This is the fourth version of A Star is Born, for whatever reason, but I’ve not seen any of the others so I won’t be making comparisons. I’m sure the story has been modernised (the last version was made in the ’70s, with the previous two in the ’50s and ’30s) without losing its fundamental essence: successful musician (here, Bradley Cooper) uncovers a new talent (Lady Gaga) who comes to outshine him. I guess it’s a timeless tale in the age of celebrity.

Singers-turned-actors have a mixed history, though casting one in a story such as this is fitting, given how you need to believe they’re a top-drawer musical artist. Fortunately, Gaga actually can act as well as sing, so she’s an unqualified success here. The headline song, Shallow — a duet between the two leads, which attracted even more attention for how they performed it at the Oscars — is… perfectly fine. People went a little too crazy for it at the time, I feel. But it’s given weight by how well it’s used in the film, so I guess that could sway you.

Also pulling double duty (well, triple if you count the singing) is Cooper, directing for the first time. (With all the talk this past awards season about how desperate Cooper is for an Oscar, it’s easy to forget that Maestro was only his second time behind the camera.) I seem to remember there being some complaints when he wasn’t nominated for direction for this one, but I think that was a fair omission. It’s not bad, but his directorial choices are a little too wavering. Like, in the early scenes, when the camerawork is all a bit documentary-ish, is effective — it undercuts the “glamorous story”, the almost-inherent fakeness of Musical as a genre, by making it feel Real. But later he gives in to glossy stylings too often; and too many of the song performances are captured with a lazily floating camera, lacking focus or decisiveness. It’s how they often shoot musical performances on TV: just kind of nothingy, moving the camera back and forth and side to side for the sake of making it ‘dynamic’. But, when you remember this is his first film, that’s fine — there’s a lot more good than bad about his work behind the camera.

A Star Is Born was #18 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

For a long time, there was Groundhog Day. And then someone had the bright idea, “what if Groundhog Day but mixed with another genre?” So now we’ve had the sci-fi version (Edge of Tomorrow), and the horror version (Happy Death Day), and the YA version (The Map of Tiny Perfect Things), and the “what if there were two people” version (Palm Springs), and the TV series version (Russian Doll)… Here, we get the action movie version. And it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect and hope “Groundhog Day as an action movie” would be. That’s praise, not criticism.

Interestingly, considering the context I’ve chosen to place this in, the film itself acknowledges — you might even say relies on — the fact we’ve all seen time loop movies before. Rather than begin at the obvious beginning (i.e. the hero’s first loop), the story starts dozens of loops in, then fills in the backstory with flashbacks later on. It’s somewhere between a sensible choice (who hasn’t seen Groundhog Day?) and a bold move (what about people who haven’t seen Groundhog Day?) That said, I imagine people in the latter group can still follow it, it just might be what’s going on is mysterious for longer (most of us will instantly get “he’s in a day-long time loop”, they’ll just have to wait for that information to become clear).

In fact, it’s a pretty economical movie across the board, hitting the ground running and rarely letting up. There’s very little repetition of “the same stuff every day”, instead taking our hero off in different directions. It does lean on voiceover quite a lot to get through some of the exposition, which won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it means it can hurry through the technicalities and get to what we came for — action and gags — so I can let it slide. On the basis of the kind of entertainment it’s designed to deliver, Boss Level succeeds admirably.

Boss Level was #160 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021.

Given the precipitous rise of AI in the past couple of years, I don’t know how relevant this documentary from 2020 still is. Back then, it was ultra-timely, but tech evolves so fast, I have to wonder if it’s already dated. Well, if you want to find out for yourself, it’s on Netflix.

Not that it’s just about AI. It touches on a lot of interesting tech-related topics, like how facial recognition struggles with non-white people, or how algorithms were increasingly being allowed to control… pretty much everything. It makes a lot of broadly scary declarations about these things, but often lacks the detail to back them up. Not that it’s necessarily wrong, but it doesn’t prove its point; doesn’t clarify what’s scary beyond the gut reaction that this all sounds scary. This is partly because there’s so much to cover — it keeps jumping around between topics in short vignettes — which at least makes clear what a big field this is. There are also signs of hope, