wanted to eject the disc and throw it out of the window. Let some other mug try to make head or tail of it. The thought of someone picking it up off the street, taking it home, putting it on out of curiosity, and seeing a spellbinding masterpiece from one of the most towering and celebrated figures in world cinema seems desperately unlikely. Far more feasible is the image of them watching ten minutes or so and putting it politely in the dustbin, thinking it was a blooper reel of outtakes, mistakes and cutting-room scraps from a real movie.

There’s an argument that I simply don’t possess the requisite reference points to tackle a film that is as densely allusive as this one. I can appreciate that, up to a point. But who does, really? Its Wikipedia article lists 69 different literary and cinematic works that the film supposedly nods to, which works out at a rate of about one a minute, and I am loath to believe that there is a single critic out there who was able to recognise and satisfactorily process all of them. To this end, I don’t have the intellectual range for Finnegans Wake either, but I know whether I like it or not (I don’t).

If I was to compare the film to music, as I have done with some previous films, then first port of call, considering its aesthetic and ADHD vibe, would be Guided by Voices’ 1994 album Bee Thousand, which sounds like it was recorded in a garage with an everyday tape recorder because it was. Bee Thousand contains melodies, though, and a recognisable flow, untidy and tumultuous as it may be, attributes that I don’t feel are reflected in Goodbye to Language. Similarly, I don’t know exactly what the lyrics to ‘Smothered in Hugs’ or ‘Echos Myron’ are about, but I know enough to feel an emotional response to their effects. Rather, then, I could look at critics’ comments on how ‘free’ this film is- not least a quote from Jane Campion, who presided over its Jury Prize award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival- and instead compare the movie more aptly to free jazz, and the objectively horrible stylings of a John Zorn or a Peter Brötzmann. Or I could follow the ‘punk rock’ comparison made by Sean Burns (The ARTery) and posit that Goodbye to Language might be the filmic equivalent of The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks by Flux of Pink Indians. Look it up. Have a listen. Treat yourself.

Anyway, Tim Brayton of Antagony & Ecstasy opines that the movie ‘actively tries to find a new language for filmmakers to inhabit’, and if that’s the case, I strongly advocate the retainment of the old one. This, for me, was a scruffy, scratchy, nonsense little movie that I look forward to never watching again. Goodbye to language, indeed. Au revoir.

73. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Like The Dark Knight, Before Sunset is the middle film in a sequence of three, and just like the Batman trilogy, I had previously seen the first and second entries, but not the third. Unlike The Dark Knight, though, in this instance I chose to revisit the first movie, Before Sunrise, and then having watched part two again, subsequently also watched the final entry, Before Midnight, giving me something of a panoramic view, a full digestion of the sandwich in which Before Sunset theoretically forms the central filling.

It’s the shortest instalment of the three- only 77 minutes, about 20 minutes short of Before Sunrise and 30 minutes lighter than Before Midnight. And it is probably unique in my film-viewing experience in that it consists almost entirely of one long conversation. There’s a short intro scene and then, following that, the whole film is simply a single extended interchange between two people. Before Sunrise had a similar dynamic- featuring the same two people, by the way- but it was made up of several shorter conversations, with offscreen passages of time in between, rather than one long one; Certified Copy, a clear filmic cousin, shared this distinction, too.

Before Sunset is a good film- it’s thoughtful, it’s considered, and it was clearly made with expression and substance in mind, not commercial enterprise; hence, its levels of artistic merit are palpable throughout. Good acting, too. Nonetheless, I ultimately feel that it may be slightly less than the sum of these particular parts. Is that because its minimalistic stylings and slender length result in an undercooked effect? Possibly, though I’d take an ‘undercooked’ film that it as good as Before Sunset any day over the huge raft of films that make no effort at depth or truth and are wholly bereft of wit, warmth, culture and passion.

I remember finding Before Sunset a slight film when I watched it many years ago, and being disappointed that it wasn’t as satisfying as the brighter and easier Before Sunrise. In particular, I was surprised when it came to its understated end- for one thing, I hadn’t known the film was only 77 minutes and expected another half-hour, calling to mind Children of Men and my vocally-expressed reaction of ‘Are they seriously just going to end the film there?’ In my case, I had to be older to appreciate endings like this- not only have I ceased to be vexed by them, but I actively like them. Gone are the days when I need a film to end on a pronounced note, and when I felt that the filmmakers somewhat owed it to my time and patience to end their film ‘properly’ and ‘fairly’.

Not that there is anything improper or unfair about Before Sunset’s denouement. Not now, anyway. My feelings back then were that the film was building up to something that never came about, and I didn’t realise that the exploratory exchanges Jesse and Celine engage in as they walk through pastel Parisian backstreets and take a short ride on a boat weren’t ‘build-up’ at all. They weren’t leading toward anything. They weren’t serving any plot contrivances. They were the movie. That’s all folks. Take it or leave it. So long and good night.

So I watched Before Sunrise again, a film I’ve only seen once, over fifteen years ago, and I received it enthusiastically; yes, it’s a little contrived, what with its meet-cute and all, but it’s dated well, considering its mid-nineties Generation-X cultural base, and it was a pleasure to watch. That Before Sunset is something of a drier, more subdued movie makes logical sense when one considers that these characters have shifted reluctantly from their possibility-laden, energetic twenties to their reflective, mordant thirties, with regret, lost time and the merest hint of impending death clouding the waters of their respective psyches. They’re not miserable people, exactly, let alone depressed, but their constant self-assessments, if nothing else, suggest dissatisfaction. Not for the first time, I feel in a much better position to receive and absorb a film with these sorts of themes than I used to be. I know why I didn’t like it before- I was around 21, and I didn’t really want to hear about the dispirited topics that these thirty-somethings were discussing. I didn’t want to see iridescent romance replaced by practicality and pragmatism. I felt I had been led to expect something different from a noticeably ‘fresher’ and more vibrant first film.

The three movies are set in different European locales- Vienna for Before Sunrise, Paris for Before Sunset, and the southern Peloponnese for Before Midnight, providing scenery that is full-blown exotic to someone who is, as I am, from rainy northern England. Such window-dressing and two-hander structure is where comparisons to Certified Copy can most firmly be drawn and of the three, it is Before Sunset’s Paris that is the most visually redolent of Abbas Kiarostami’s Tuscan vision, though much of that, I feel, is in the way that Jesse are Celine are sometimes enclosed by the high walls of the tight-knit streets they move through, providing us with a closer visual parallel to Binoche and Shimell than its antecedent or successor.

The conversation in Before Sunset is presented as completely natural- no filters, no edits, just raw and uncut, as if you were there, though they’re undoubtedly speaking more candidly than they would be if they weren’t alone. Certified Copy’s bisected structure and character transformation ‘interferes’ with such an effect, and perhaps because of this, the Kiarostami film felt like a weightier piece as it explored the fissures that occur when you love someone but don’t like them anymore, whereas with Before Sunset, in and of itself, there is a question as to whether Jesse and Celine are actually in love, though it’s certainly implied. Can you really be in love with somebody that you’ve only met twice? Before Midnight goes on to provide further comment on such an issue without necessarily resolving it, deliberately taking a very complex stance on what may or may not constitute love, and the difficulties thereof.

I had a few difficulties of my own, chief among them Celine’s claim that she didn’t have sex with Jesse all those years ago- a claim she later recants with the comment that this is ‘just something that women do sometimes’. What, gaslighting and lying? Sorry, I don’t have the slightest patience with that sort of thing at all. I liked Celine in the first film, and as the trilogy drew on my feelings towards her became more mixed, whereas my opinion of Jesse generally stayed about the same. This isn’t a bad thing, per se- logic dictates that such things will sometimes result from films that place rich character nuance so highly in their list of aims. But it leaves a sour aftertaste, quite fitting for a movie which itself strikes a decidedly bittersweet note, like a cocktail with an unusual ingredient that you’re not sure should be there.

Still perfectly drinkable.

97. White Material (Claire Denis, 2009) 

In Claire Denis’s subdued, dust-blown think-piece White Material, Isabelle Huppert plays Maria, a French woman who runs a coffee plantation in Africa. Trouble is brewing- serious trouble. She receives numerous warnings and entreaties to leave, which get increasingly more disbelieving as the movie progresses.

But she won’t leave. She just won’t. She’s determined to bring in her latest crop, even after all her workers- all of them- leave at once, citing their own fears. With an air of no-nonsense pragmatism, she simply drives into town and recruits a fresh crew, though not without having a gun pointed at her on the way.

Why won’t she leave? Why doesn’t she just take her adult son, whose life is profoundly empty, and go back to France- or anywhere? This is the film’s central quandary, and it’s a powerful one. The facetious among us might suggest that if she did leave, then we wouldn’t really have a film, and they might also subsequently argue that Claire Denis is milking this simple plotline for all the tension it can possibly beget.

Indeed, there is a bloody-minded insistence to Denis’s direction that reflects the actions of her central character. She insists that we stare right into the faces of our characters with a plethora of extremely tight close-ups. She insists we see Maria as a woman of practicality and sense despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. She insists we admire the desolate beauty of the sun-scorched African landscape as much as we fear its danger. She insists that drones of itchy dissonance hang incessantly in the background. And she insists that we end the film with more questions than answers.

‘This is a beautiful, puzzling film’, said Roger Ebert in his 2010 review, expressing a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with. I have to ask myself why I received Memento’s puzzling nature in such a lukewarm fashion, yet was okay with the obfuscation in White Material’s dark, disquieting charms. Perhaps it’s such disquiet that provides distinction- the movie is predicated on miasmic layers of dread which unfold incrementally and give off the impression of movement, of progression, even though its movement is a torpid spiral downward. Memento, by contrast, didn’t really make me feel much of anything. The puzzling aspects of White Material come about through character nuance and unusual narrative direction, not structural contrivance.

Or perhaps it’s Isabelle Huppert’s incredible performance as Maria. I praised Guy Pearce in Memento, and he was good, but he played someone who was constantly re-assessing and constantly re-building himself- to a degree, he wasn’t really a full person, he didn’t really have a persona. When I watched Leonard, what I saw coming off the screen was not a man but more a representation of an idea, a concept.

By contrast, Maria does not seem to be re-assessing anything, or re-building any elements of her character in any way. She knows exactly who she is and has no qualms about it in the slightest. I guess you could say Maria represents an idea too, something like Hey, suppose a stoic woman was warned to get off her land under threat of death, and just decided to stay instead? How would that play out? You could probably propose such an embryonic précis for most movies, TV shows and novels. In any case, there’s something indefinable about Huppert’s performance, something a little otherworldly about Isabelle/Maria which somehow, conversely, is in evidence- even accentuated- when she is portrayed performing basic daily tasks, dropping into the pharmacy, making polite conversation with people, being firm when she needs to, gently admonishing her son with words of common sense and reasoned clarity. Is she a fish out of water in this terse African terrain? Yes, but she acts like she belongs there.

When I was watching There Will Be Blood, many years ago, there were stretches of the film when Daniel Day-Lewis, in a performance of superlative acclaim, didn’t really seem to be doing that much. It was a similar case with Isabelle Huppert in this movie, which featured a great many scenes where she wasn’t overtly ‘acting’ or obviously ‘performing’. There are other parallels with the Anderson opus, I feel, not least in the visual aesthetics of arid landscape and billows of dust. Like Daniel Plainview, Maria is driven- it’s practically her defining characteristic, and such drive seems to be making up for a decidedly sparse personal life (spoiler ahead). Maria ends the film, as did Plainview, committing an act of shocking and unexplained violence which features our anti-hero striking repeated blows, diminishing any impression of impulsivity. However, I liked Maria a lot more; she may be many things, but she’s not an ogre, as Plainview was, she has far more human qualities, and was subsequently much more interesting to watch. And, of course, let’s not forget that her movie runs for 106 minutes whereas There Will Be Boredom- sorry, Blood- runs 158.

As with many other movies on this list, White Material is also notable for what it doesn’t contain as much as for what it does. Maria never makes any great speech vowing that she will die on her land if necessary, that she will go down with this ship, come hell or high water, to rapturous applause- why would she? How many times have you seen anyone do that in your real life? Such trite cliché would make even less sense than usual in a film as tough, unforgiving and veristic as this.

Ultimately, I felt that this crisp, concise, merciless movie had the air of a masterpiece. Like Ida, which I described as a quiet masterpiece, White Material feels something like a calm, muted, minor masterpiece rather than any earth-shaking achievement guaranteed to blow your mind. In fact, it’s not even a movie I would readily recommend to many people; I can easily imagine mainstream audiences hating its slow pace and harsh timbre, its abstruse dynamics, its ostensibly pointless narrative arc. They might even find it, as I did Werckmeister Harmonies, akin to eating gravel, or perhaps more aptly, handfuls of dust. In the end, it’s all a question of taste, I suppose.

8. Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)

Film critic Nigel Andrews of the Financial Times has said that ‘to describe Yi Yi as a three-hour Taiwanese family drama is like calling Citizen Kane a film about a newspaper.’

I don’t agree. I can see the point he’s going for, but Yi Yi is a three-hour Taiwanese family drama. That’s what it is. Of course, one can argue that it is ‘so much more’ than that, as Andrews is clearly doing, but y’know, it’s still perfectly accurate to say that Yi Yi is a three-hour Taiwanese family drama, because it is. I would also posit that if that brief description doesn’t sound particularly appealing to you, then a viewing of the film is unlikely to challenge, let alone overhaul, your preconception.

If it does, it may well depend on how conversant you are with world cinema. I’m no connoisseur, to put it mildly, and maybe that’s why I’m having some trouble enjoying films from Korea, Thailand, Japan and in this case, Taiwan. Maybe, to some degree, my inexperience is in play and I am still yet to fall into the respective rhythms of the cinema produced by these nations.

That’s not to say that Yi Yi is anywhere near as abstract or as challenging as an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film. It isn’t at all. But just as I can see what Nigel Andrews was aiming for with his comment, I also felt like I could see what Edward Yang was aiming for in this movie- that is, the same kinds of effects that Terrence Malick was aiming for with The Tree of Life, albeit with a more subtle, understated approach. Yang wants to show us the profundity intrinsic to the fabric of our everyday lives; he wants to show us the human condition filtered through the prism of a ‘normal’ family, going about their business, doing ‘normal’ things and encountering universal problems. My issue? That sometimes this really does just come across as a family drama- not a bad one, but equally not one that necessarily shimmers with masterly precision and astonishing insight. Does it contain touching, poignant moments? Yes, absolutely. I thought these moments were fairly few and far between, but they are there, especially in the second half, and they do work, though perhaps marred by occasional flashes of what I perceived as histrionic overacting.

I felt there were traces of Margaret in this movie- our characters live in an apartment block, their vestibule but one small part of a monolithic building housing innumerable people whose lives all overlap in the corridors, itself a tiny cog in the machinations of a bustling, ostensibly unfeeling metropolis. Particularly, I was reminded of two comments I made in my more recent review of Margaret- ‘These people are lonely. They can’t connect’ and ‘[Lisa’s] living a life of emptiness and uncertainty’. Such themes are made fully explicit in Yi Yi, though fleeting and somewhat hidden amongst a plethora of surrounding material, some of which, as I’ve said, I found somewhat pedestrian. At one point, Min-Min, the wife of our most prominent character, NJ, erupts with frustration, vociferously exclaiming that her whole life is just a blank. Later, NJ remarks that he wakes up every day in a state of all-encompassing confusion, with no certainty of anything (‘This is the only thing that I am sure of,’ sings a 1967, 22-year-old Arthur Lee on Love’s mesmeric masterpiece You Set the Scene, ‘and that’s all that lives is gonna die’).

Because NJ is unfailingly quiet, polite, calm and thoughtful, almost to a fault, his confessional remark is odd. Perhaps this was a factor in my sense that these themes, explicitly stated as they were, did not ultimately contain much in the way of depth. Some would argue that this lightness of touch is creditable, and such an assessment would be perfectly fair. To this end, I don’t think that Nigel Andrews’ opinion is ‘wrong’, as such, even though I earlier used the phrase ‘I don’t agree’; I was able to use his comment as a springboard for further discussion, so it was inherently useful if nothing else. Neither do I think this picture ‘fails’. I didn’t think The Tree of Life was an unmitigated failure either- having reservations about a picture does not always mean that you do- and if I had to pick a favourite from the two, I probably preferred Yi Yi, though not, I should say, by much. Nevertheless, in both cases I felt a pronounced distance between the material’s apparent intent and its end results.

Elsewhere, there are unusual touches- long takes requiring some intricate choreography, an inclination to sometimes leave the action offscreen, engaging our auditory senses in place of our visual ones, and even more striking, a technique that sees many scenes presented to us through the reflections of windows. I’ve never seen that before in any other movie. But I don’t know. Overall I felt the film was something of a mixed bag which, for me, was unable to fully follow through on its stately ambition. Still, I guess you can’t really knock a film for trying too hard. We need films that try, that risk being overlong, that attempt to balance disparate elements and intertwining storylines like spinning plates. Yi Yi pulses with an artistic validity and a palpable search for truth which is reason enough to watch it; anything beyond that, I feel, is fully subjective. 

34. Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015)

Have you ever wanted to know what it was like to be inside a Nazi death camp? Like, really, properly inside its inner sanctum, surrounded by dead bodies, cleaning up the blood, inhabiting the perspective of someone whose remaining days are sharply running out and for whom this nightmare world is the last thing they will ever see? From an anthropological angle, such a thing is of course extremely valuable. How could it possibly feel to be in a situation like that, an absolute worst-case, surely-that’ll-never-happen scenario turned to excruciating reality?

Thankfully, most of us will never know, and I, for one, am unable to effectively put myself in the situation- it’s too far beyond my comprehension and my sphere of experience, though maybe there’s also a primal part of my psyche that actively refuses to engage with such agonising cognitive exertion. The closest I will probably ever get is watching Son of Saul, a movie that trenchantly aims to re-create the experience for you, that centres solely around this single concept and takes it to its logical but homogenous extreme, in the process asking a lot from the viewer in terms of attention and focus.

This is a movie which is, necessarily, much dirtier and grimier than the far more pristine and classy Pianist; it also feels significantly more apocalyptic. For all its heavy weight, there was light at the end of Polanski’s tunnel. We knew Szpilman was going to survive the war, his existence as a real historical person notwithstanding; it would have made no narrative sense if he hadn’t. There are no such assurances here. There is, though, a sense of grace in Son of Saul amongst the grime and filth. For one thing, it’s an extraordinary technical accomplishment, the execution exemplary. For another, the camera’s resolutely smooth movement and languid speed imply dignity, composure and poise even as it portrays scenes of unimaginable horror.

There also seems to be a certain sense of detachment in the camerawork, and also the way the movie is presented in general. It rarely closes in on anyone’s face, for example, to make sure it drives home a dramatic point. There are no musical cues to spell out that one moment is especially intense, or another particularly poignant. The horrors are usually glimpsed fleetingly- the camera does not seem to distinguish any act as more significant than another and simply records what it in front of it, though always keeping close to Saul. Subsequently, the movie is not overly explicit. It doesn’t have to be. It makes its points plainly and with a matter-of-fact air that feels almost callous. It’s also fairly concise, calling to mind the similarly slim, decidedly bruised visions of Timbuktu and Ida. Whether I would actually recommend it or not is another matter- I mean, if such a thing needs saying, this is not the film for a Friday night in front of the box with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, whereas I believe The Pianist could theoretically serve that purpose, if one was so inclined, as might other ‘serious’ films such as City of God, Children of Men, The Lives of Others, Spotlight, Pan’s Labyrinth or Requiem for a Dream; personally, I found Ida to be a relaxing viewing experience. My supposition regarding appropriate viewing context for the movie, then, is not just a question of subject matter- you have to be looking at the screen attentively at all times to properly appreciate the effect of Son of Saul, and even then you are apt to find yourself confused and disoriented. Primarily, its function is as a piece of art, and considered solely on this basis, it is very successful. No surprise that László Nemes has worked directly with Béla Tarr- some of his long shots are nothing short of incredible. But you may end the film, as I did, feeling a sad, subdued dejection towards its dissociative tone and inscrutable protagonist rather than any searing, deeply impactive disbelief at man’s mind-boggling inhumanity to man. You may have witnessed a small sliver of hell, and it may well have made you shudder, but you walk away from it, glad it’s over, and go back to whatever else you were doing, leaving the largely silent and unfathomable Saul behind.

86. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) 

Of course, I do my best not to pre-judge films before I’ve even started them, but I had a certain expectation about Far From Heaven before I put it on. It was another Todd Haynes film set in the 1950s. It was going to cover the same thematic ground as Carol. It was going to be a stylistic exercise with a certain tone that bordered on self-satisfaction and frustratingly little going on beneath the surface. It was going to leave me without much to say.

I was wrong. I really liked this movie. I felt able to engage with it much more closely than I had with Carol- or, for that matter, its spiritual sibling Brooklyn. This is not to say, necessarily, that Todd Haynes is a better screenwriter than Phyllis Nagy (though based solely on the limited evidence of these two films, I would opine that he is), but rather that he may be at his most effective when he is adapting his own work. Perhaps he even took pains to make his contribution to Carol somewhat unintrusive, letting the material of Highsmith and Nagy ‘breathe’ as much as possible with relatively minimal directorial input, and if so, that may be a factor in why I found the resulting film a little empty and lacking certain ingredients that may have made it feel like a more substantial piece.

Are those ingredients the ones that are presented right here in Far From Heaven- racial tensions, the collapsing of an idyllic, exemplary nuclear family, and the dramatic frissons that occur when one’s homosexuality is a painful internal struggle rather than the relatively matter-of-fact, blithe way that Carol’s central couple felt towards their impulses? Well, not specifically- of course not- but they certainly serve as examples of elements that might have made my experience of Carol altogether more affecting. It is, thus, very easy for me to call Far From Heaven a more satisfying film, with more to grab onto. While its vision of the 1950s and the attitudes thereof do, somewhat unavoidably, call to mind Haynes’s 2015 period piece, it has a different sort of beating heart, one that aches with melancholy, longing and lost opportunity, and subsequently does not feel as buttoned-up or restrained. This possibly sounds as if I resent the happy ending that occurred in Carol, and I don’t- not at all. But the characters played by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in that film knew who they were, and though they were irritated at being forced to live in a clandestine manner and conduct their relationship under a veil of artifice, such circumstances did not appear to result in any significant introspection or existential tumult, hence I felt there was a certain amount of dramatic tension that was notable by its absence.

By contrast, Julianne Moore plays a woman who, despite being fortysomething, still seems to be searching for her identity. She has a very pronounced social persona, and plays the role gamely, but something itches at her- as events develop, we can deduce that she’s probably wondering if she married the right person. Her husband, Dennis Quaid, has similarly forced himself into a life that doesn’t fit him. We can imagine that, as a younger man, he didn’t feel he had much choice but to go along with the prevailing social code of the day- to marry respectably, to take a position as the head of a family unit- and he convinced himself back then that things would somehow all turn out okay in the end. The terrific Dennis Haysbert plays Raymond, a man who could quite feasibly be a version of his President Palmer from the TV show 24 if he had been born forty years earlier, under massively different circumstances- temperate, kind, thoughtful, empirically dignified, assertive when necessary. A good father who is aggrieved by the racial subjugation he receives, but also calmly tries to get on with his life without letting it interfere too much.

In line with Raymond’s peaceful attitude, I felt that this was in itself a calm film, even when it depicted arguments, and even when it explored systemic injustice and malicious tittle-tattle. It was a film which rather simply asked a few gentle and probing questions without feeling the need to get too heavy-handed or lay anything on too thick, despite flirting with the machinations of a melodrama. In some ways, this was merely a portrait of three people who were born too early- if these events had occurred 30 years later, then these three could feasibly have had the lives that they wanted and it would have been far less trouble. Of course, racism hadn’t been ‘solved’ by the 1980s, and neither had homophobia, but hopefully the crux of my point stands nonetheless. In addition, the movie also felt more ‘colourful’ than Carol or Brooklyn, as Haynes employed a sharp palette of rich iridescence, especially regarding red, which made the period feel vital and alive even as its deep social flaws were laid out- one felt a lamenting touch of regret emanating from Far From Heaven, intermingling with its thornier themes, that those days are forever over and that we don’t live with those kinds of aesthetics anymore.

A bittersweet, touching triumph.

67. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) 

Earlier, in my review of Zero Dark Thirty, I included it in a small list of films- The Social Network, Spotlight and Zodiac being the others- that I identified as portraying real-life events with an air of ‘journalistic professionalism’, though such professionalism does not necessarily preclude a certain amount of stylistic flourish, especially where David Fincher is involved. I went on to proffer that Zodiac was perhaps the most masculine film from this group, and as a consequence, the one most unlikely to have been directed by a woman.

As I absorbed The Hurt Locker’s first half, I was reminded of this observation and moved to recontextualise it as I was presented with a movie that was extremely, overtly masculine- much more masculine than Zodiac. This must be, in fact, the most masculine female-directed film I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t really feel that there was any trace of a woman’s hand on this movie at all. Neither did I feel that this posed any sort of problem. If I am again to pick up on the comments of Bret Easton Ellis, then I think what he was getting at is that there’s no reason for a film such as The Hurt Locker to receive the kind of praise it has, let alone win the Best Picture Oscar, when it is virtually indistinguishable from a great swathe of male-directed war films- Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001), Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001), We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002), Windtalkers (John Woo, 2002), Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005) and Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010)- to name a few, which were moderate successes in their time but have now all but disappeared from the public consciousness; none of them, for instance, had any serious hope of appearing on this Top 100 list. It’s a valid point, whether one agrees with it or not, and forces a reviewer who likes this film to consider what exactly separates it from the war-movie melange of (relatively) recent years.

Because one thing’s for sure- I thought The Hurt Locker was extremely effective and I enjoyed it a lot, more so than Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a complex, layered film, in the guise of an exciting war drama, or maybe it’s the other way around; such semantics and ‘labels’ can hardly be said to matter much since both states can comfortably co-exist, a point that The Hurt Locker makes abundantly clear. Its portrayal of machismo I found particularly beguiling- it presents it in a fashion that feels almost neutral, without celebrating it or necessarily denigrating it, though there is some overt criticism of gung-ho behaviour, and the consequences thereof, towards the film’s end.

Famous faces appear in tiny roles, namely Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes and David Morse. Their appearances are ingratiated smoothly with the fabric of the film, which could otherwise be characterised as a series of episodes that these soldiers move through in a short period of their lives- a cross-section, a ‘sampling’, of the sorts of things that they readily experience.

There’s a question as to whether these characters are heroes. Yes, they do things that could be considered heroic, but they’re not necessarily always doing them for the ‘right’ reasons, at least where pure altruism is concerned. Neither are they bad people, as such; there is no real rage, jealousy or malice in this movie, at least not from this American side that we are exclusively privy to, and when two of the soldiers are pragmatically discussing whether to kill their senior officer, it is through feelings of self-preservation and fear, not villainy. If any of the characters resemble an archetype, it’s this officer himself, William James (Jeremy Renner), who- at least to some extent- embodies the reckless abandon and cavalier ‘bravery’ that we have seen in many other films, and that is usually presented, with pointed superficiality, as a stirring, admirable characteristic. The Hurt Locker presents his behaviour as exciting too- it has no qualms about the viewer enjoying the danger that he courts. Neither does it instruct you to dislike him- you can like him if you want, I think, and this does not mean you have misunderstood the film. But it does ask you to consider the consequences of his attitude and remind you that the other officers in his unit are not, so to speak, ‘living in a movie’- they’re not Stallone, they’re not Van Damme, they’re not really there to have adventures or to put a boot in Iraq’s ass, they’re there to do a job as professionally as possible and get home in one piece, irrespective of whether they have a family waiting for them, and James, who boasts a prodigious technical talent along with his derring-do and backbone, nonetheless represents a very real threat to these precepts.

That Bigelow, Renner and screenwriter Mark Boal can introduce considerable depth to this archetypal behaviour is to their significant credit. We don’t really know what James’s motives are- simple heroism doesn’t seem to be the answer, and neither does ambition or reward. I remarked earlier when covering Shame that people- and it would often seem especially men- can turn to all sorts of different stimulus to plug the emptiness in their lives, and disarming bombs seems to be James’s addiction of choice, thanks to a combination of peril and the sense of achievement it brings him, the simple pleasure that comes with being really good at something. He doesn’t want to put his unit in danger, and if there are arbitrary ways he can avoid it, then I guess he will, but he doesn’t have the greatest concern for their safety either. This could be a key takeaway from The Hurt Locker- that sometimes attitudes that have the capacity to bring about great personal destruction for others can co-exist with competency, wrapped in packages that seem relatively sane, astute, logical and even outright charming.

15. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007) 

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days concerns two young women, Otilia and Gabita, student roommates in the late stages of Ceauşescu’s Romania, over the course of a single day. It’s going to be a terrible day for both of them, though that’s not evident from the start, as Mungiu meters out information sparingly, later leading to some resounding revelatory moments of very effective drama. The camera is more interested in Otilia than Gabita, and we can surmise that her day is ultimately worse. It’s certainly more busy- Gabita, for some reason, seems to do very little, especially in contrast with her friend, though some of this, through circumstance, is relatively understandable.

Such inferences are observable from an early stage as Otelia spends a sizable portion of her morning going from dorm to dorm trying to locate a particular brand of cigarette for her roommate, while Gabita, who as I’ve said spends much more of her time off-camera, presumably just relaxes in their room. At this stage, it’s not really indicative of anything overly untoward, as for all we know they take such a thing in turns, and maybe even Gabita has been performing this chore, or others, far more than Otelia lately; nevertheless, it sets a tone, and as the movie progresses this sort of supposition becomes increasingly unlikely.

Roger Ebert is extremely hard on Gabita, calling her ‘possibly the most clueless young woman ever to have the lead in a movie about her own pregnancy’, before going on to opine that ‘the notion of taking responsibility for her own actions is completely unfamiliar. We wonder how she has survived to her current 20-ish age,’ expressing views that I do not necessarily share myself. Gabita may have many traits- laziness is highly implied to be one of them, though I wouldn’t wish to level a definitive accusation based on the evidence of a single day- while tendencies toward manipulation and advantage-taking are also perfectly feasible. She didn’t strike me, however, as stupid, and I don’t think Mungiu, or the actress portraying her, Laura Vasiliu, intended her to.

Roger goes on to exhort that ‘if I were Otilia, I would never see Gabita again’. My reaction to her wasn’t quite that strong, but it was certainly odd the extent to which Otilia ran around after her, correcting her mistakes and clearing up her messes. It suggests that maybe Gabita has got some leverage on Otilia, some damning information, or possibly that she has done something comparable for her in the past and is owed a massive favour. It’s even possible that the two of them might be having a clandestine lesbian relationship, with Otelia finding herself in the role of a frustrated, put-upon lover- while not hinted at in any way during the movie’s runtime, such a circumstance would certainly explain a lot about Otilia’s actions, not least her decision to return to the hotel, not the dorm, at the end of this most testing of days, though one can also speculate that under these circumstances she would take any company over the prospect of solitude.

I hadn’t seen the movie before this project, but I was aware that it had a reputation for being harrowing, and it is. It’s a caustic, acidic film that left a sour lingering aftertaste and made me feel out-of-sorts and grubby. It is also unquestionably a work of substantial artistic merit and significant achievement, both from a narrative, scriptwriting standpoint and a performance-based one (spoilers ahead). Somewhat perversely, I found the most excruciating section to be one where Otelia merely sits at a table with her boyfriend’s family; only we and her know what has just happened before she arrived, and in a single, unerring shot that lasts several minutes, the scene pulses with nauseating incongruity and grating juxtaposition.

Again, as with Son of Saul, I would not recommend this film for some breezy weekend viewing or date night. It’s a quieter, calmer movie than the holocaust drama, but it unsettled me more, not least when Otelia appeared to break the fourth wall and stare at us in the film’s final seconds. To reiterate, she shares the horrors she’s endured only with us- even if, for example, she tried to describe the horrible family dinner to Gabita, and Gabita uncharacteristically took genuine interest, it would probably not sound all that bad in a recounted oral context. Even if she tried to put across how horrifying she found the experience of roaming the pitch-dark streets carrying a dead foetus before tossing it into a garbage chute, Gabita would probably be apt to think Well, at least you’re not the one who actually had the abortion, so you got off easy. People, and by extension life, can be like that, unfortunately.

28. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)

I wasn’t sure about the Spanish drama Talk to Her at first. Its opening half-hour gives us little snippets of stories, none of them particularly compelling, and presents them in a disjointed fashion that I found dull. However, it was around this half-hour point that I felt the movie started to come together, become more coherent and engage me more with its machinations.

There are no overt spoilers in this review, but for anyone who is planning to watch the film in the near future, I would recommend doing so first before reading it. This is because the film, while not exactly containing twists, concerns itself with certain underplayed surprises and a degree of concealment. Most pertinently, Benigno Martin, played by Javier Cámara with boyish, puppy-dog naivety, is a delusional, dangerous lunatic whose rightful place is prison. However, he is also sweet, kind, polite, personable, calm, humble, dedicated and hard-working.

He has a strong one-sided love for a young woman, Alicia (Leonor Watling), who by pure coincidence happens to be a ravishing beauty. As someone who, in my teens and early twenties, was guilty of developing quasi-obsessional raptures over girls I didn’t really know all that well, I had long trained myself out of this proclivity, in the name of self-preservation as much as anything else, by the time I was Benigno’s age, which I think is supposed to be about 30. Subsequently I felt that he should have been able to do the same, the circumstantial differences in our respective lives notwithstanding (Benigno has spent a substantial amount of time in relative solitude caring for his elderly mother).

How, exactly, are you supposed to feel about Benigno? My vacillating levels of sympathy for him over the course of the picture were, I believe, fully intended by Almodóvar as, with a relatively gentle but firm hand, he attempts to play the viewer like a fiddle. The duality of my own opinion does not seem to be an ill-judged or inappropriate response to the movie’s dynamics, and calls to mind a passage in Bret Easton Ellis’s White where he discusses his own self-contradictory sentiments regarding David Foster Wallace, stating specifically that ‘an increasing problem in our society is people’s inability to bear two opposing thoughts in mind at the same time’. Adding further complexity to such considerations is the character of Marco (Dario Grandinetti), whose unerringly sane, serious, controlled disposition co-exists somehow with a deep understanding and an unwavering loyalty toward Benigno. He is aware of how transgressive Benigno is- he must be- but chooses to look past it and focus on his better qualities. It is impossible to know whether Almodóvar is using the respectable Marco as an artistic device to draw out the audience’s sympathy for Benigno in the name of dramatic complexity, or if he himself feels that sympathy and Marco is somewhat ‘standing-in’ for him. Such considerations are in line with the ‘gesture of understanding toward life’s downtrodden whipping-boys’ I identified as a possible subtext of A Serious Man, and finds yet closer parallel with Todd Solondz’s Happiness, a film that was outright insistent on demonstrating the human characteristics of aberrant, repellent people.

Talk to Her has far more emphasis on poetic, sensual and beautiful elements than Happiness did (most films do), and some of these stylistic qualities called to mind The Great Beauty, though it had a rather different look and feel to the freewheeling Sorrentino piece. Overall, it was a provocative, textured and ultimately rather sad film, which even hinted at an intriguing continuing story beyond its credits. All good.

74. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012) 

I wasn’t looking forward to doing Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. Why not? Well, I’ve seen it before, and hadn’t known how to take it. Back then, I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t particularly like it either, my feelings falling somewhere in that vast grey expanse of space in between, and in advance of a second viewing, I thought God, I don’t know how I’m gonna put a review together for that film. It’s not bad, but it’s so…empty. I'm not gonna have anything to say about it. Like the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, it’s a paean to ‘cool’, disaffected, self-referential nihilism, and it doesn’t suit my aesthetic.

Well, I watched it again, for the first time in about a decade, and I saw something quite different- a serious film with a seriously solid artistic core. Whether you actually like it or not becomes more and more irrelevant as the movie goes on, because it is so clearly a cohesive statement which is consistent within its own internal, systemic logic. Inside the parameters of this logic (such as it is), every shot, every line of dialogue, is in full service to the final product.

Does that make it a masterpiece? To an extent, yes, from an auteur standpoint if nothing else. I may not have liked it as much as films such as Tabu, The White Ribbon or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, or thought it was necessarily on their level, but masterpieces come in all shapes and sizes, and some are more minor than others; one also gets the sense that it is not really supposed to be ‘liked’ (not in the usual, traditional sense, anyway). Though it cannot really be compared to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in any meaningful way, I am nonetheless reminded that the Mungiu film left me feeling somewhat ‘grubby’, an after-effect that occurred here, too.

Like A History of Violence, Spring Breakers appears to be an act of deconstruction. Cronenberg does actually have a history of violence, though, time after time across his storied filmography, so it could be said that he was deconstructing himself as much as anything else. What type of picture, exactly, is Spring Breakers deconstructing? Films with hot girls in them? ‘Trashy’ films centred around sex, violence and crime? (Korine did, after all, make a movie called Trash Humpers, which fully lives up to the promises of its title). Or perhaps the very concept of ‘spring break’ in the first place, and the willingness of young people to behave hedonistically?

On his podcast with Marilyn Manson as guest, Bret Easton Ellis discusses the film. He comments at some length, so I can’t quote his thoughts in their entirety, and there’s a reasonable amount of nuance; the unedited extract is not as negative or critical as the ensuing quotations, in isolation, would suggest. Nevertheless, he opines that it would have ‘benefited from a fleshed-out, narratively coherent script’ while describing an ‘anticipatory state’ he was in during the movie’s early stages which resulted in him being ‘fairly disappointed’. Most notably, he exhorts that the picture ‘didn’t go far enough’.

What intrigues me particularly about Ellis’s comments, and frustrates me a little, is that Spring Breakers is exactly the kind of film that I would expect him to like. It is shot through with post-modernism. It so pointedly nudges up to the mainstream, prodding at its fabric, while remaining at all times an autonomous, individualistic artistic statement. It’s so heavily based around surfaces, around look and feel, and like his own American Psycho, as well as American Beauty and Blue Velvet, it engages with the filth that often lies beneath carefully constructed, aesthetically pleasing façades.

He’s also expressing sentiments that are fairly congruous with my own underwhelmed, nonplussed reaction to the first time I saw the film. I now find myself convinced that Spring Breakers does, in fact, have a ‘narratively coherent script’ along with a very valid tonal and thematic vision. One assumes that because of filmmaker Harmony Korine’s enfant terrible reputation, along with some marketing the movie received that may have been somewhat misleading (my DVD cover makes no attempt to impart that this is an art film- quite the opposite), Ellis expected, and apparently wanted, a piece that was rather more lurid. It is a lurid film, but luridly loud and garish rather than luridly sexual or violent. That’s not to say it doesn’t contain sex and violence- it does, but the sex is confined to some breast nudity, almost all from background extras, and a relatively tasteful ‘threesome’ scene in a pool which is notable for its brevity. As for the violence, well, the movie ends with a shootout, but this is the only ‘sad’ shootout I’ve ever seen in any movie; it’s very pointedly not Peckinpah. Here the deconstructionist element of the film is possibly at its most pertinent, as it offers a completely different, ostensibly plaintive take on the slow-motion love-letters to violence touted by the likes of Tarantino, Troy Duffy, Nicolas Winding Refn or the Wachowskis.  

Whatever messages this film may have are juxtaposed directly with its frivolity and superficiality, but one possible takeaway is that some people are simply drawn to danger and lawlessness, that they get turned on by engaging in such activities, and there isn’t really very much the ‘rest of us’ can realistically do about it. Alien, Brit and Candy are not the most evil characters you will ever see in cinema- far from it- but one gets the sense that if innocent people get hurt as they pursue their particular version of the American Dream, then they’ll kinda just shrug it off and carry on, at least in the short term. All just part of the game, man.

These areas are where I believe the movie’s most resounding and significant themes can be drawn out. As Brit and Candy commit armed robberies soundtracked by Alien singing a dead-serious, profoundly emotional rendition of a Britney Spears song, there must be irony in this picture- there must be- but it’s irony that lies solely in the eye of the beholder. It’s not signalled to you in any way. You surmise it yourself, and then you figure out what worth, if any, it has to you.

Such slippery dynamics most likely have a hand in the film’s divisive status- it has 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, lower than any other movie on this list except The New World, and the audience score is an alarming 38%. I myself, when first engaging with the Top 100, was surprised to see its inclusion. One supposes that, like Bret Easton Ellis, viewers sat down wanting one thing, and instead received another, especially fans of Selena Gomez, whose stardom was probably at its height around the time of its release. Her character decides to go home halfway through the picture, a narrative choice critiqued by Marilyn Manson, but I think that her actions signify that some of us- most of us- are not cut out for this kind of lifestyle, and there’s nothing wrong with recognising that, doing the sensible thing and leaving, even if it’s to go back to your miserable little town where ‘the grass isn’t even green, it’s just brown’ and ‘everything is the same and everyone’s just sad’. That Korine chooses to use his most recognisable and bankable star to make such a point is, again, an extremely solid artistic choice.

Spring Breakers is one of only 12 films on this Top 100 list that are rated 18 by the British Board of Film Classification, a distinction largely irrelevant to American cinemagoers as almost all of our 15 and 18-certificate films fall under the single R rating in their system. But why, exactly, is it rated 18, when I’ve seen stronger 15s (Joker, for example, is more violent, as is No Country for Old Men)? Was the sight of James Franco fellating a gun really enough for the BBFC to clutch breathlessly at their pearls? I can only imagine that the certificate is due to certain tonal and thematic aspects rather than its onscreen content, which as I’ve said is largely marked by restraint, unless you’re particularly offended by breasts. Though the criminal lives of these characters are clearly vacuous, and entail serious risk which, ultimately, is not downplayed, it’s possible that a viewer, especially one who was young, could see the film and glean a message that committing crime is cool and sexy, especially when you do it in a bikini, under gorgeous sunsets, whilst saying things like ‘just pretend it’s a video game’; risk itself is cool and sexy too, and these hot, dirty, take-no-shit bad-bitches are really living the life. Such notions bring to mind American Psycho- the book, not the film- which I first picked up around twenty years ago and have been experiencing something of a struggle with ever since (incidentally, I believe I was too young, at 16, to be reading such material, and I see no problem with the decision of Queensland, Australia to restrict its sale to over-18s). My principal qualm with the book is how insanely graphic it is- I guess it always will be- but supplementary to that is my belief that, from a certain angle, it proposes that murder can be really fun if you go about it the right way- if you go all in, completely cast off inhibition, get really wild with your methods and indulge yourself, if your victims are hot and blonde and naked with big tits, and they have wet, torrid lesbian sex with each other as a nice precursor to you getting your nail-gun and your jumper-cables and your drill out, then you can have an absolute blast; you might even be able to achieve that hypothetical higher level of pleasure that I alluded to when reviewing Shame. I'm not saying that such a thing was what Bret Easton Ellis intended, nor am I saying that you should read the novel like that, I’m just saying that, in my view, you can.

I respected Spring Breakers a lot. I probably respected it more than I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it well enough, especially as I chose to watch it refracted through an art-film prism. Like Talk to Her, there are peals of poetry and beauty in Spring Breakers, and one of my abiding emotions was sadness. It depicts loss of innocence. It depicts the inevitability of wonderful memories to either transition into something else and lose their purity, or merely disappear into your rear-view mirror forever. ‘Feels as if the world is perfect,’ sighs Selena Gomez’s Faith on the phone home to her grandmother. ‘Like it’s never gonna end.’ We’ve all been there.

60. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006) 

Nothing happens in Syndromes and a Century. It’s made up of a series of conversations centred around a hospital. Some of these conversations are between doctors and patients. Weerasethakul throws in some notable filmic features- a technically excellent tracking shot here, a long, languid, unbroken take there, but nothing happens.

I had to ask myself whether this was preferable to the dynamics of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, where things do happen, but they involve human monkeys and sex fish and are thoroughly bizarre. I concluded that it was. Syndromes and a Century is a calm, hushed film redolent of the meditative quality you might get from watching clouds slowly move past, or glaciers. It’s very quiet, and despite the problems that it had with the Thai censors, it’s very inoffensive.

As usual, I don’t really know what any of it means, and suffice to say, I’m still having some trouble grasping the nature of Weerasethakul’s vision. But the passage of time seems to be a major theme. Sometimes you can physically feel the passage of time when you are watching it, as Weerasethakul offers us some extremely torpid views of scenery, statues, trees, and exterior views of the hospital. Some of this insistence on deathly pacing even called to mind the extremities of The Assassin, whilst fully removed from the austere dread that comes with Béla Tarr’s merciless visions of desolation.  

If I was going to speculate, I’d proffer that this film is supposed to strike notes that are somewhere in the range of The Tree of Life and Yi Yi: A One and a Two. It’s far more understated than either of those films- it contains nothing in the way of bombast, not even a little- but I think it wants to show us how the meaning of our existence is locked within the seams of our daily lives, just as precious metals are locked within the seams of rocks. I didn’t find it particularly profound, but I did find it touching in a delicate, wispy, threadbare sort of way, like something semi-meaningful someone once said to you that you only half-heard, or a minimalist piece of music heavy on ambience and repetition- ‘Wealth’ by Talk Talk, for example, or ‘Rutti’ by Slowdive.

For the third time now with this director, my abiding impression is that there’s something I’m missing, and that I don’t really ‘get it’. The ride, however, was smoother this time than with the previous two, and I’m left feeling as if I’ve woken up from a befuddling but not altogether unpleasant dream, one which made me feel like I was somewhere else, and maybe even someone else, for a little while.

98. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002) 

Having just referred to Syndromes and a Century as a series of conversations, I now encounter a film which takes such a description to, surely, its most concentrated, minimalist level, as if to say ‘You thought that was conversation-based? Ha! Try this.’

It’s ten conversations, hence the title (the last one is like a tiny ‘reprise’, less than a minute long, so it’s nine, really), and all of them are in a car. That’s the entire film. One camera angle records the driver, one angle records the passenger, and in some exchanges, only one participant is onscreen throughout.

I wasn’t feeling this one at all. I mean, ‘static’ isn’t really the word. The picture quality is not good; shot on digital video, it looks exactly like a home movie. From what I can see, however, there was no real incentive to employ any fine cinematography; after all, do we need it when the film has no aesthetic element to it at all?

I have to ask myself if I could have enjoyed a film like this if I had been interested in the conversations, and the answer, I suppose, theoretically, is yes. I mean, I love 12 Angry Men, but I’m not sure such a comparative reference is apt- the Lumet masterwork may be set in one room, but that’s simply not as restrictive as a car, especially when you’re dealing with a much larger cast of characters, and they have something specific and pressing to talk about.

This is, then, a ‘slice-of-life’ movie, ultra-realistic, and within that framework, I guess it does contain a certain amount of modest tension. Again, there is a question of minutiae here, just as there was with Syndromes and a Century, and just as there was, to a lesser extent, with the decidedly more sweeping Yi Yi. When we are presented with scenes of humdrum, everyday routine, and there is no obvious way to ascertain their significance, are we supposed to ascribe our own? Are we meant to ‘step outside’ our usual expectations of cinema and reassess its general purpose?

One gets a small insight into Iranian life, especially where its women are concerned (though if that’s what you’re looking for, I would suggest that A Separation is by far the more valuable piece). Aside from that, what have I learned about the streets of downtown Tehran? Almost nothing. What have I learned about bratty, obnoxious children? That I don’t like seeing their thoughts expressed in uninterrupted single-shot takes that last close to twenty minutes.

What have I learned about cinema? That I prefer other types.

39. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005) 

Like a handful of other films on this Top 100 list, The New World has been released in different versions of varying length. The longest, a 172-minute version, is the one that I purchased, so unlike other films which are reviewed twice, I am, in this case, simply going to cover The New World’s extended cut, and leave it at that.

Just as when I began Far From Heaven, there was a certain amount of pre-judgement in play based on the director’s previous Top 100 movie. In this case, I had particularly disliked The Tree of Life’s breathy little voiceovers that sounded like cut-up and re-assembled love letters or poems. Such an approach was not immediately apparent in The New World, and I felt that it started quite brightly. Set in the early 1600s and concerning the settling of English explorers in coastal Virginia, the visuals are breathtaking, like being in a William Hodges painting, as is the commitment to realism that dictates the native tribes speak the historic Algonquin language.

It was all ticking along quite nicely. The fledgling romance that develops between Colin Farrell’s John Smith and Q’orianka Kilcher’s Pocahontas, traversing a language barrier, was touching and sweet, as was the mutual respect between the two tribes, intermingling with the understandable guardedness and circumspection.

Obviously, that can’t last, especially when the natives start to realise that the newcomers, who they thought were only temporary, aren’t going anywhere. This culminates in a very well-shot battle scene that feels climactic but does in fact occur when there is around an hour and forty minutes left of the movie to go. From here, The New World starts to move through a series of episodes- Smith becomes the head of his unit, turning out to be a poor and unconvincing leader, while his estrangement from Pocahontas causes their relationship to become fractured.

It is also around this point that the whispery, fragmented voiceovers made a re-appearance. I wouldn’t have minded if their use was sparing, or if the utterances meant anything to me. Unfortunately, neither of these things transpired and I felt that the film descended into a whirlpool of crushing tedium and questionable coherence. In particular, the actual dialogue, that the characters actually use to speak to each other, was interfered with, sometimes because Malick inexplicably chooses to overlay a voiceover on top of speech, but most of the time simply because the editing prevents the exchanges from having beginnings, middles and ends. Often someone will say something and the other person won’t even answer, but instead sort of look off into the middle distance- then we cut away, to yet another brief and infuriating communiqué. Elsewhere, we have abundant shots of rivers and trees and grass- beautiful, to be sure, but when the human story is so frustratingly deficient, these sequences might as well have been spliced in from a nature documentary.

This was a right royal chore to sit through. I may not have found Ten compelling, and I may not have always felt its exchanges were worth listening to, but at least they were clear and made sense. Why won’t Malick let his characters speak? I am starting to get the distinct impression that he and me are simply not viable bedfellows, something I will have to try to put aside as I attempt to objectively tackle The Tree of Life’s three-hour alternative cut.

44. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

12 Years a Slave is, as its title suggests, a film that examines the sweep of slavery within the microcosm of one man’s experiences across a relatively short amount of time. Ambitious, then, and for the most part, there’s nothing wrong with any of it- it’s finely acted, commandingly directed, and a cinematographic sensation; these aspects, together with a strong, smooth narrative that brooks few diversions, result in a film that offsets its hard-to-watch qualities with others that are decidedly easy. The likes of Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Michael Kenneth Williams and Sarah Paulson are all on hand to make sure that even small roles are handled with exacting standards. It’s a good film- I mean, it really is, there’s no question of that. If I was to put a figure on the film’s levels of general success, however, it would be less than 100%- probably somewhere around 75 or 80.

I was reminded of observations I made earlier about Son of Saul- ‘[The camera] rarely closes in on anyone’s face to make sure it drives home a dramatic point. There are no musical cues to spell out that one moment is especially intense, or another particularly poignant.’ Well, this is a film that does do those kinds of things. Similarly, I said of White Material- ‘Maria never makes any great speech vowing that she will die on her land if necessary, that she will go down with this ship, come hell or high water, to rapturous applause.’ In 12 Years a Slave, however, while there is no ‘centrepiece’ speech, or explosion of overplayed catharsis, the dialogue does sometimes include elevated, extremely earnest quasi-monologues; meanwhile, characters are set out as ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, and just to make sure we don’t miss the point, Michael Fassbender’s deplorable, moustache-twirling mega-villain gets worse over time, culminating in a climactic scene of visceral, utterly heartless brutality, notable for the mildness of the victim’s transgression and the act’s complete lack of necessity.

Were there ‘baddies’ involved in slavery? Well, yes, of course there were. Did they have no redeeming qualities whatsoever- their wives too? Again, yes, that simply must have been the case, by law of averages if nothing else. Did they commit acts that were unwarranted beyond all notions of logic, reason, or decency? Yes, yes and yes. Is Steve McQueen ‘wrong’ to use a few sledgehammer tactics in his vision, especially when they are offset by more balanced shades elsewhere in the picture? Of course he’s not ‘wrong’, even if you don’t subscribe to the notion that a director can, at any time, make any kind of film they like- it’s completely arguable that such aspects are not in fact shortcomings at all, but perfectly valid filmmaking choices that some directors would elect to make, and others wouldn’t.

It could also be argued that slavery is itself a ‘sledgehammer’ issue that requires ‘sledgehammer’ tactics. Maybe that’s true. Nevertheless, it still feels pertinent to consider, from a filmmaking standpoint, whether the movie is ultimately good enough to ‘get away’ with the sorts of decisions that might otherwise be considered risky. Again, for the most part, yes, it is, to an extent that I would say runs at about 75 to 80%. That’s to its unmistakable credit- a great many lesser films have been derailed by melodramatic and immoderate excess. The overall effect is a film that risked losing tonal control, and largely didn’t.

Ultimately, one wonders whether to judge a film like this on how upsetting it is. If it’s more upsetting than Son of Saul or The Pianist, which, based solely on onscreen content, I think it probably is, does that then make it more successful? Similarly, can it be compared to Spotlight, in that it deals with an incredibly serious overarching subject, or is slavery a ‘bigger’ issue than paedophilia in the Catholic Church, and does the ‘bigger’, bolder tone of 12 Years a Slave, in comparison to the drier and much more reserved Spotlight, reflect that? The latter film is, of course, primarily concerned with characters who have not been through these experiences themselves, but are merely investigators, a pivotal consideration.

As ever, the depiction of man’s inhumanity to man is one which is shot through with incredibly sharp and knotty thorns. General human decency should be a basic cornerstone of our beliefs as we collectively try to make sense of a confusing and often astoundingly unfair world, yet time after time we are reminded that this crucial, foundational tenet, on which all of our culture and civilisation should rest, just isn’t there; instead we have a malignant, forbidding vortex in its place. As one character puts it at one point, when preparing to separate a woman from her children, despite her- naturally- begging him not to, ‘My sentimentality extends the length of a coin.’ Why? Why does he think like that, and not consider it a problem? Why did these people do the things they did when there were so many other behavioural options available? As I mentioned when discussing Son of Saul, I struggle to effectively put myself in the situations depicted, and fully engage with how it might have felt- I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I simply don’t know, and for that I’m grateful; 12 Years a Slave, minor apprehensions aside, was a powerful and effective reminder of such good fortune and gratitude.

6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)

Ever been heartbroken?

Awful, isn’t it?

Is it a crucial life experience, or is it useless, worthless, pathetic mental chaos that belongs in the emotional dustbin? (If nothing else, your friends and family are probably going to start liking you less for a little while).

Would you artificially erase that person from your thoughts and memories if you could?

What would that process be like, and what would the repercussions be?

These are the fascinating scenarios explored by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a mesmeric melding of Michel Gondry’s visionary talents and Charlie Kaufman’s prodigious imagination. Jim Carrey is Joel Barish, a sad, quiet man who is hyper-aware that his life isn’t interesting. Kate Winslet is Clementine, free-spirited, forthright, a little unhinged and not always all that pleasant to be around. Do they work as a couple? Should they try?

I wasn’t sure how I was going to take Eternal Sunshine this time around, seven years after I last watched it. There’s always a concern with films like this which have dazzled me so much in the past, and have set the bar so high, that any revisit comes with the inherent risk of disappointment; conversely, there’s also a slight worry I’m going to see it through biased eyes that somewhat trick me into thinking the movie is better than it actually is.

I needn’t have worried. Though Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn’t hold the same wonder that it did when I saw it the first time at the cinema aged 18, it is a film that feels like the ‘warm bath’ to which I compared Lost in Translation, or a comfy old jumper that always fits. It is so supple in its machinations, and flows so assuredly from one idea and one set-piece to another, by way of astounding visual imagery, that I can’t really imagine it ever striking a duff note, even if I were to watch it when not necessarily in the right mood for its heady, eclectic mixture of playfulness, pain and existential dissection.

Some films are very much of their time. In this case, the very year, 2004, is included in the dialogue, which suggests that neither Kaufman nor Gondry had any problem with tying their work to a particular era, or in this case, a specific year. What I find notable about this is that it doesn’t appear ‘tied’ to its era at all, and that’s not a fawning nod towards the movie’s ‘timelessness’ but rather a confused, inquiring entreaty as to why things look the same now as they did then. Fashions haven’t changed- everyone in this film wears clothes that people still wear here in 2022. Tom Wilkinson’s doctor’s office has no design features that bely age or are redolent in any way of a bygone epoch. Neither does the bookshop at which Clementine works. The apartments that the movie spends time in all look perfectly ‘normal’ and just as they might today. The same was true of 25th Hour- as a portrait of 2002, it was striking that its settings- the classrooms, the nightclubs- all looked exactly like they do now, and none of the language that anyone used was outdated either, in a way that simply wouldn’t have been the case if one compared 1960 to 1980 or 1980 to 2000. Such things suggest that we have found ourselves in something of a cultural rut that hasn’t moved for two decades, and shows no signs of shifting. They also suggest that because I am old enough to remember 2004 perfectly well, and it really doesn’t seem all that long ago, my judgement may be somewhat impaired; one grudgingly accepts that perhaps it feels as if the aesthetics of the socio-cultural landscape haven’t moved on because I haven’t moved on.

Anyway, if you wanted to be nostalgic about such considerations, and I do, you could suggest that these movies, along with Lost in Translation, a product of 2003, are missives from or remnants of an age that was pre-recession, pre-social media, with no notable cost-of-living crisis, and subsequently somewhat simpler, when the world’s collective worries were comparatively mild; every single one of these Top 100 movies are also pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, and pre-pandemic. Such sentiments can, of course, be clichéd and misguided- lest we forget that these particular years constitute the direct shadow of the September 11 attacks. Nevertheless, on a personal level, 25th Hour, Lost in Translation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, amongst others, represent an era which pre-dates a job I held for 11 years from 2006 to 2017, and still miss; perhaps more pertinently, especially where our latter movie’s concerned, they pre-date my first proper heartbreak, which occurred at that very job in the summer of 2008, coinciding almost exactly with the global economic collapse. Consequently, these earlier years are now set in something of a sweet and rather beautiful sepia-tone for me, even though I know full well that in reality, despite a great many good points that I largely took for granted at the time, they were also riddled with chronic insecurity and a profound lack of direction.

Such disclosures seem particularly relevant when reviewing a film that openly laments the passage of time and engages directly with the fragility of memory. Just as in Inside Out, memories are shown to undergo an actual, physical, onscreen collapse. Sections of the film take place inside the mind of Joel, and we are privy to the intricacies that occur as the erasure of his memories is underway. We get to revisit pieces of his past, modified through the circumstances of their presentation, and bubbling with creativity as Clementine becomes ever-more entwined with his psychological terrain. These sequences serve, amongst other things, to accentuate the movie’s overarching iridescence- visually, it’s an absolute riot of colour. We are actually inside a person’s head. We are inside their hopes and thoughts and fears. Unlike Inside Out, this is an adult, one who has tasted all sorts of disappointments along with outright heartbreak, and whose childhood memories carry the burden of inherent melancholy. In Inside Out, the young Riley is confused and upset at the changes occurring in her psyche, and that her hobbies and interests, usually so reliable for sinking troublesome excess energy into, are losing their allure. Joel is, of course, past all that, his preoccupations completely different. Interestingly, we never find out what any of his hobbies or interests are, diverting as they would be from his one true passion, the talismanic Clementine; we don’t find out what his job is either, though it’s likely unfulfilling. Clementine’s ‘hobbies’ are a similar story, apparently confined to dying her hair and drinking.

One positive way to read this is that the two of them don’t need hobbies or interests when they’ve got each other. A less positive way to read it is that they are both pieces of relatively empty human tumbleweed who are drifting through their lives, not particularly enjoying anything and just kind of waiting to die, something they would share with other characters in other Kaufman films, one of which is actually called I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and made more of a palpable possibility when Joel wonders if he, Clementine, and the other people in their restaurant at the time are in fact ‘the dining dead’.

Like Before Midnight, a portrait emerges of a couple who love each other but also argue like hell. Love isn’t simple. Relationships aren’t simple. Loving someone and liking them aren’t the same thing, and the two states don’t necessarily behave smoothly when they are forced to live side by side- maybe they can even chip pieces off each other as they knock together under particularly unstable conditions. Whatever the case, this is a great film, unconditionally recommended, even for the casual viewer who isn’t of an overly daring disposition. At its heart, it’s basically a drama, and a fairly sober one at that, despite the kaleidoscopic nature of its presentation. Fantastic performances from Carrey and Winslet lynchpin the movie’s more ostentatious flourishes, if such a thing were needed, while stellar support is provided from actors who, to varying extents, are all somewhat oddly cast and unusual choices for their respective roles.

Let’s also not forget Jon Brion’s luminous score, delicate and keening, forlorn but hopeful. This is a soundtrack which not only satisfies but surpasses its remit in providing musical compliment to the contents and general sentiment of the movie; nevertheless, I’ve put forth ‘musical equivalents’ for movies in previous reviews, and in this case, Eternal Sunshine’s happy-sad, toybox-ramshackle dynamics could conjure a huge number of individual tracks from the annals of indie by bands such as Sparklehorse, Sun Kil Moon and the Magnetic Fields. More specifically, I would single out the New Jersey five-piece Real Estate, especially tracks such as ‘Green Aisles’, ‘Three Blocks’, ‘Had to Hear’, ‘Crime’ and ‘Primitive’, songs which overflow with longing, lamentation and bittersweet nostalgia.

The movie ends with Joel and Clementine stuck, like so many of our other characters, in an uncertain cinematic limbo. In this instance, the repetition that the movie implies makes re-visiting it, and watching them ‘repeat themselves’ again, seem particularly poignant.

Goodbye for now, guys. See you in another seven years.

89. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008) 

I had to watch The Headless Woman twice.

My first viewing was somewhere around the time of Certified Copy. It’s a decidedly strange film, both disorienting and mundane, difficult to make head or tail of, and by the final half-hour of its lean runtime I was kinda just waiting for it to end and glad when it did. Another one out of the way, I thought. I don’t know what I’m going to write in my review, but I’ll find something; I’ll squeeze some mild, noncommittal opinion out and then I can move on. It was only then, after the film finished, when reading plot synopses online along with some other reviews, that I realised I hadn’t gotten the film at all and I was going to have to watch it again.

There is a central event that the movie revolves around- that much I understood- where our main character, a middle-aged woman called Vero, hits something in her car. Is it a dog, or is it a child? The movie goes on to obfuscate this question, providing pieces of contradictory information for the following 80 minutes, and then it ends.

What I hadn’t grasped was that the film was very deliberately making its central question as unfathomable as possible. It doesn’t have an answer, it’s supposed to be confusing, and that’s the point. I had expected some sort of answer, even if it turned out to be partial and/or unsatisfactory, and it turns out that it just isn’t that kind of movie; like the works of David Lynch, its internal workings are running on a very different set of gears. Unlike Lynch, these qualities are played out at a subterranean, almost imperceptible level, and ultimately speak of a picture which is as acrid as vinegar. I said of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: ‘It wanted me to feel numb at the end. It wanted me to feel perplexed and out-of-sorts.’ Well, you can take that comment and emphasise it tenfold. A viewer then has to query exactly why Martel- or anyone- would want to make this sort of film, irrespective of whether they actually like the approach or the ‘points’ that are being made.

One thing I hadn’t grasped the first time round was that Vero is shown to be having an affair in the film’s early stages. The scene where she goes to a hotel room with a man who isn’t her husband had gone right over my head, possibly because I just hadn’t been paying enough attention, but also because this man greatly resembles the man she’s married to. This sort of theme will continue throughout the picture- Vero spends large amounts of time with family members, but we often don’t really know exactly who they are or what her relationship is with them. Something else I came to realise was that two scenes at the film’s climax- one back in the hotel, another in the hospital- had far more significance than I’d thought, and that this was in fact a much darker movie than I’d initially surmised.

As The Headless Woman’s true nature dawned on me, my notes for my original aborted review included this passage: ‘It’s a nasty little film that Lucretia Martel wants you to walk away from feeling that your whole life is a lie. This is not necessarily a criticism. For one thing, maybe your whole life is a lie- it’s not unfeasible.’ Having watched it again, my feelings have softened- I probably wouldn’t call it a ‘nasty little film’ now, especially since I have a fuller understanding of how it functions as a thought-provoking piece of art. Neither do I necessarily think that Martel wants you to think that your life is a lie. She’s an artist, and at least to some extent, she’s a provocateur, and she wants to prod at your particular version of reality, almost to the point where it might puncture.

Earlier, I said that Inherent Vice wanted to simulate a marijuana haze, and The Headless Woman might be said to simulate concussion, but the tone of the piece suggests something more serious and unsettling than that. Vero’s behaviour might also be said to resemble autism- she appears bewildered by the general hustle and bustle of her family, responds poorly to stimulus and dislikes being touched- but there are also clear and chilling suggestions of a more foreboding mental illness. When viewing it the second time, I was far more aware that what we are seeing onscreen is not necessarily real, and for all we know, Vero is in fact mumbling to herself in a padded cell. Such a notion would represent an extreme and highly questionable reading of the movie, but nonetheless, how likely is it, really, that Vero’s own niece, maybe as much as thirty years her junior, incestuously longs for her and writes her love letters? How likely is it that a peripheral character, in perfectly normal tones and apropos of nothing, suddenly exhorts that Vero’s hair is ‘disgusting’? And most pertinently, in a scene where she talks to her aunt Lala, who is overtly shown to have dementia and imparts that her house is filled with ‘the dead’, why does a small boy appear from under the bed, out of focus and essentially ‘faceless’, who turns to look briefly at Vero before leaving the room? Like every other mystifying aspect of the piece, it could, in theory, have a perfectly ordinary explanation- maybe he is simply a member of the extended family who was just playing. However, in the circumstances of the film’s narrative, especially considering what Aunt Lala has just said, the stark inferences are all too clear.

We can, then, summarise that the camera itself is sometimes lying to us. A feminist reading of the movie might proffer that it is simulating what it is like to be gaslit. This is not to say men can’t be gaslit- of course not- but that women are more readily told by their partners they are overreacting, jumping to conclusions, ‘acting like a psycho’ or just generally being silly. That Vero’s husband doesn’t actually say these sorts of things to her in so many words is a testament to the subtleties- some might say shiftiness- of Martel’s methods.

The first time I saw The Headless Woman, I thought it was one of the emptiest and most boring films on this list; I had no idea why it had made it into the Top 100 at all. I am now inclined to think that it is downright fascinating. Its themes, its implications, its presentation- all of them are beguiling, and I would be hard pressed to name a picture that has so much undertone to it, or goes about its business in such a sly, furtive, caustic manner. Like others we’ve covered- Once Upon a Time in Anatolia springs to mind, as does Werckmeister Harmonies- this does not function as a piece of ‘entertainment’ in any way. It doesn’t meld its bleak implications with any straightforward, commercial aspects, as A History of Violence, Inside Llewyn Davis and Spring Breakers did. Neither does it offset its sombre tones with any overarching beauty, as exhibited by The White Ribbon, Let the Right One In, Timbuktu or White Material. It just dumps its quiet, confusing load onto the viewer and frostily tells them to deal with it. I called Son of Saul a ‘small sliver of hell’, and perhaps that applies here too, as we enter a psychological hell set much closer to home in the highly recognisable, everyday surroundings of domestic comfort.

Shiver.

53. Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001) 

I had to watch Moulin Rouge! twice. The first time, I didn’t know what to say, other than I didn’t really get it. I just didn’t have a review.

So I waited a while and I reluctantly came back to it. My issues were similar to ones that have been touched upon previously, like when I referred to ‘the huge gulf between how I am ‘supposed’ to receive this material and how I actually do’ when covering The Grand Budapest Hotel, or when I thought City of God was ‘trying to use sensory overload to steamroller me into exhilaration’.

The film is wall-to-wall frenzy and frolic. John Leguizamo, playing a dwarf, affecting a speech impediment, and sometimes wearing a monocle and a top hat, will mug wildly. Then there’ll be a musical number, the lyrics ripped from several disparate pop songs and spliced together. Richard Roxburgh, with an ostentatious moustache and an even more ostentatious maleficence, will mug wildly. Then a musical number. Some overwrought talk about love. Another musical number. Jim Broadbent will mug wildly. Another musical number. Some moustache-twirling from Roxburgh’s repulsive villain. Another musical number.

As I tried to stitch together a review, I saw that points I was considering making had already been made by others- for example, I was aware from an early stage that its riot of colour and sound and expressionism could beget a great range of very different reactions, and that one viewer could behold it with absolute delight while another would regard it as one of the most irritating films in existence. However, it’s a point that seems, in light of past comments, barely worth making. At Rotten Tomatoes, the phrase ‘a love-it-or-hate-it experience’ is right there in the ‘critics’ consensus’ summation at the top of the page, while Andrew Collins at the Radio Times opines that ‘you will either fall in love with every camp flourish, or find yourself exhausted after 20 minutes’.

Roger Ebert, in a positive review, says ‘it is like being trapped on an elevator with the circus’. He also references the film’s resemblance to a music video, pre-empting another observation I was going to make myself. The dialogue is only really there in a functional capacity- to serve the movie’s vibrations, to let you know who to like or hate, and to pull its meagre plot along. We are just supposed to take it as read that Satine and Christian are in love- any further exploration of their feelings, or in defining exactly what love is, and how or why it might manifest itself- would waste valuable time that could be spent launching yet another ostentatious burst of choreography.

It's almost critic-proof, then, because it is so clearly a very specific type of film, and the fantasies it exhorts are ones which a significant number of viewers are only too happy to receive. It serves no purpose to say the movie is imbalanced, because it isn’t aiming for balance. It’s moot to say that the movie lacks subtlety, or nuance, because it has consciously cast aside such concepts. It’s futile to say that its plotline has a distinctively derivative Shakespearean flavour, because the film makes a point of overtly ripping out pieces of pop culture and re-using them. And it’s churlish to complain that the film is too loud, its editing too quick, its tone too heightened, because…well, because that’s the film it wanted to be, it’s what its fans like about it, and these elements can’t, in all seriousness, be considered missteps. Similarly, concerns we may have that Satine, our only strong female character, is presented as a delicate little flower, too pure for this world, can be swatted away by the film’s self-aware, self-referential, post-modernist textures, its emphasis on referencing and engaging with the spirit of older movies and bygone culture. 

I suspect I might have been a little more receptive, or a little less resistant, to Moulin Rouge! if I was steeped in the classic musicals of Hollywood’s golden era, the extravagance of Busby Berkeley, and/or Bollywood. As it stands, this really isn’t the film for me, though I was a little less befuddled on the second viewing, and I did kind of feel like I ‘got it’ slightly better.

12. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) 

There’s a scene in David Fincher’s police-procedural serial-killer period piece Zodiac where our titular murderer, faceless to us, tells a woman in the passenger seat of his car that he’s going to kill her and throw her baby out of the window. The scene cuts away- the next thing we know, passers-by are helping the woman, who has managed to escape. Maybe, in itself, it’s not such an unusual decision to omit the intervening minutes, but then Fincher repeats the technique ten minutes later, when Robert Downey Jr.’s hard-bitten, booze-soaked reporter Paul Avery follows up a shady anonymous lead; despite having received explicit threats on his life, he makes his way, alone, under darkness, to a deserted, desolate location, but we don’t see what happens then- we simply hear about it, second-hand, through dialogue, whilst in the meantime, night has become day.

Are these ‘gaps’ in our narrative an attempt to re-create the confusion that the movie’s characters feel as they chase this ever-elusive boogeyman, and are confronted at every turn with red herrings and pieces that don’t fit? Is it an attempt to introduce supple derivations to the more formulaic elements of the film, and the more generic, archetypal traits of its characters? Or both?

Jake Gyllenhaal is wide-eyed, boyish and eager. Robert Downey Jr. is the older, more seasoned reporter- chain-smoking, sarcastic, and the very picture of jaded cynicism. Mark Ruffalo is pitched somewhere between the two, sometimes coming off as an anchoring influence for the viewer, relatable and familiar, though not necessarily immune to the occasional quick streak of abrasive behaviour.

Generally, I felt that Zodiac never really caught fire or grabbed my attention the way I would have liked it to. This is partly, it would seem, through stylistic choice- the movie is a decidedly slow burn and appears to be pitched, very deliberately, at a certain cerebral level. We know, for instance, that the killer isn’t going to suddenly jump out from the shadows- it isn’t that sort of film. Neither does it feature any of the overtly gruesome or sensationalistic aspects of a movie like Seven. Nevertheless, it is quite a creepy film- it maintains an undercurrent of discomfort and dread throughout, not least when Fincher sets a murder sequence to the bouncy but unnerving strains of Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man. This undercurrent is arguably the most successful, strikingly effective aspect of the movie, made more beguiling when it is not always clear, exactly, where the undercurrent is coming from- is it coming from the notes and messages that the faceless killer keeps sending to the police, or is there just a broad, undefined fear across these Californian locales that the Summer of Love and the utopian dreams of the 1960s have turned distinctly sour, and that this movie has managed to capture with twisted aplomb?

Elsewhere, we are just supposed to take it as read that Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith is obsessed with the case without the film ever really explaining why or how such an obsession has come about. Maybe it doesn’t feel that it needs to, as the nature of obsession is inherently inexplicable. In this, perhaps we can see echoes of our own little fixations, especially ones that we don’t even understand ourselves and that we continue to indulge even when they are detrimental to our wellbeing. Perhaps we can also see parallels in our own lives’ unanswered questions, those situations which should have been relatively straightforward but turned out to be anything but, and you were forced to walk away from, leaving them unresolved forever.

All this results in a movie that feels deeper and darker than your average serial-killer flick, even those that are in the more mature and analytical vein that this one is. I even saw superficial parallels with The Headless Woman in its oblique stylings and disagreeable aftertaste. It’s probably slightly overlong, and that also feeds into its understated vibe of wilful perversity, prompting questions as to whether this is in fact something of an art piece disguised as a relatively commercial mainstream picture with major stars.

A mixed bag.

78. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorcese, 2013) 

The Wolf of Wall Street stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, a real-life unscrupulous businessman who was convicted of fraud in 1999 and served prison time before writing a book on his experiences and becoming a motivational speaker.

If that sounds a little dry and solemn, it isn’t. This is far and away one of the most straightforwardly entertaining movies on the list. Jordan heads up a ragtag band of freewheeling reprobates, including Jonah Hill and Jon Bernthal, for whom life is one long, distinctly un-PC party. Despite its three-hour runtime, there isn’t really any section that noticeably lags or casts any huge shadow over the revelry, even in its final reel where (spoiler alert) arrests are made and everything collapses. It’s all fun and games.

Such unabashed entertainment sits alongside the movie’s gleeful willingness to depict predatory behaviour with pronounced nonchalance and even something resembling encouragement. Is that…acceptable? Should a film, or any piece of media, openly exhort such principles? The movie simply doesn’t engage with the harm that Jordan and his cohorts unquestionably cause, and does, at some points, seem to fully buy into the ‘one born every minute’ idea that ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’. These trod-upon customers, these yahoos, rednecks and plebs, are heard briefly on the other end of a telephone as the miscreants laugh at them. Otherwise, they don’t figure as part of the story- if they did, it would be a buzzkill, a bummer. On the flipside, we are even treated, at one stage, to a tale whereby one of Jordan’s employees, a single mother, was heroically plucked by him from a grinding life of poverty, showered with opportunity, and now she’s wearing Chanel suits. ‘I fucking love you, Jordan,’ she tells him, misty-eyed, as this film’s points, winkingly ironic as they may be, get more and more sledgehammer by the second. ‘I fucking love you.’

Do we love him? Should we? As with The Social Network, this is, of course, not really Belfort- DiCaprio doesn’t resemble him physically, and Scorcese must have deliberately cast one of the most naturally appealing and pliable actors of his generation with likability in mind. What, then, is this film saying? It can’t possibly be saying that this behaviour is good- that’s objectively inaccurate. Is it saying anything? Perhaps it is imparting that a film doesn’t really need a message, especially if it’s entertaining enough, and if it does have some questionable undertones, then you don’t necessarily need to like them or agree with them to enjoy the film. Perhaps it is saying that it’s perfectly okay to get vicarious thrills from this kind of nakedly selfish and mercenary conduct as an understood part of a moviegoing experience- viewers who love this film are unlikely to go and be ruthless stockbrokers based on it, just as those who love GoodFellas are unlikely to up and join the Mafia, and those who love Halloween or Friday the 13th are unlikely to actually break out the mask and machete themselves.

Generally, I don’t really want movies to moralise to me; that sort of thing might be appropriate in, say, a Pixar film, but not one like this which is unmistakably adult. We don’t need to be told that it’s wrong to exploit others, and I guess this film assumes that you already know that, going on to tease and play around with those sorts of boundaries accordingly. The movie also seems to recognise that you can be offended and entertained at the same time, especially when there are obvious questions around how seriously you are really expected to take any of this. From time to time, this is a very, very funny film- one that genuinely made me laugh out loud, right from my gut. These people are a scourge on our society, our economy, and our general collective wellbeing, but they are also clowns, idiots, buffoons. They’re the kind of people who have to be tied down on aeroplanes while everyone else rolls their eyes and tells their children not to stare.

I felt the presentation had a distinct similarity to that of GoodFellas; while its tone is undeniably lighter, and sometimes sillier, Jordan’s voiceover delivery is redolent of Henry Hill as he unfolds his story, sounding like a guy who is, with a distinctly offhand charm, regaling you over beers. They’re both charismatic raconteurs who have eschewed a regular life for one of danger and unpredictability, and they both seem to be sufficiently aware of the bewitching effect that their tales can have on ‘normals’, especially males, who have never taken a risk in their life, hate their jobs and live lives of arid suburban mediocrity. Through the voiceover, it’s always possible that this movie-version of Jordan, this construct, is exaggerating things somewhat- is it really possible, for example, that he and his cronies did that many drugs, and that their hangovers and after-effects were apparently so minimal? Was he really the most popular guy in the office who had everyone chanting his name and hanging on his every word?  

Scorcese is essentially selling us a fantasy, one made up of hookers, jet-setting, hookers, Quaaludes, ‘taking care of business’, hookers, massive boats, dwarf-tossing, a stark-naked Margot Robbie, hookers, Matthew McConaughey thumping his chest like a gorilla, adulation, snorting cocaine off a hooker’s ass, ‘living for today’, disregarding consequences, speaking as crassly as you like, ordering martinis at lunchtime, laughing in the face of law enforcement, literally telling FBI agents to go fuck themselves and throwing lobsters at them, screwing hookers in the middle of the office with everyone watching, Spike Jonze saying he wants to suck your cock, Jonah Hill marrying his cousin, hookers, and more money than you could ever possibly spend. It’s largely up to the individual how far they feel inclined to buy into this particular fantasy, which, like Spring Breakers, blends its taut exhilaration with low-rent sleaze and grubbiness. Perhaps this is not too dissimilar from a video game where you can behave with unparalleled decadence in a controlled environment- commit armed robberies, say, or drive a car into a crowd of bystanders. While Belfort’s white-collar crimes may involve less outright violence than these examples, the excess depicted by the movie, as reflected in its very length, is such that I feel the comparison remains, at least to some degree, observable. Then there are questions as to whether the movie really has to be as lewd, crude and unremittingly profane as it is; one feels that it is strong enough, and enjoyable enough, that this particular element could have been toned down without really losing anything, but then, that goes against the very nature of excess, doesn’t it?

95. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)

Moonrise Kingdom is a fable about two adolescents, poised around the transitional age of puberty, who ‘love’ each other and defy the elders that have forbidden the relationship to escape together into the woodland on the small island on which they live. It’s 1965.

These two characters are both as precociously intelligent as you would expect from a film with this storyline from this director, and their escapade is the focal point of the piece. Meanwhile, though, a quite different sort of movie is being played out in the background, one where characters of a certain age- that of their fifties and sixties- are spending the autumns of their lives wading through a fog of ennui, the kind of ennui that sees people drift into affairs and then impassively call them off.

We can see here a profound disconnect between the adolescents and the grown-ups; the young couple believe in the principles of adventure and don’t see perfect love as any sort of unattainable myth. If the adults in their lives are anything to go by, they will have these beliefs eroded over the years until the ensuing melancholy makes them resemble sleepwalkers. One thought process would decree that they should then try to hold on to their sense of wonder and enjoy it for as long as they can; another would ordain that the longer they live in this unreality, the worse it will be when the vagaries of age do solemnly dawn on them. This latter line of thinking would suggest that the younger incarnations of Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand and Bill Murray were themselves starry-eyed dreamers with all that further to fall, redolent of when Joni Mitchell bluntly sings ‘all romantics meet the same fate- some day, cynical and drunk, and boring someone in some dark café’ (though in this instance, the cynicism has not resulted in verbosity). Meanwhile, the Ed Norton character, noticeably younger than the other three, appears as-yet unaffected by the gloom, thereby providing something of a bridging influence between the very different- one might say incompatible- emotional worlds that the island is currently hosting.    

This is an okay film. There’s nothing much wrong with any of it, and as it develops at a measured, precise pace, its tone, I guess, is internally consistent, and it’s all reasonably presented and solidly acted- Bruce Willis, in particular, reminds us how good he can be when engaged in roles of quiet dignity and subdued restraint. Nevertheless, I felt his part, along with those of all the other adults, was underdeveloped and thinly written. McDormand, Murray and Norton are not really given that much to do, and this is even more applicable to Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman. Moreover, just as in The Royal Tenenbaums, I felt that ennui was touched upon without Anderson or his co-writer Roman Coppola having anything particularly interesting or substantial to say about it- in this, I felt distinct similarities to Richard Ayoade’s 2010 effort Submarine, another film which features a teenage couple at its heart and pointedly offsets their outlook against that of their elders.  

Why do I feel that a film like Lost in Translation had so much more success in exploring disaffection and despondency? Maybe in part because it wasn’t an ensemble piece; that movie sees Bob and Charlotte, whose respective dispositions would typically relegate them to background status in your average movie, or outright non-presence, afforded the screentime that allows their characters to breathe and actualise themselves before your eyes. In this picture, mildly diverting and agreeable as the children and their central narrative are, I would rather have seen an exploration of McDormand and Murray’s marriage than this melange of knowing tragicomedy, retro reference points and intrepid boy scouts. I would rather have seen a sincere slice-of-life piece focused around Willis’s Captain Sharp, or maybe the island in general, than this masturbatory, water-treading run-through of Anderson’s usual tones and themes, low-key and digestible as their presentation nevertheless was.

Can’t have everything, I suppose.

23. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Just like their namesakes in Amour, Georges and Anne Laurent, played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, are the quintessential Middle Class couple, the very embodiment of the comfortable cosmopolitan elite. They’re not very happy about it, though. Georges is irritable and gets into street arguments. Their son Pierrot lives in his own teenage bubble, doesn’t appear to particularly like either of them and wants to be left alone. Anne generally spends her time in frustration, trying to get answers, or simple conversation, out of her prickly, patronising husband and surly son.

Then there’s the tapes. Someone is sending them footage of their own house, leaving video cassettes on their doorstep, wrapped in crude but nasty drawings of stick figures and blood. We don’t see Georges and Anne’s lives before the tapes start to come, but we can surmise that they have made existing problems worse, rather than created them wholesale.

What to make of all this? In a remarkable coincidence, Caché arrives very soon after The Headless Woman and Zodiac, a fact that, in itself, accentuates the bizarre and rather awful sense of displacement that this Haneke monstrosity hands dead-eyed to the viewer, taking the shadowy, obtuse evasions of those two films and bringing them to the very forefront of its filmic landscape, employing an even harder, more vicious and more surgical tone than either.

More than any other movie on this list, Caché is a puzzle, by which I mean it actually operates as a conundrum, a brainteaser, where clues are metered out, as opposed to a movie that just happens to be ‘puzzling’. If you’re thinking about watching it, I would recommend going into it as cold as possible, and imbibing it completely on its own terms without any prior warning. Then you can go online, as I did, and contemplate the theories from there, building your own opinion from the ground up.

I didn’t like it much when I was watching it. One reason for this is that movies with such an unfeeling tone and arrhythmic structure are often inherently difficult to like. As with Amour, the film’s events are presented without a shred of sympathy for or identification with the characters at all- if anything, they ‘deserve’ it. Another reason for my apprehension was, I think, that to cynical eyes, the movie doesn’t really do anything or go anywhere. We’ve been trained to expect a certain narrative arc when this sort of plot is presented to us- typically, the tapes would have gotten more and more foreboding and intrusive, with footage of the characters sleeping, for example, and the deaths of some unfortunate fringe characters- then, eventually, we find out who the antagonist is and what motivation, flimsy or otherwise, they may have had. That would, of course, have been something of a predictable, run-of-the-mill horror film, and barely notable, but still, the fact that Caché doesn’t do any of these things- a single burst of shocking violence notwithstanding, it’s ‘just’ a drama, where arguments, interpersonal tension and subterfuge are prevalent- leads one to question exactly why it exists and why anyone felt the need to make it in the first place. Even Roger Ebert, who really liked the film, openly asks at one point ‘What was Haneke’s purpose with Caché?’, going on to state ‘I suspect it was to inspire just such questions as we’re having’.

Questions are certainly one thing that the movie indubitably offers. When some other films ended with unanswered mysteries, like The White Ribbon or Inception, I felt the ride itself was good enough that, for me, there was no feeling of being ‘short-changed’, ‘double-crossed’ or ‘played’ by their ambiguities. Not so with this one. It was a frustrating, itchy, dissonant watch that felt less elegant than either The Headless Woman or Zodiac, and I mentally prepared myself to write a lukewarm review.

However, then I started to read some theories surrounding what may really be going on. In particular, it’s suggested that the sender of the tapes is none other than Haneke himself, a proposal that, on the face of it, seems ridiculous, but starts to carry more credence when you recontextualise Caché as an experimental piece that, as part of its deviant nature, merely resembles a ‘regular’ film and features recognisable, esteemed actors. Roger Ebert discusses the movie’s possibilities at length (I should say that from this point the review will not make any sense if you haven’t seen the film, and contains spoilers). For some reason, he doesn’t mention that particular theory; assuming he was aware of it, maybe he doesn’t want to introduce any preternatural aspects to his analysis or the film in general. Instead, he runs through the movie’s characters and assesses the probability of their involvement, settling on Majid’s son and Pierrot as the likeliest guilty parties in an unholy alliance.

He finds Majid’s assertion of innocence wholly convincing, and on this basis, practically rules him out. I don’t- yes, he appears honest and decent, but so do lots of people, and some of them are very good liars. He touches on the possibility that Georges may be sending the tapes to himself, but rejects it, which again, I don’t. This latter hypothesis would mean one of four things, all of which, I feel, are intriguingly valid: 1) Georges’ sanity is much more tenuous than it appears; 2) Georges is sane, but enters fugue states akin to sleepwalking where he does inexplicable things and doesn’t remember them; 3) Georges is relatively sane, and fully aware of what he is doing at all times, but is a pathological liar who does things like this for attention and to torment those around him, similar to someone with Munchausen syndrome; 4) Georges’ guilt has supernaturally manifested itself, with or without sentience, and is sending tapes to the source of its own creation. This theory is made even more tantalising by the scene which sees Pierrot ask his father ‘What’s with that card you sent?’ before handing one of the grisly stick-figure cards to him and saying ‘My teacher gave it to me at recess. She didn’t get the freaky drawing but said it’s weird you sending me cards at school.’ This exchange occurs right around the small cluster of scenes that Roger Ebert identifies as a ‘smoking gun’.

Another possibility occurred to me, which may not necessarily be original, and that is that the drawings the tapes are wrapped in look child-like because they were actually sent by a child- the adolescent Majid, who has somehow achieved a form of time travel to deliver missives from the past. With this theory, when Georges visits the adult Majid and he convincingly claims his blamelessness, it’s genuine; the character both did and didn’t send the tapes, like Schrodinger’s cat, and this adult version of him is innocent. 

Haneke has said that any interpretation is just as correct or incorrect as any other. It’s that kind of film. Anything goes, and conclusive answers simply do not figure in the movie’s make-up. This leads me on to my own personal favoured theory; it happens to be the one I mentioned earlier. Ebert points out the difficulties inherent in making such tapes- the static shots of Georges’ house appear to have been filmed from an impossible position, a patch of thin air. You could achieve such a shot with specialist equipment, and might be able to do so unnoticed at night, but not during the day. Who would be able to capture footage lasting hours under those circumstances? A similar point is true of the film from inside Majid’s flat- who had the requisite access, and who possessed the wherewithal to prepare it and start filming before Georges turned up? The answer to both these questions- Michael Haneke. He has access to everything- he can film Georges, or Anne, or anyone, any time he wants, completely unseen. They are utterly at his mercy. This theory also ‘explains’ somewhat why Majid, for no apparent reason, very suddenly and shockingly slits his own throat- as both director and screenwriter, these choices are Haneke’s alone, and that was simply what he compelled his character to do at that time. It was his will. Majid had no say in the matter- and neither, of course, do any other fictional characters, in any work. It also explains why none of the cast are definitely, obviously guilty- yes, Pierrot appears to resent his parents and acts as if he could be hiding something, but that’s what teenagers are like. Yes, he and Majid’s son meet in the film’s final moments, and it’s pretty weird, and it’s suggestive, but it means nothing, really, in terms of cast-iron guilt. The simplest and easiest solution is that none of them had the implausible skills needed to negotiate the technical aspects of creating the tapes, and none of them put so much time and effort into the undertaking of such a bizarre and ultimately rather fruitless endeavour. It is Haneke himself who is malevolently crossing the fourth wall, and the characters are all equally under the force of his puppetry.

Is all of this conjecture diverting? Absolutely. Have I enjoyed engaging with it? Yes, up to a point. Did I actually enjoy the film? Not so much. But if you’re of an art-film disposition, and you like your cinema dark, enigmatic and conniving, with undertones of harsh and scabrous social commentary, then I suppose Caché comes highly recommended. I’ve certainly never seen anything quite like it. And there’s something to be said for a movie that induces such disquiet, and in its own way operates very effectively as something of a horror film, yet leaves almost all of its characters alive at the end, without them being in any obvious imminent danger.

A confounding, provocative work, to say the least.

7. The Tree of Life (extended alternative version) (Terrence Malick, 2018)

Just over an hour into this extended edit of Terrence Malick’s hulking opus, Brad Pitt’s father character, Mr O’Brien, is extolling his worldview to his three boys in the car. ‘The wrong people go hungry,’ he tells them. ‘The wrong people get loved. The world lives by trickery. If you want to succeed, you can’t be too good.’

The sons are smiling and playing with a dog at the time, and one of them tries to adjust the radio, so we can reasonably surmise that they’re not really paying much attention. But if you say something enough times, then it will inevitably start to have some sort of effect on your audience, especially when, as in this case, they don’t really have any other choice but to listen to your theories. Underpinning the questionable issue of filling young boys’ heads with this sort of thinking, and expecting them to be interested in it, is the implication of the speaker’s high level of virtue. Some of his statements, almost by law of averages, are true- the wrong people do often get loved, and though The Wolf of Wall Street was by no means a documentary, it purports to be based on real events, and can still serve as sound indication that the world, to a significant extent, does live by trickery. But the central theme of his utterances, disguised as sage, dutiful advice, is that he himself is too good for this world- too decent, too honest, too upstanding. If he was more of a crook, he would have ‘made it’. As touched on in my first review for the movie, this apparent no-nonsense, unvarnished wisdom is in fact serving selfish needs.

I could see now that O’Brien is a profoundly unhappy man, and through this sort of rumination he is able to recontextualise his own failures, presumably making himself feel temporarily better in the process. It’s sometimes difficult to see exactly what his specific problem is, especially through modern eyes and through the context of economic hardship. He appears to be unsatisfied with his job, but it provides enough for him to live in a perfectly presentable house on what looks like an extremely pleasant, quiet, crime-free street. His sons are all healthy, none of them are tearaways, and his wife is beautiful, respectable and dedicated to him and the boys.

For a while, I felt that he had emerged as the key character in this version of the film. Of course, I remembered his behaviour from the first time around, but I had some sympathy for him in the beginning stages of this re-tread; it’s clear that he wants his sons to both like and respect him, as he wrestles with them in the front yard and sometimes grabs them at the dinner table in clumsy but understandable gestures of jocular affection. The sympathy, however, started to dissipate around the point where he made this small speech in the car. As the film goes on, there doesn’t seem to be any plateau to his disciplinarian tactics- he seems to feel the need to keep pushing them further and further, behaviour which smacks of immaturity and resounding deficiencies in judgement and self-control. The grandmother character played by Fiona Shaw calls him a ‘weak spirit’ and even proposes that he is jealous of his own children. His wife confides to her brother that ‘he works the men under him too hard. Nobody likes him. It’s not that he’s a cold or selfish man, but he turns people against him. He offends them almost on purpose’ (incidentally, I believe she is wrong where the selfishness is concerned). Immediately following these comments, O’Brien becomes belligerent at the sight of his sons having fun with their uncle, exactly like an overgrown child who is not getting enough attention, and essentially orders the man out of the house.

Some of this conduct might be a little more excusable if he was still in his twenties, but he isn’t, he’s in his forties, and it’s pathetic. Why did Jessica Chastain’s mother character marry him? It is solely because it was ‘the done thing’ in the 1950s to find a husband without delay and marry young, come hell or high water? The couple simply don’t seem suited to each other, even when you consider that the majority of women would likely have struggled with him; there is absolutely no reason why this sweet, kind, warm-hearted woman of strong spirit and good sense would want to be with him at all.

As I similarly experienced when re-appraising Margaret, I found that the extended version of this movie was a deeper, more legible experience than its condensed counterpart, and even with my limited first-hand knowledge of his filmography, I strongly suspect that this is Malick’s filmmaking at its fullest and richest expression. The movie has the scope and the intention of an epic, and at this length, it feels as if these epic qualities are more effectively brought forth. I found that one of the most prevalent aspects of the film was its portrait of childhood- both childhood in general, and a childhood lived a certain way in a certain specific era. I can see now why Sean Penn’s Jack looks back constantly on his formative years- they were the only time he got to spend with his brothers. I can see now how weird it must have been- how wrenching- to grow up with two siblings yet live your entire adult life as an only child. Your adolescence would inevitably take on enormous personal significance- mythical, mystical, and almost close enough to touch, yet gone forever.

One could argue that Mr O’Brien has somewhat ruined a childhood that would have otherwise been positively idyllic, especially when you consider how precious these years would later go on to be in memory. The movie doesn’t make such an accusation outright, as such, but perhaps what I find most frustrating is how unnecessary his conduct is. There’s absolutely no need for it. The boys are fine- they’re not even particularly rambunctious. If you’re extremely disappointed with your lot, as he is, and you feel the world is against you, as he does, then why transpose these problems onto your kids? Why not keep it to yourself and maybe talk these feelings through with your wife, in private, after they have gone to bed? Why not discuss it with your friends over beers?

O’Brien doesn’t seem to have that second option. His friends are conspicuous by their absence, and in this we can perhaps detect that Malick is offering a gesture of understanding toward those sorts of people that- quote unquote- ‘nobody likes’. Of the traits that can lead to such a thing, O’Brien displays many- profound lack of consideration for other peoples’ thoughts and feelings is probably the main one, followed swiftly by a common sense bypass and an apparent belief that if he stubbornly carries on behaving in this way, with no compromise, then one day he will wake up to find that, at long last, the rest of the world has done the decent thing and fallen into his insistent rhythms.

This gesture of understanding does not take the contrived form of attempting to show the behaviour in a palatable light. Instead, it gives us a textured, contemplative glimpse into the more human sides of contentious, grating, obnoxious, arrogant people- one senses that O’Brien wants to be a good father, a good husband, and probably a good boss too, but lacks the tools, and in all likelihood this quality stems from his own childhood and his relationship with his own father.

Like other long films we’ve covered, particularly Yi Yi, the extended cut of Margaret, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, this version of The Tree of Life is something of a sprawl, with hints of directorial over-indulgence and potential lack of discipline. This is not necessarily a bad thing- Memento, for example, was extremely neat and tightly structured, yet left me cold. While I still have a certain amount of doubt concerning The Tree of Life’s ‘masterpiece’ status, and I’m still not sure if the content really follows through on the meaning it’s afforded, these sorts of concerns are pretty insignificant in the overall scheme of things. What I saw this time around was a work of substantial thematic weight and some genuinely compelling character-based discourse. Like Far From Heaven, it was also a sad and longing look into the past, into a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, it asks how we deal with bereavement, and the answer is that we don’t really, we simply learn to sort of co-exist with it and carry it with us forever, in some faded, pale, meagre version of acceptance.

63. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011) 

Oh boy.

There is perhaps an argument that Béla Tarr is one of the most predictable filmmakers in contemporary cinema.

The film is going to be in black and white. It’s going to feature extremely long takes. Seconds will turn into hours. Characters’ speech will sometimes sound as if they’re reading straight from an intimidating philosophical treatise or hard-line manifesto. And it’s going to be one of the grimmest things you’ve ever seen in your sorry little life.

With this movie, Tarr and Hranitzky amply follow through on all of these predictive suppositions, and just to add even more spice to proceedings, there is no dialogue for the first 30 minutes. There’s a short introductory voiceover, and then…no one speaks. At all. For half an hour. Meanwhile, a string refrain that sounds like Phillip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi score under the influence of heavy sedatives repeats over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

The story? A father and daughter live in a dilapidated hovel in the middle of nowhere. That’s it. That’s the whole film. I just saved you 154 minutes.

Oh yeah- and it’s the windiest place in the world. This is a film that is about wind as much as it is about anything else. The wind howls. The wind whistles. It howls. It whistles. It tugs at the windows and the doors. The hovel creaks. The string refrain scrapes its way through another tortuous, hopelessly despairing iteration. The daughter helps the father get dressed in an unbroken take- there’s 10 minutes. The daughter goes to the well- let’s follow her all the way there and all the way back again as she fights her way through the ridiculous wind. There’s another 10 minutes.

Even by Béla Tarr’s standards, this was extreme. It was simply one of the most challenging films I have ever watched to completion. Imagine Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse with 95% of the dialogue taken out and being played at 20% speed.

Was it an allegory? Most certainly. Do I care? No. Will I be watching it again, ever? Only after death, if I find myself in hell.

40. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)

As Brokeback Mountain opens and unfolds, we see Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) both being employed on a seasonal basis as ranch-hands. It’s the early 60s. They’re left to their own devices, and apparently have the whole mountain to themselves, though we do see later that their situation isn’t as private as it appears.

After a certain unspecified amount of time, after having gotten to know each other a little, they end up having sex. The initial encounter is played out as an impulsive moment that comes about suddenly and fast. It’s not clear whether their actions are based on a physical attraction, an emotional connection, or the culmination of long-withheld homosexual feelings that were brewing in the backgrounds of both men’s lives prior to the events of the film. It could even, in theory, have been instigated by something akin to boredom.

Neither man seems particularly gay (both, in fact, insist that they’re not). This could be a comment on the era- they would have been conditioned by society to ‘act straight’ for simple reasons of self-preservation; we can see echoes of such notions in Carol, where Cate Blanchett’s titular character laments that she’s ‘living against [her] own grain’. Another parallel with the Haynes piece is the issue of privacy- Carol and Therese drive hundreds of miles across the country to try to find some, and within the walls of their purchased and paid-for motel room should have been able to do anything they wanted, within reason, only to find that they have been followed the entire time and are even being recorded.  

Whether this recurring theme is a conscious filmic reflector that the homosexual community are under an unnaturally high level of scrutiny, and feel their lives are being disproportionately interfered with, or is merely something of a coincidence, is a matter of debate, though such a thing was certainly observable during the bygone decades in which both Brokeback Mountain and Carol are set. Similar things could be said of the potential interracial relationship in Far From Heaven, which might have been the defining love story of Cathy and Raymond’s lives if other people had deigned to stop rubbernecking and just let them alone.

I found Brokeback Mountain’s central tryst to have more ambiguity and less definition. At one point, for example, the two men don’t even see each other for four years. The movie explores the difficulties that arise when two people are in a relationship- and here the word ‘relationship’ is used rather loosely- where one of the partners is more in love than the other one is, and wants more than the other does. Its most pertinent question, for me, was exactly why Ennis won’t acquiesce to Jack’s suggestions and wishes of co-habitation. The easy option would be to construe that it’s because he just can’t handle the notion of society suspecting he’s gay, or bi- that’s if he could even reconcile it with himself, which he barely seems able to. It would be an understandable, recognisable trait, and his violent reaction to his ex-wife’s questions and inferences would also support such a supposition. However, I’m not entirely convinced. That’s not to say that this concern isn’t a factor- it definitely is, the inferences are unequivocal- but I also think it's quite possible that he simply doesn’t want to set up home with Jack, and make the union permanent- he enjoys their time together, and feels genuine affection, but he’s happy to only see him three or four times a year, and the current arrangement suits him.

Over the course of the film I got the impression of Ennis as someone who is disinclined to put himself out for anyone or anything. This goes against the portrayal that the movie affords to him, which is clearly supposed to be sympathetic- rather generously, I feel. Almost all of the movie’s problems, such as they are, can be traced back to him. He knows that he’s never going to fulfil Jack’s wishes, and that Jack is more invested in the relationship than he is, yet chooses to drag the situation out over two decades instead of doing the merciful thing and cutting him loose. He takes a wife that he knows he doesn’t love and wastes twelve years of her life. He takes another female partner later in the picture and simply goes AWOL on her one day, with no explanation, leaving her to deal with the crushing emotional tumult brought about by such an act. His daughter is having a bad time at home and asks if she can come and live with him and he says no. She later tells him she’s getting married and although he ultimately agrees to attend the wedding, his first reaction is to say he can’t make it because he has to do some ranching. In the film’s poignant final scene (spoiler alert), when he mourns Jack, this is not necessarily out of ‘love’, as many critics have surmised- at least not in the overarching romantic sense, anyway. He might simply miss his friend, the one he happened to have sex with, and miss the routine he had of ‘getting away from it all’ and escaping into the mountains every few months with someone whose company he enjoyed. The tragic events have put this internal, relied-upon schedule out of whack, just as his daughter moving in with him would also have done, and while he is clearly upset, and wishes things could go back to how they were, this is not the same thing as a desperate yearning for someone with whom you were hopelessly in love.

Am I being too hard on the guy? Maybe. This is one of the film’s strengths- there are different angles from which you can assess it, and different ways in which you can make judgements about its flawed characters. There is an argument that the stoic and taciturn Ennis doesn’t know what he wants and is chronically indecisive; even as I make criticisms of him, it would be difficult to assert with any conviction that he hurts other people on purpose. He looks to me to be a loner who finds himself in entanglements with other people almost by accident. His children may have come about as something of an accident too. He dips his toe in the water of relationships (including, as noted, a twelve-year marriage), but the practical nuances of maintaining these relationships- taking your partner’s feelings into account, for example- don’t come naturally to him, and when we see him living alone in a trailer at the end of the movie, miles away from anyone or anywhere, with things all looking rather dismal and forlorn, this is in all possibility a habitat which he finds perfectly amenable. Maybe he is living some of the best years of his life out in that backwater with no-one to bother him, and has finally attained that mythical, ever-elusive privacy, albeit with some sacrifices.

Ultimately, this was a mature, accomplished work that achieved tasteful, understated levels of poetry and lyricism, eschewed easy answers and gave the viewer space to draw their own conclusions around its narrative content and tone. As with many other movies we’ve covered, The Tree of Life being the most recent example, there was a melancholic sadness forming a key aspect of Brokeback Mountain’s fabric. Any film that covers twenty years in its protagonists’ lives is apt to touch upon lost opportunity and wasted time; in this case, I particularly felt that the concept of ‘hauntology’ was relevant, a theory that, if I’m understanding it correctly, decrees that people are ‘haunted’ by lives they could have had, ones that are presumably better than the one they’ve got. Jack spends the film not so much haunted by a life that he could have had with Ennis as much as he’s haunted by one that he could currently be having, in the present tense. Instead he has to go back to his cold wife and his boorish nightmare of a father-in-law, probably feeling as if Ennis has somewhat sentenced him to such a thing. When he solemnly intones ‘I just can’t quit you’, the sentiment carries with it the suggestion that he would quite like to, prompting yet more questions as to whether this is really a ‘love story’ at all, or rather something more akin to W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and its tale of Philip Carey’s inexplicable, self-sabotaging capitulation to the abominable Mildred.

100. Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010)

Carlos is a movie that follows the true-life escapades of political militant and terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Addressing directly the issues around verisimilitude that emerged when I covered The Social Network and The Wolf of Wall Street, it begins with a disclaimer of sorts which states that elements of the work have been fictionalised. Is this still a ‘document’, then, offering information to people who want to know more about the life of a specific cultural figure, or is it a dramatic expression of artistic points that Olivier Assayas, who co-writes as well as directs, wants to make? When a filmmaker actively emphasises the presence of an editorial process, then the latter consideration must always be in play.

As ever, the movie is likely a melange of these two approaches. In this case, it results in a piece which is a much more sober and dour experience than either The Social Network or The Wolf of Wall Street, and consequently feels far more ‘real’ than either of them- a hard, tough, humourless film about hard, tough, humourless people who smoke incessantly, knock back straight whiskies, sometimes during the day, and communicate with each other in stern, blunt, unbending tones, often involving threats. Their sexual encounters are steely and transactional. When they ‘need to’, they kill people.

Carlos appears to have consciously transformed himself from a human, with emotions, feelings, and implied weaknesses, into a streamlined, efficient instrument of the revolution, for whom sentiment and softness would be pitiable as well as inconvenient, and probably some sort of bourgeois luxury. He is above such feeble nonsense, and intent on making that point as clear as possible with his every inflection, including in his personal life and romantic relations.

That’s how he sees himself, anyway. In the early stages of the picture, Carlos appears calmer and more collected than some other members of his organisation, including his boss, suggesting that he is more reasonable and perhaps more moderate in his beliefs than they are. One might surmise at this point that he is going to be a compelling anti-hero for whom the viewer feels certain twisted sympathies and, against their better judgements, roots for; Édgar Ramírez brings a magnetism to the role which accentuates such a notion. But this doesn’t transpire- it would have been a more simplistic, derivative movie if it had, though arguably more involving. A crucial moment when a pilot declines his handshake appears to mark the turning point in the narrative- we see, amongst other things, that his behaviour does not always engender the kind of respect that he seems to assume without question. We see that his methods do not always have the kind of support that he thinks they do.  

As the years pass in the film’s long diegetic timeframe it turns into a portrait of a selfish and egotistical man becoming old, fat, and increasingly desperate to remain relevant- no surprise, then, that the real-life Carlos tried to block its release. When he tells a prospective girlfriend that he expects complete obedience from her, yet has built his life and reputation around a political stance that purports to be the very apex of egalitarian principle, we have to consider the extent to which Assayas is undercutting this entire belief system, imparting that utterances and attitudes like these are in fact communism’s ‘true face’, and perhaps also making broader points about fringe ideologies in general.

Carlos’s tragedy is that no-one takes him as seriously as he does himself. There are shades of O’Brien in The Tree of Life here as we are reminded again that anyone who insists they be treated with absolute respect at all times, bordering on reverence, will eventually come to see that their demand is untenable; society doesn’t work like that, it won’t simply fall in line with what they want, and in all likelihood people are joking about them in private. The more deluded among them will not realise it for years, and even when they do, will be in so deep that they cannot and will not backtrack.

Such considerations create a platform for me to look at ‘serious men’ that we’ve encountered in earlier movies and the amount of editorialising that may or may not be in play by the filmmaker. Francis Slaughtery of 25th Hour takes himself incredibly seriously, but unlike Carlos or O’Brien, his speech patterns suggest he fancies himself a purveyor of razor-sharp, take-no-prisoners wit. Are we outright instructed not to like him by director Spike Lee, or screenwriter David Benioff? Well, this fool literally brags about how big his dick is and drops racial slurs on his best friend’s girl, so probably, yeah. This is not to say we are intended to dismiss him completely; if nothing else, his shark-like, Wolf of Wall Street-esque attitudes address socio-cultural concerns that carry pertinence for all of us, far beyond the confines of the business world.

How about Lancaster Dodd from The Master? More than any of the three men mentioned so far, he is jovial, sociable and makes conscious efforts toward likability. As I mentioned in my review for that film though, I felt a distinctly unappealing noxiousness somewhere in the more subterranean levels of his character, an effect which can only be exacerbated by high self-regard; in this instance, he is a man who literally claims to have unique sets of answers, to see truths that no-one else does, and self-regard doesn’t come much higher than that.

I could go on. Gerd Wiesler, for example, from The Lives of Others, was obviously a man who was extremely serious. In all five of these cases mentioned so far, I disliked the character in question, feelings that invariably continued beyond the end credits, even when Wiesler’s narrative arc happened to crest with a bittersweet redemption. To take oneself too seriously is a quality that rubs other people up the wrong way, and subsequently these men live lives that are alienated and remote. They may not look alienated and remote- they usually don’t live alone, and are very often surrounded by people, but their relationships with these people are fractured, compromised, riddled with artifice, peppered with discomfort, and shot through with lingering doubts.

Carlos is another film which exists in incarnations of varying length; in this instance, there is some ambiguity as to whether it was originally intended as a cinematic piece at all, as the full-length version is a ‘mini-series’ that lasts a whopping 338 minutes- well over five hours. With this in mind, I thought I might be able to get away with merely watching the 2 hour 45 minute cut, as this collection of reviews is of course based around the 100 greatest films of the 21st century, and was never meant to take in pieces that are not movies by the generally accepted definition of the term. My experience watching this version was, however, frustratingly empty, my distaste for the central character and indifference toward the peripheral ones almost certainly a factor in this. Neither does it help that the movie’s narrative concerns- international terrorism and the political landscape of the 1970s- do not hold a large amount of interest to me. There are also moments where the passage of several years disconcertingly occurs within mere minutes for the viewer. It became clear that to get a more complete picture I was going to have to watch the full five hours of content, which I will do presently.

87. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

Amélie, played by Audrey Tautou, is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I’ve not seen her referred to as such in other reviews, nor on the trope’s Wikipedia page, so perhaps she deviates from it in ways I can’t see, but from my angle she fits perfectly neatly into the description, which has, in the years since Amélie’s release, become cliché.

The term Manic Pixie Dream Girl wasn’t in use in 2001- Wikipedia states its year of origin as 2005- and that might be part of the reason why, at the time, the material was received as so fresh and exciting, instead of how I found it, which was trite, laboured and passé. One way in which Amélie deviates from the usual attributes of the MPDG is that they are usually seen and received through the focal point of a male character, for whom she is the solution, the antidote, to all his emptiness and inner conflict, whereas in this movie, Amélie is presented on her own terms, and we get to see elements of her inner life that would be missing in other films that feature girls like her. However, this inner life is living in a small apartment on her own and working in a café. That’s it. She visits her father sometimes- her relationship with him is thin and insubstantial. She is friends with an elderly man in her apartment block- her relationship with him serves no narrative purpose and revolves around him inexplicably painting multiple replicas of the same portrait piece over and over again. She struck me as a construct, a scriptwriter’s folly, a hypothetical idea of a person, rather than someone that came off the screen as in any way real.

Earlier I mused that the central character of Eilis in Brooklyn lacked ‘beguiling quirks’, a choice of language which was perhaps a little clumsy because it infers that a woman needs to be somewhat quirky to elicit valid feelings of interest from men, something which I don’t believe. But ‘quirky’ is of course a broad term, and can refer to the personality quirks that we all have rather than the tonal areas that are explored by the likes of Wes Anderson and also this movie. My comment about Eilis was instead addressing my perceived flatness of her character; I found Amélie a flat character too, but apparently for very different reasons, since quirkiness is her defining attribute. It’s frustrating to hear her described as an ‘outsider’ by the voiceover man when I know how well she would have been received at hipster parties, which were very prevalent in the years immediately following the film’s release and beyond.

The movie, I guess, is an acquired taste. It’s a piece which is clearly aiming for a particular tone- one of irresistible, life-affirming delight- and the critical response and international recognition it received make it clear that this aim unquestionably found its mark. Against that backdrop, when I saw the film for the first time around twenty years ago, I remember feeling as if I didn’t really ‘get it’ and was distinctly underwhelmed. I expected to better understand its rhythm when I re-watched it through more experienced eyes, having been a teenager last time, but if that did happen, I unfortunately also found that I liked the film even less than I did then; I guess the intervening years have served to somewhat codify my views on what kind of elements I respond to positively in a film, and those that I don’t.

This movie was full to the brim with the latter. Amélie ‘benevolently’ and ‘charmingly’ interferes with other peoples’ lives, as if they were her lab rats, in ways that would make them extremely, justifiably annoyed if they found out. Her love interest, a blank canvas of a man who she barely knows- and neither do we- is someone who she claims to be in love with towards the movie’s end. As I got into its latter stages, I genuinely began to resent watching it and thought it was a waste of time. This isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and neither does it really contain anything overly objectionable, my concerns about Amelie’s meddling interventions notwithstanding. But it wasn’t for me. I thought it lacked the maturity and finesse of a film like The Great Beauty, with which it shared an iridescence and an ‘intimate’ European sensibility; in this instance, I felt that any such intimacy was a façade, and thoroughly skin-deep.

14. The Act of Killing (director’s cut) (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012) 

Previously, as I viewed extended versions of Margaret and The Tree of Life, I found that my second viewings presented me with a different viewing experience, one that ironed out many of the apprehensions I’d had with their shorter edits. Already, then, I wondered if this was going to be the case as I prepared to revisit Anwar Congo and his cohorts, or if I was merely going to be watching a longer version of the exact same film, with the same tone, the same thematic content, and the same general feelings when it finished.

Unfortunately, I found the latter proposition to be true. The gangsters go bowling. Anwar goes to the dentist. Herman brushes his teeth, dripping the toothpaste foam disgustingly- and bizarrely- down his bare torso and over his enormous gut. Anwar picks at his teeth with a pair of pliers.          

Earlier I remarked that ‘the movie’s key narrative arc centres around Anwar, who is the only one of the gangsters to show any real feelings at all, remorse or otherwise.’ I thought that maybe this observation was going to be challenged around the midsection, when a fellow murderer, Adi Zulkadry, makes remarks that were present in the original cut, but that I somewhat overlooked. ‘The communists were not more cruel than us,’ he says. ‘We were the cruel ones. There’s been no official apology, but what’s so hard about apologising?’ Sage, reasonable words…but then, immediately, he tells a happy, offhand story about how he walked down the street killing any Chinese person he saw- ‘dozens’, according to him- including, somehow, his girlfriend’s own father, who he stabbed, hit with a brick, and left in a ditch, just because he was Chinese. Even though he was actually seeing the man’s daughter at the time, who was Chinese herself. It makes not a lick of sense. Then he says ‘The key is to find a way not to feel guilty. It’s all about finding the right excuse. For example, if I’m asked to kill someone, and if the compensation is right, then of course I’ll do it, and from one perspective it’s not wrong.’ Oh, of course. Anwar, sitting beside him, says nothing, looking pensive, unconvinced, and already worried in advance about the nightmare he is likely to have later. One feels he is aware that guilt is the correct response to the circumstances, even though, as I said in my earlier review, he never actually apologises. One feels that he doesn’t want to clear himself of guilt, as Adi has apparently done. He seems to know that that sort of absolution, self-prescribed or otherwise, would defy logic.

Guilt, then, is one of the major themes of the piece, as these men are guilty- guilty of doing things that they unequivocally should not have done, regardless of any societal endorsement- including, of course, good old-fashioned fearmongering- and even when we bear in mind that sweeping judgements are very easy to make from First World vantage points. But there’s also a certain sense of schizophrenia to the film as Adi says things, from one scene to the next, that are wholly incompatible with each other, and even Anwar, whose uncertainty and self-doubt I again found to be easily the most substantial and compelling element of the work, nevertheless sometimes looks perfectly happy and relaxed, grinning from ear to ear and dancing the cha-cha.

If this longer director’s cut achieves anything, then I feel that it was to make Anwar’s capitulation at the end even more pronounced, for the simple reason that there was more build-up to it. This applies not just to the scene where he is retching, but also- perhaps even more pertinently- when he is unable to continue with the murder re-creation he is filming and utters in a weak voice that he just can’t go on. He’s had a small taste of how it may have felt to be one of his victims, and it has left him a wreck.

This is an important film, to be sure, as it is possible that if it weren’t for Joshua Oppenheimer, these events would have been consigned to the dustbin of history and known only to a very select few. I can attest that here in the UK no-one ever talks about ‘the Indonesian massacres of the 1960s’ or seems to know that they ever took place, in direct contrast to many far more famous similar events. However, I felt again that despite its importance, the movie revolves around Anwar to such an extent that without him, and his neatly cresting narrative arc, it would be a much emptier, insubstantial piece with far less human interest. Oppenheimer never appears onscreen himself, so could be said to be operating with an even lighter touch than that of Sarah Polley in Stories We Tell. Nevertheless, we can suppose that, off-camera, he was asking certain leading questions, which is perfectly understandable- it’s his film, after all, he can ask his subjects whatever he wants, and no-one is actually making these gangsters say appalling things. But despite its ostensibly neutral tone, I also felt there was a palpable agenda in the film’s undercurrents that was fully borne out by Anwar’s breakdown. One can’t suggest that Oppenheimer was actually pleased to see an old man rendered crippled by his demons, but purely from a filmmaker’s standpoint, he must have been wiping the sweat from his directorial brow and breathing a sigh of relief. Otherwise, how else would he have ended the film? And what would we have been left with- a piece that suggests you can lead a life committing outrageous homicidal acts and then spend your old age living blithe and somewhat carefree, as everyone here except Anwar appears to do?

10. No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) 

There’s something sickening about No Country for Old Men. There’s something sickening about using a captive-bolt stunner to the head as a method to kill people, especially when you call them ‘sir’ and politely ask them to hold still while you do it.

By definition, then, there’s something sickening about the perpetrator of these deeds, Anton Chigurh, who feels nothing- nothing- when he snuffs out a person’s life. As a viewer, I guess it’s natural that this makes you uncomfortable, displaced and uncertain. How else should you feel, really, towards the act of killing, and the onscreen rendering thereof? Michael Haneke has stated that Salò is ‘the only film that has managed to show violence for what it is’, and though the onscreen content of No Country for Old Men is, of course, much more staid and far more socially acceptable than Salò’s, one feels that on at least some level, the points it makes belong in the same ideological ballpark.

There’s a question as to what the film is actually ‘about’. On the face of it, it’s a thriller with western elements and a palpable undercurrent of intellectualism. But it’s not a thriller, really- a couple of expertly filmed chase sequences aside, it’s not there to thrill, despite comments such as that from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, who opines the movie is ‘entertaining as hell’. For me, the film is many things- it’s somewhat absorbing, from a certain cerebral angle, it’s unquestionably intelligent, but it’s not entertainment. It’s an essay. It’s a violent movie that comments negatively on its own content and forces you to really analyse the kinds of things that other films will so cheerfully depict. Could this be a direct criticism of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez? Possibly, especially when both filmmakers have made westerns with aesthetic elements that resemble this picture, but their films have got style, wit and verve, and violence is merely one facet of those filmmakers’ respective creative palettes. Instead, if we are indeed to assume that the movie is intended as a critique, then it might be more likely to be criticising steamy thrillers in the mould of Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct, which seem to present murder as part of the same exhilarating tapestry as sex, or killer-as-good-guy movies like Death Wish, Dirty Harry and Taken, which aren’t set in the cartoonish fun-cool worlds that Tarantino and Rodriguez tend to occupy but ones that are far closer to our own, and seriously seem to convey the message that violence, at least sometimes, with supposed circumstantial caveats, is something to be applauded.

As much as it is about anything else, then, I feel that the movie is about the actual act of killing, and the discrepancies therein- how one person can kill someone else, accidentally or otherwise, and it will be the most devastating thing that ever happens to them, leaving them a guilt-addled mess (the proverbial ‘most of us’), whereas others can take a human life with full malice aforethought and be thoroughly unperturbed- then, like Chigurh, continue to do it again and again on an indefinite basis.

Would he kill a child? It’s something the film doesn’t address- maybe it doesn’t feel like it needs to, as such a consideration may simply not be part of the film’s fabric. This is contrasted by, for example, Ben from Man Bites Dog, who absolutely can and absolutely does kill children- that movie, like this one, coincidentally also begins with our homicidal anti-hero garrotting somebody from behind. Similarly, Patrick Bateman, in the book of American Psycho, also kills children, for nothing, at least in his fantasies, something which the movie notably omits. Why? Too distasteful? It’s a questionable judgement call when one elects to adapt source material that is already so distasteful in the first place.

If this movie’s timeframe is an accurate representation of his killing habits, proportionately, then Anton Chigurh would probably be the most prolific serial killer of all time. I guess there have been real-life figures like him who have existed- Richard Kuklinski, say- but their numbers don’t match what Chigurh’s would be if adjusted for inflation, especially when we consider that he might kill someone every single time he needs to get past a hotel reception desk or is asked a potentially awkward conversational question by a gas station clerk. Chigurh struck me, therefore, as a symbolic representation of concepts rather than an actual human- the concept of fear, for example (the proverbial ‘all our fears’), or the kind of abstract ‘ill wind’ that I mentioned when covering Werckmeister Harmonies, or perhaps just death in general, echoing works such as the 17th century poem Death Be Not Proud, where John Donne addresses it directly as something of an anthropomorphic entity.

In the context of this movie, then, death can come at a time that is completely unexpected and inopportune, when you are just going about your regular business, as many of Chigurh’s civilian victims are when he lands upon them, or alternatively, as Woody Harrelson and Kelly Macdonald do, you might get some level of advance warning- a terminal diagnosis- and spend a small amount of time staring death in the face and somewhat negotiating with it, desperately trying to find rhyme or reason. It gets some of us when we’re relatively young, like Macdonald, and some of us when we’re older. We might have a ‘brush with death’- a blood clot or stroke- that we manage to survive and leaves us deeply shaken, just like the gas station clerk played by Gene Jones.

Such conceptual theories go some way to ‘explain’ erroneous details of the film, such as why law enforcement seem to have absolutely no chance of catching and stopping Chigurh, or why Woody Harrelson goes quietly and willingly to the hotel room with him when he has nothing to lose from making the killer do his business in the more difficult, relatively public setting of the corridor. It goes some way to explain how Chigurh seems to have no trouble getting into an upper echelon of a private office block, shooting someone in the neck in front of a witness, taking time to stand over them and watch them gurgle and die with no hint of any need to make a quick getaway, and then apparently getting out of the place easily with no resistance or fuss; if Chigurh were real, he would probably be subject to one of the biggest manhunts of all time, not a search that was contained to a solitary, elderly Texan sheriff and a lone bounty hunter of questionable competence. These theories would also explain how, for example, he is able to get into Macdonald’s house in broad daylight without leaving any noticeable signs of a break-in or raising the attention of the neighbours. But they don’t explain a scene where Chigurh has a car crash- do Death, or Fear, ever have car crashes, even metaphorically? Or the scenes of Chigurh obtaining supplies and subsequently cleaning and bandaging his wounds- is that something that Death, or Fear, even in theory, ever do? Is all this supposed to make sense, or is No Country for Old Men trying to pull something of a Headless Woman on us (despite being the earlier film)?

You could maybe compare Chigurh to John Ryder in The Hitcher, another character whose apparent invincibility and bizarre fortuity suggest that he is not really supposed to represent a person, but something rather more abstract. An important difference, though- Ryder, like the aforementioned Patrick Bateman and Ben in Man Bites Dog, is seen to actively enjoy killing people and does it for nothing, whereas when Chigurh kills someone, there is always a supposed reason behind it, even if it is paltry in the extreme, and he is never overtly shown to get pleasure from his activities, as opposed to them merely being some morbid means to an end. I guess this makes him more unusual than them in the annals of popular culture, harder to pin down or properly define, and distinct also from the likes of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. 

In any case, earlier I described Synecdoche, New York as ‘absolutely saturated with death’ and I had a similar feeling here. We’re less than five minutes into the picture and not only has Chigurh already killed three people but Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Bell has also described the deaths of two others in his introductory voiceover. Then Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss, in the course of trying to kill a deer, comes across an entire fleet of cars filled with cadavers. Death, death, death and more death. Towards the film’s end, Sheriff Bell visits his uncle in a quiet, calm, weary scene. The uncle lives alone, squalidly. It is clear that these two men are approaching death. They might not die tomorrow, or the next day, but they are in the final stretches of their lives, something compounded by Bell’s retirement from work- ‘the beginning of the end’, as some might say. He mentions at the end of the picture that he has already outlived his father’s age by twenty years. He is on borrowed time. There is no mention of what he is going to do with what little he has left.

These are the sorts of themes that I’d neglected to grasp from previous viewings of No Country for Old Men, or to the extent that I did grasp them, I resented them. I was now seeing it for the third time, and in the lead-up to this latest viewing, did not look forward to it at all. It’s never been a film that I’ve liked- I had problems with the movie’s disrespect for narrative and its overarching tone, even if I couldn’t really fault the execution. While these issues haven’t completely gone away, it’s clear that the movie has all sorts of aspects going for it, even if these aspects are shrouded in a philosophical framework which is distinctly unappealing and, at times, downright ugly. One wonders, then, how justified I am in denigrating a film just because I don’t like the message it sends, especially as I have taken other critics to task for doing such a thing regarding Dogville. So I don’t know. I certainly appreciated the movie more on this third viewing, but ‘appreciated’ and ‘enjoyed’ are not the same thing- I am reminded of a whole subculture of ‘horrible’ and somewhat ‘sickening’ art that is clearly not supposed to be enjoyed by the likes of Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon and Zdzisław Beksiński. I am now aware that just because I don’t like something, it does not necessarily mean the artist is at fault, and in this case, the Coen brothers have crafted a work that it as brutally efficient as its antagonist, though I would still hesitate to follow in the footsteps of my critical contemporaries and call it any sort of masterpiece.

29. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) 

I had to watch WALL-E twice.

The first time, it barely left any impression, and I was surprised to find that the ample enjoyment I received from Ratatouille, Inside Out and Finding Nemo, and the easy praise I was subsequently able to give them, were not forthcoming here. It wasn’t easy to say exactly why, though it certainly seemed apparent that its plot didn’t tick along with the buoyancy with which those three movies’ narratives had fizzled.

So I came back a few weeks later and I watched it again. My reaction was roughly the same, though I felt I was perhaps able to identify the film’s intentions a little better- basically, I think its titular character, a small robot, is meant to evoke bittersweet notions of incredibly touching, Chaplin-esque naivety, as is his ‘relationship’ with EVE, a sophisticated lady robot, which eschews traditional dialogue and is expressed almost completely through action and inflection. It’s an understated film, then, and I guess such understatement is to be commended. It’s also something of a risk, and unfortunately it was a risk that didn’t really pay off for me. I can imagine very young children finding it enchanting, as they themselves communicate without full speech, but the adventures of WALL-E, who is clearly shown to be possessing great traits of pluck, determination and heart, left me with a set of dissatisfied queries, not least the Socratic question of whether one can really be considered ‘brave’ when they are not cognisant enough to recognise danger or even know that it exists.

Elsewhere, live-action footage of Fred Willard is interspersed with the animation. Why? Why didn’t they get him to do a voice role and animate his character too, thereby making the movie visually consistent? Such a gripe may come across trivial and petty, and it is, but it’s also an incongruity which helps to indicate, albeit indirectly, why I wasn’t particularly convinced or compelled by WALL-E. Far be it for me to say that this movie isn’t ‘good enough’ or that it should have been executed differently. Like all Pixar movies, it looks fantastic, with a sequence that sees WALL-E and EVE perform, with fire extinguishers, an iridescent double-helix ‘dance’ out in the void of space being a particular highlight. But overall, it just didn’t really click for me. It was okay- that’s all, just okay, and in the context of the other three Pixar films we’ve covered, that signifies a significant depreciation.

51. Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

What do you want from a film?

Great visuals? A compelling plotline? Bravura technical aspects?

A cerebral, existential investigation of the psyche that probes at the fragile nature of our perceived reality?

An ensemble cast filled with Academy Award winners and some of the hottest, freshest talent of recent years?

Ingenuity? Espionage? Explosions?

A teasing, open-ended final shot that essentially leaves the film hanging, unended, forever?

It’s all here. In what is surely a display of Christopher Nolan’s multifaceted talents at their fullest extent, his sumptuously lavish, fiendishly clever, outrageously entertaining seventh feature is a true moviegoer’s feast, and sees him, in the role of both writer and director, showing how devastatingly good he can be when working with a particular type of material and a (very) considerable budget.

Although this is a film that I have loved for years, it’s not one that I have watched time and time again, with this viewing being, I think, the fourth time I have seen it. As I settled down for what I thought was going to be a pleasant re-tread of a piece whose qualities I was already convinced by, and not intending to watch the whole thing in one go, I was blown away anew by its creativity, its fluidity, its precision, its audacious verve and its thoroughly magnificent set-pieces.

The characters are not really fleshed-out people- they’re ciphers who are there to serve the narrative, while the dialogue is similarly functional. Nevertheless, every single one of its supporting cast, most of whom will be more used to giving lead performances, are fully capable of wringing out the necessary dimensions from their roles to provide the movie with its human element, thereby- of course- aiding and abetting the considerable narrative thrust.

Like Synecdoche, New York, much of Inception takes place in man-made, constructed settings that mirror our own world, but are distinct from it (that movie, incidentally, also featured several stellar lead actors in smaller roles). Inception’s conceit is that we are inside dreams, but with a caveat- they are not free-forming dreams as we know them but were consciously devised by an ‘architect’. Such dynamics also recall Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Jim Carrey’s Joel Barish- and by extension, us- spent time inside the landscape of his mind and saw some of the scenes playing out there, but they weren’t dreams, and though he was re-visiting moments from his past, they weren’t straightforward memories either, but fully open to modification, albeit with less control, less planning and more ad hoc improvisation than the situational circumstances laid out by Inception. Although this film, then, has a much different tone and genre than either of those Charlie Kaufman-scripted pieces, one could posit that it sometimes resembles what might result if Kaufman was to pare back his screenwriting eccentricities and consciously try to produce something that was a mainstream, money-spinning endeavour designed primarily to excite audiences.

Either way, it’s a cracker. I loved it when I first saw it back in my twenties, and I love it now- I guess there are still a few things that time hasn’t managed to dilute, and this remains one of them.

100. Carlos (full-length version) (Olivier Assayas, 2010) 

This unabridged edition of Carlos is split into three episodes, all of which are feature-length. As part one comes to a close, there’s a conversation between two men, allies and co-conspirators of our titular character. One says to the other ‘Carlos scares me. Life means nothing to him.’

‘He’s a soldier. A leader. You’re under his command,’ comes the imploring reply.

‘I’m a political militant,’ the first speaker returns. ‘I hate armies and soldiers. I fight for a cause.’

‘So does he,’ insists the second man.

‘I’m not so sure,’ retorts the first.

Neither am I. Indeed, this is not the first time in the picture that the integrity of Carlos’s motivations has been questioned. Earlier, when he tells a fellow revolutionary that ‘The fight I propose will lead us to glory,’ she shoots back ‘Glory? That’s what you want- to be admired! That’s what drives you! Bourgeois arrogance hidden behind revolutionary rhetoric!’

These sorts of criticisms and doubts come naturally to the company Carlos keeps, a shifty bunch who live under the shadow of potential betrayal and subsequent arrest. One can deduce that communism is so puritan that, sooner or later, falling afoul of its principles is almost inevitable as they persistently cast sidelong, sceptical misgivings over one another’s perceived conviction; they are also forever pledging that they would ‘give their lives for the cause’, adding the very real possibility of early and violent death to this list of stressors. Still, even with these considerations in place, there’s just something about Carlos that makes you wonder what his driving impulses really are. He’s such a self-important ass, who so clearly believes he is the shrewdest, most capable person in the room, that it doesn’t seem plausible for altruism to figure very highly in his thinking, if at all.

He issues demands, for example, to the French Minister of the Interior which he is told will not be heeded, as ‘Public opinion prevents them from giving in.’

‘So war it is,’ he responds, letting us know just what he thinks of ‘public opinion’, and that his needs and his principles come conclusively before theirs. 

Another scene sees Carlos, in the midst of a major siege he has conducted- the ‘OPEC raid’- take one of his hostages aside for a cordial man-to-man chat, during which he insists that his convictions are the same as that of the Venezuelan president, Carlos Andrés Pérez.

‘He’s a man of peace with great respect for human life,’ comes the rather brave reply.

‘So am I,’ says Carlos, erroneously, before continuing ‘Men of honour have nothing to fear.’

This comes after an interaction during the same siege sequence, which forms the centrepiece of both the film and the three-part miniseries, where he takes the Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia into another room and makes a grandiose, rambling speech proclaiming that he is going to kill him, but also exerting that the two of them share close bonds and are ‘men of the same calibre’.

Honour. Glory. Conviction. Calibre. Elsewhere, his speech is also peppered with words like ‘imperialism’, ‘Zionism’ ‘nobility’ and ‘destiny’. He talks the talk. Unlike his contemporaries, who don’t seem to care whether people outside their organisation like them or not, Carlos is preoccupied with making his case, validating himself, striving to reach a reconciliatory point where his revolutionary politics and radical militant activities co-exist with accepted mainstream tenets of sound judgement, moral fibre and an overtly masculine sense of mutually understood respect.

Are these exchanges the ‘key’ to comprehending Carlos’s attitudes, and are they subsequently the ‘key’ to decoding the overall work? Are we supposed to recognise and accept that he is a contradictory character who can’t be taken at face value and, amongst other things, claims principles that he doesn’t have? In parallel to this knotty dynamic, Assayas contrasts scenes that are very veristic next to others that are clear exercises in style, while hot sexual content and bursts of blood-spurting violence are also injected into proceedings, their necessity questionable. Why, for example, do we need to see Carlos open up the robe of Nora Waldstätten’s character, Magdelena Kopp, giving the viewer a nice good look at her lithe alabaster body, and then put his hand between her legs? What has that got to do with terrorism? Why, for that matter, do we need to see Carlos full-frontal nude, not on just one occasion but two? Is it meant as a reflection of how closely we are engaging with a portrait of his inner life? Why- and how- is he smoking a cigarette in the shower?

It's questions such as these that make one wonder exactly what Olivier Assayas wanted to achieve with this piece, and what exactly has resulted from his efforts. Like No Country for Old Men, it has some elements that suggest a thriller, but it isn’t one. Unlike No Country for Old Men, it’s not a western, or a noir, or an existential thesis, or a grim meditative think-piece. I don’t know if you can even call it a biopic, really, as most biopics cover their subject’s formative years, and parentage, and relationships with their siblings; here, we don’t even see what drew Carlos into revolutionary politics in the first place.

To borrow a phrase that I used while covering the uncut edition of Margaret, this full-length version of Carlos feels like it has more oil in its joints than its more concise counterpart, and is altogether a more rounded experience. This is no surprise- there are nearly three hours of material missing from the other one, so it seems almost inevitable that such omission will make it feel clipped and lacking a certain something. That’s not to say that this version brought with it a much-improved clarity of vision- it didn’t. What ground it gained in cohesion was lost in its laboured, convoluted plot points and extreme length; I hadn’t liked the movie first time around, and I certainly didn’t want another 170 minutes of it. One of its more notable aspects, for me, was how this hulking five-and-a-half hour behemoth merely served to amplify just how many mistresses Carlos gets through, and that for someone who is supposed to be living a life of high principle, he indulges his vices just as much as the next man, probably more. 

Some of the editing decisions for the movie version make perfect sense. One is able to observe that the siege sequence, the ‘OPEC raid’, survives fully intact- perfectly understandable, as it is easily the work’s most stylish and effective section. Meanwhile, it is part three, the strangest, least straightforward segment, which suffers most in the cutting room, and not always in ways that one can fully comprehend. At one point, for example, Magdelena Kopp, arguably the second most important character of the entire piece, is arrested and serves a prison sentence lasting years, a storyline completely missing from the movie. Even more pertinent is the omission of a scene in which Carlos aggressively grabs a young woman with whom he is engaged in a sex act and, for no reason, assaults her. The rendering of Carlos in the movie version was far from positive, but he was not shown in this sort of light. A character can be a control freak, a misogynist and a bully without necessarily performing acts of physical violence; we’ve all seen examples of men like that in reality, and we have also encountered them in some of these previous films, The Tree of Life perhaps being the most pertinent recent example. Yet this longer version of Carlos makes it clear that he isn’t limited to these relatively discreet, comparatively ‘respectable’ methods of subjugating people, and leads the viewer to wonder where exactly his behavioural line is. Roger Ebert, who appreciated and liked Carlos much more than I did, commented that ‘Given the opportunity, he might have made a Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot’. That seemed hyperbolic when I saw the shortened version without this scene- in that piece, he does commit murder, but always with some ideological basis or to escape arrest, and never in a way that suggested genocidal predilections to me. Those acts were less shocking and less repellent than the fully gratuitous, sexually-based assault of a defenceless woman. I guess Roger’s comment still seems a little hyperbolic now, but less so. Maybe the relatively measured Carlos from earlier in the picture who prevents Nada (Julia Hummer) from committing a bloodbath and identifies her- correctly- as a crazy bitch, is by this point a faded memory, a remnant of the past.

In any case, certain tonal aspects of Carlos are a little reminiscent of The Wire, another work that took a composed, unsentimental look at criminal activity and also contained strong sexual content without ‘explaining’ or signposting its narrative justification. The Wire’s depictions of sex and nudity appeared to remind us that we, as viewers, were being treated like adults, and were watching a strident, forthright piece containing the kinds of material that other shows might typically be too timid to include. In this aspect, The Sopranos operated along similar lines, as did successors such as Boardwalk Empire. However, as I mentioned when covering City of God, The Wire comprised fifty hours of content; the contextual buffer for its occasional sexual material, then, was firmer than it is here in Carlos. It also featured far more plot strands and many more characters than Carlos does- while this piece does have an unusually large cast, they all revolve around our insufferable central figure, a man who, amongst other pleasantries, at one point states outright that he ‘doesn’t trust women’. Immediately following this particular comment, the woman he makes it to- the aforementioned Magdelena Kopp- succumbs languidly to his sexual advances and then marries him. A subsequent wife is an exquisite vision of youthful Latina vitality. One gets the uneasy impression that criminal behaviour and general odiousness can sometimes come with serious benefits, a message that was easier to swallow in The Wolf of Wall Street when it was delivered with both jocular buoyance and flippant insincerity.

The Wolf of Wall Street was also just a really fun film to watch, while this one, to put it bluntly, wasn’t. There have been many other movies across the course of this project that weren’t ‘fun’ either, but for one reason or another, I appreciated them anyway; unfortunately, Carlos isn’t one of them. I struggled with it the first time around in its shorter version, and here I struggled with it again. The performances were good, and the technical aspects, especially the period detail, were good, and the direction and the craftsmanship were all good too, but for me it just wasn’t enough. I found the piece inconsequential, trifling, far too protracted, and often extremely dull. Unless you’re really interested in the man and his life, or the particular strain of hardline political ideology that the piece engages with and how it can be thematically interconnected with the excesses of the male ego, then I’d give this one a miss.

3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) 

Daniel Plainview is an enigma. The opening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s dust-blown opus shows him digging, alone, in an underground well. There have been no establishing scenes to tell us anything about this character. We don’t know how he has come to be there. We don’t know anything about his past or his motivations, and what little we discover over the course of the picture is largely open to interpretation.

Having seen the film before, I now knew what kind of person Plainview was- or, at least, the person he was going to turn into (spoilers ahead). I found this made the movie much easier to decode. That’s not to say I understood Plainview’s subsequent behaviour- I didn’t- but when he spends the first hour or so of the picture coming across like a taciturn, driven guy whose intentions might be relatively genuine, I knew that this was not the case, and I was not perplexed as he devolved into someone else.

Someone who doesn’t have a scrap of decency in his entire body.

Like American Psycho, or Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, There Will Be Blood presents us with a character who is a candidate for Worst Person Ever. Any human qualities are a conscious imitation of things they’ve seen other people do and say, and exhibited solely as a means to getting what they want in a given situation. I don’t think Anton Chigurh necessarily qualifies for this particular list, because he doesn’t have the same oily nuances in his character; he doesn’t strike me as someone you could readily meet in your day-to-day life- at work, in the pub, at the supermarket, or in positions of local authority- whereas these other three, at least in concept, definitely are. In this case, Plainview reminds me of that terrible teacher or despicable boss who is constantly in a bad mood, irrespective of whether there is any discernible reason to be, visibly bristles at the very hint of being questioned or challenged, erupts at perceived slights and thinks nothing of talking to people like they’re pieces of shit- insists on it, in fact- yet can throw a respectable, firm-but-fair, ostensibly level-headed veneer over their personality when it suits them; for good measure, Plainview throws false humility in there, too.

In this analogy, Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday is that pupil/employee who the teacher/boss inexplicably has it in for. Sure they’re rude to other people too, but there’s that one person for whom there’s clearly something deeper going on and they save a special reserve of bile. The perceived flaws of the bullied victim become exaggerated and take on the form of insurmountable transgressions- in this case, Eli is an irritating upstart who needles Daniel with pestering requests, assumes his devout religious ideology is shared, or at least deeply respected, by everyone around him and has an inflated sense of his own self-worth. Their antagonistic relationship develops to the point where Eli does eventually give Plainview just cause to dislike him, but only after he has been severely provoked himself in the form of a physical assault, and in any case, Plainview’s baseless contempt for the young man is palpable immediately. The movie, on one level, could be characterised as a back-and-forth between these two characters as they each attempt to establish dominance over the other and both enjoy points at which they are ‘winning’.

Earlier in these reviews, I have made reference to my previous distaste for There Will Be Blood, a film that way back in about 2010, I thought lacked purpose, finished through gritted teeth and in echoes of Anderson’s Inherent Vice, ultimately felt was playing some sort of facetious game with me. I am now perfectly happy to admit that I was completely wrong. I did, in fact, enjoy There Will Be Blood considerably. As stated, I feel that much of this was down to my ability to observe Plainview, and his character’s descent into utter detestability, from a more informed vantage point; I also knew how the film was going to end, so wasn’t blindsided or shocked by it. Quite the contrary- I laughed. The sequence was an extremely effective piece of coal-black, teasing, mordant slapstick comedy, very much at odds with its preceding material without, I felt, cheapening it.

Why does Daniel do what he does at the end, though? We can deduce that his extreme wealth has not brought him happiness- that’s plain to see. Still, after having achieved such affluence, why does he choose to spend the rest of his life in prison just to put paid to Eli Sunday, who is nothing more than a mosquito to him? One possible answer is that Plainview has lost his grip on an already-fragile sanity, and in fact, one of the movie’s most notable and enjoyable aspects is how colourfully Daniel Day-Lewis is able to portray swivel-eyed mania yet still (mostly) remain the right side of ham. Another possible answer is that there really is just something about Eli that touches Daniel on an extremely raw level- he might not even know quite why he hates him so much, and doesn’t necessarily care, but simply chooses to wallow in the hatred without analysing its causes. In the end, that may be his defining attribute- not his wealth, not his determination or drive, but his hatred for this little twerp, and in the end, it’s the hill he has chosen to (figuratively) die on.

David Denby of The New Yorker opines that There Will Be Blood is about ‘the driving force of capitalism as it creates and destroys the future’ and points out that ‘in [the characters’] undreamed-of future, Walmart is on the way’. He’s absolutely right, of course, though unlike Werckmeister Harmonies, the film strikes me as more than just a feature-length allegory and I think the characters and the narrative progression are not meant merely as symbols. Nevertheless, the ways in which Daniel Plainview represents capitalist thinking are thoroughly self-evident, both in a general sense with an attitude which disregards the wellbeing of anyone but himself and is characterised by naked greed, but more specifically when, through speeches that resemble advertisements, he pretends to be honest, trustworthy, and on the same page as the community, holding the same trenchant and upstanding values that they do and promising to work in tandem with them towards a common goal.

Here another potential reason for Daniel’s hatred for Eli can be put forth. One could suggest that the 20th century saw capitalism displace religion as the masses’ drug of choice, with huge supermarkets and shopping malls becoming, essentially, our new churches, and the two titans going head-to-head, especially when we consider that religion advocates a simple life of few possessions and comprehensively dismisses the kind of temporal gratification brought about by consumerism.

In any case, of the films that superseded my initial opinion of them from several years ago- Fish Tank, Children of Men, Spring Breakers, or to a much lesser extent, The Royal Tenenbaums- this was the one where the re-appraisal was the most dramatic. The most obvious reason for this would be that this time, I watched it through more mature, considered eyes, and though that’s certainly true, up to a point, it seems too pat an explanation for why my reaction was so different, as does the suggestion that I simply wasn’t ‘in the mood’ for the film first time around- if anything, I approached it with more reticence this time, discouraged even further by my dubious experience with The Master and my thoroughly exasperated one with Inherent Vice. Sometimes, of course, you just ‘get’ films much more when you watch them through again. Though I still don’t think it’s perfect- it lags somewhat in the middle, and the ‘brother’ sub-plot felt a little tangential- There Will Be Blood nonetheless comes highly recommended for the discerning moviegoer, as long as they don’t mind their cinema being scabrous, caustic, cavalier with tone and form, and containing nothing in the way of warmth.

2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

‘That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists any more.’

‘He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.’

These phrases appear on title cards as Wong Kar-wai’s supremely delicate, extraordinarily understated romance drama comes to its sedate but commanding conclusion. These sentiments end the film on a strong, evocative note, and quoting them perhaps helps me end this project on a similarly strong note too, even though, of course, we’ve still got our no. 1 film to cover and we’re not quite at the finish line yet.

Earlier I expressed reservations about the potentially reductive quality of comparing Moolaadé to Timbuktu- was I being lazy in leaning on the list’s only other African film as a reference point? It seems natural, though, that one would sometimes spot certain through-lines in films that share a geographical and cultural background, and so it is that I find this movie noticeably evoked the other Asian movies on this list, particularly Yi Yi: a One and a Two. This is partly down to simple question of setting, as much of the film takes place, like Yi Yi, in the narrow corridors and cramped apartments of an anonymous, nondescript residential block, the restrictive nature of these dwellings adding extra dimension to the characters’ struggles for emotional and spiritual freedom. I felt further parallel with the Edward Yang epic, as well as Syndromes and a Century, when I sensed that Wong Kar-Wai was trying to wring poetry from commonplace situations and the kind of conversational exchange that you hear all the time in your own house but very rarely in movies, especially ones that aim squarely for conventional notions of entertainment and solid plotting; such dynamics are likely to come directly from the grandmaster, Yasujirō Ozu, a clear forerunner for and influence on this sort of cinematic storytelling.

There are really only two characters in In the Mood for Love; everyone else is essentially a prop, including two figures, pivotal to the narrative, who are kept offscreen completely and, for the viewer, exist only as concepts- ‘others’ for our central pair to play off of and be the antitheses to. Nevertheless, I was reminded again of Yi Yi with the presence of a buffoonish side character whose purpose, one assumes, was comic relief. Despite their similarities, the cinematographic distinction between Yi Yi and this film is profound- the naturalistic look from the Yang movie has been substituted for a far more overtly cinematic palette of deep, rich hues and a masterfully precise handling of light and shade- one particularly striking visual involves a simple streetlamp at night-time, under a sheet of shimmering rain.

It’s very pretty. It is, quite literally, a very pretty picture. It’s thoughtful, quiet, calm, dignified, and it’s also concise- an easy film to like, then, and an even easier one to respect. Nevertheless, the cynic in me feels that perhaps it is so understated, so exceptionally elegant, that it edges toward contrivance. That same cynic also wonders why it is called In the Mood for Love when it showcases two people who appear to be very much in the mood for avoiding love and erecting all manner of abstract, ephemeral obstacles to impede it. Rarely, if ever, have two people arranged regular clandestine meetings with one another and gone to so much trouble to keep their trysts under wraps, then proceeded to behave so innocently. In that sense, In the Mood for Love has something of a wholesome quality, in contrast to our next and final film which will examine that singular pain of lovesick yearning from a much more expressionistic and decidedly more adult angle. As with many of our previous movies, it is very much in the eye of the beholder how much meaning and general appeal one will find in this material, and its hyper-restrained tone- its ‘wholesomeness’- as approached and presented in this particular way. I found myself admiring much about the picture, not least its rejection of easy answers and its clear focus on an artistically valid ethos over more ignoble aims, whilst nonetheless remaining relatively unmoved by the sum of its overall tapestry. The ‘relationship’ between Chow and Su- a ghost relationship that recalls the hauntology I touched on when covering Brokeback Mountain- is based around implication and allusion to such a degree that it sometimes comes across almost stillborn. They define themselves by what they’re not- that is, adulterers- so resolutely that it threatens to obfuscate what they are- who they are, what they stand for, and why exactly they feel the way they do. Earlier I referred to the movie as a ‘romance drama’, but on reflection, this is apparently a romance drama without any actual, tangible romance in it; I feel, then, that this movie is less about love or romance than it is about regret, disappointment, and how politeness, etiquette and high-minded principle can sometimes get in the way of happiness. No-one is going to give Chow and Su medals for their self-discipline, for not stooping to the level of their cheating spouses, and if they were to act on their feelings, their friends, neighbours, and busybody landlady would be scandalised for a few scant weeks by their supposed indiscretion and then move on to something else. Instead, however, in echoes of similarly abstruse acts of absolution featured in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, we find that Chow feels the need to lock his ‘secret’ away within the stones of a Cambodian monasterial wall. What, though, is so secret, so unmentionably private, about the events of the film, especially when Chow no longer lives in that same localised area?

Is his unsayable ‘secret’ merely that he still loves a woman who belongs to his past, who he should have moved on from, but just can’t let go?

Join the club.                                                                              

1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

There’s something rotten and fetid nestling in the underbelly of Hollywood.

Beneath the glitz and the bright lights lie veiled threats, sinister secrets and dark, discordant dread.

Sound familiar?

Like the hidden nastiness that accompanied small-town life in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, or the insistent layer of fear and discomfort that underscored the entirety of Eraserhead?

As with practically every other David Lynch piece, Mulholland Drive is a real kettle of fish, boasting a plot you can’t fathom- not in any linear sense, anyway- and a cavalier fusion of disparate, ostensibly incompatible elements. It’s undeniably accomplished, and for most of the picture it is actually one of his more coherent works, as he presents us with a reasonably involving narrative about ‘Rita’, an amnesiac woman, who has been in a car crash, and Betty, a plucky would-be actress who has arrived in tinseltown to pursue her dreams. Both ‘lost’ in their own ways, and both exhibiting archetypal qualities, they try to uncover the details of the car crash and find out who Rita really is. Over time, this develops into a tender romantic relationship which ultimately feels like the heart of the piece. These events play out in parallel with an unrelated story about an arrogant young director who gets caught up in an impenetrable conspiracy, and through this lack of relevance from one tale to the other, the movie risks coming across muddled and disjointed, something which, of course, has never bothered Lynch in the slightest. The two storylines appear to somewhat ‘come together’ in the final reel, albeit in an abstract sense, but to these eyes, there’s nothing substantial about this supposed convalesence and in this I think the film betrays itself somewhat as the remnants of a projected TV series.

One genre after another is touched upon. Betty’s arrival in Hollywood, full of hope, recalls a raft of similar heroines from the Golden Age, usually ready to burst into song. Rita’s storyline, as well as her sultry, buxom appearance, is embedded in both classic film noir and every successive thriller that took its cues from that framework and made heady, foreboding atmosphere its raison d’etre. Then, when Justin Theroux’s director character catches his wife in bed with Billy Ray Cyrus, it plays like a comedy, albeit a relatively dry one, something which is then emphasised further when he attends a mysterious meeting with neon-pink handprints all over his suit. Another comic sequence, which includes slapstick, sees a hitman make an absolute botch job of a contract kill. Later, there are two scenes where the film is closer to horror than any other movie on this list, including Let the Right One In- firstly when our heroines take an illicit search through a dark apartment and (spoiler alert) stumble upon a dead body, then later, at the film’s climax, with an utterly nightmarish sequence involving two evil octogenarians.

Fittingly then, just as the film dips its toe into a bristling bouquet of genres, it also sometimes feels, as mentioned earlier, like a grab-bag of elements from other David Lynch works (more spoilers). The preoccupation with coffee from Twin Peaks is here, as is Michael J. Anderson in a non-sequitur cameo. The double personalities from Lost Highway are, eventually, in full evidence. The queasy, uncomfortable eroticism from Blue Velvet raises its head, firstly when Betty plays out a heavy-breathing make-out session with a sleazy, much older actor who forcibly pulls her towards him and wants to play the sequence ‘nice and close’, then also later, when her alter-ego masturbates vigorously while crying. And numerous scenes of women singing, especially an extended sequence of Rebekah del Rio performing in front of a curtain, call to mind both Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet and the Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead.

There are two ways to look at these derivative elements. One is that through re-iterating and re-constituting themes from his other works, Lynch is accentuating the auteur nature of his oeuvre, and Mulholland Drive is thus something of a career-defining magnum opus. The other is that these qualities are now feeling like re-heated food and starting to go a bit stale. Though I don’t think this is a bad film- far from it- I generally tend toward the second supposition than the first. This may largely be due to my cold sense of displacement toward the collapsing narrative- I wanted to know how Betty and Rita’s story played out, even if it all ended with sadness and disappointment, instead of things being completely cut off without warning and the two of them just disappearing into the ether forever.

The presence of not one but two director characters further emphasises the meta, self-referential feel; Lynch also seems to be making sideswipes toward casting-couch culture and the sordidness that young actresses are expected to willingly engage with. Simultaneously, he lets us have long, indulgent looks over the undressed bodies of Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring, so he is somewhat having his cake and eating it- fittingly for a film like this, the ‘message’, such as it is, is muddled.

So I have mixed feelings about this one. On a positive note, for a film which didn’t ultimately make any sense and was a myriad mishmash of conflicting tones and shifting textures, it was very watchable. I enjoyed the performances, especially from Watts, but also Harring in her more subdued, introspective role, and a nicely convincing Justin Theroux who was able to slightly underplay his character’s sardonic tendencies and keep them from becoming too jarring or alienating.

In echoes of Caché, Theroux himself said of Lynch’s attitude to analysing the film’s events: ‘I think he’s genuinely happy for it to mean anything you want. He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations.’ I don’t think there is any reading that completely stands up without at least one small element or another contradicting it, but nevertheless, I might as well suggest a theory, which I doubt is original and has most likely occurred to many previous viewers in the twenty years since the film’s release. This is that the much shorter second part of the movie chronologically precedes the first. Rita is really the actress Camilla Rhodes, and the gun that is pulled on her just prior to the car crash represents the hit that was put out on her by Diane, outsourced by the guy that she actually hired. ‘Betty’ is a construct by Diane, who prefers embodying personae over being herself, and is buoyed by Camilla’s prospective death, seeing it as a ‘fresh start’, reflected in her new character’s pluck and positivity. Either through quirk of circumstance or meticulous planning on her part- the latter would mean that the hit was not, in fact, intended to be successful- the two of them re-convene and Diane uses her acting training to take advantage of the situation and manipulate a relationship from it, the relationship she always wanted, one with overtones of forced sweetness and utopian romantic perfection.

The big flaw with this theory- which, I should say, is merely a casual suggestion and not something I’m completely sold on or convinced by- is that, of course, Diane shoots herself in the head at the end. Is it a metaphorical death as she undergoes the process of transforming herself into Betty? Who, then, is the body in the bed, whose ghastly face Lynch insists we look directly into several times?

Who knows. This is, of course, just the last in a multitude of films throughout this project that leave the viewer with more questions than answers, and in Mulholland Drive’s case, its smouldering sexuality and searing sense of unfulfilled desire linger along with them after the final credits too. Ultimately, it’s a daring, distinguished and- of course- distinctly unusual piece from one of cinema’s most singular mavericks. It is also, arguably, a resounding victory for style over substance.

Afterword 

So we’ve made it. 100 whole films- or to be more exact, 102.

This project came about, more or less, on a whim. I guess that’s the case for most ideas, really- they don’t come from any concrete origin point, and they’re not necessarily accompanied by any seismic moment of inspiration or epiphany. 

In keeping with its inauspicious genesis, the beginning stages of the venture came about in meagre little dribs and drabs, including one period lasting well over a year, from early 2019 to late 2020, when I barely worked on the project at all and started to think that it might not happen. Without wanting to congratulate myself too much, then, I can’t quite believe I’ve done it. I didn’t really realise the full scale of the project, and what I’d gotten myself into, until I was about 40 films in, by which time I knew I had to plough on, come hell or high water, since I’d already done too much work to let it go to waste.

Modest foundations aside, the roots of this project probably lie in a Film Studies A-Level that I undertook from 2002 to 2004 at Hyde Clarendon Sixth Form College in east Manchester when I was aged 17 and 18. My tutor was called Louise Gooddy- outspoken and unconventional, she wore leather jackets and swore freely during her lessons, coming across like a cool older sister or auntie. Crucially, I felt that under her tutelage we were spoken to and treated like equals- not ‘kids’, or plebs that needed keeping in line, or chancers who were taking that class looking for an easy ride, but people that she liked and respected, who were given the benefit of doubt if needed, and who were implicitly assumed to share the same passion and interest for film that she had. As the intervening years have flashed past, and having had to deal with some truly disgraceful people along the way, I have come to value these sorts of traits inordinately.

During the course, we undertook modules on film noir, and Italian neo-realism, and the history of censorship, and the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s, and we learnt about technical terminology such as mise-en-scène, much of which I have unfortunately now forgotten. I fully intended to take my interest in the subject through to university level, but was talked out of it. Ostensibly, this is highly lamentable, but on the other hand, if I had continued down that road, then this collection of reviews, though perhaps written earlier, would have been completely different. It would effectively not exist.

Such academic study, which at the time I took seriously, followed by subsequent negligence over the next 15 or so years, left me in something of a purgatorial limbo where my critical capabilities were concerned. There were a number of directors whom I’d spent plenty of time reading about but had never actually beheld first-hand. I knew who Michael Haneke was, for instance, before I started writing, and his status, but The White Ribbon was my first experience with one of his movies, and my review reflected this naivety, hopefully imbuing it with that exciting sensation of fresh, new experience and emphasising the possibilities of pleasant- or, indeed, unpleasant- surprise. If I had seen Benny’s Video and Funny Games and The Piano Teacher beforehand, then it would have been a different piece, with perhaps the kind of drily informative and casually knowledgeable tone that we have seen in one professional appraisal after another over the years. The same goes, I guess, for the raw candour of my Goodbye to Language review- unencumbered by any residual reverence for Godard, any lingering respect that may have been carried over from memories of his classic films, I was able to scrawl a missive that not only took his abstract doodlings completely on their own terms but also reflected their iconoclastic ethos; this ‘fresh’, quasi-layman approach does, I guess, occasionally entail being something of a brat.

So I have tried to bring something relatively new to the table. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. Partly through lack of other option, I have tried to turn the holes in my moviegoing knowledge to an advantage, in the process aiming to strike a certain middle ground between stone-cold rookie and unflappable expert. Will there be people who say I’ve failed miserably? Of course there will- there always are. But I’ve written the piece I wanted to write, and if its audience is limited, then I can always content myself with that. If it has an intended reader, then I suppose it is the kind of movie enthusiast that I am- one who knows a little about film history, who can namedrop directors if necessary, but for whom there is still much learning to be done, and a whole galaxy of unseen films to further discover.

In general, I’ve really enjoyed the experience, and I hope that’s come through in the writing, even when I’m describing feelings of annoyance or frustration. No-one wants to read 100 reviews of bland positivity, and on occasions when I’ve been catty, sarcastic, or outright disrespectful, I hope this is received in the spirit that was intended- that opinions are opinions and I don’t necessarily think mine hold any more inherent truth or correctness than the next person’s. Moreover, I often quite enjoy reading or hearing from people whose views are at odds with my own- it reminds me, if nothing else, that art and culture and expression don’t exist to please everyone all the time, and that’s a good thing. That’s what makes them what they are, and if we all had exactly the same taste, then we would live in a completely different and infinitely inferior world, with a thoroughly stillborn cultural landscape.

I have used some of these movie reviews to explore my own concerns regarding the passage of time and how powerful- and painful- the subsequent feelings of nostalgia can be, as well as uncertain trepidation about the future. Fittingly, Hyde Clarendon Sixth Form College, the setting for some of my fondest memories, both inside and outside of Louise Gooddy’s classroom, and one of my strongest reference points should I want to mentally re-visit the painfully naïve but sepia-toned years of my late teens, is now non-existent- it was demolished in 2018 after three years of disuse, as if further reminder were needed that time has marched on and left this period, among a great many others, firmly in the dust.

What more is there to say, except to thank you for reading this, even if you didn’t like it, and show particular appreciation to you for having stuck with it all the way to the end. I’ve referenced Roger Ebert enough that any further acknowledgement of his influence is probably not needed, especially when he’ll never see it himself, but I’ll make it nonetheless: Roger opened my eyes to the possibilities of film criticism, and showed me that analysing cinema doesn’t have to be bloodless, that a reviewer can evoke their own memories and other aspects of their personal lives in their reviews if they like- even certain biases, if they’re willing to defend them. As many other commentators have extolled, reading Roger Ebert felt like a friendship, and it was as if you knew him. His work was completely accessible, both figuratively and literally, as one can browse his website at leisure, a key factor in how I was able to enjoy his work so extensively, and presumably why his cultural footprint seems so noticeably larger than that of a similarly respected contemporary such as A.O. Scott.

Finally, I would just like to dedicate this collection of reviews, and the website in general, to Margery Dean, my grandma, one of the most wonderful people who ever lived.

We still miss you every day.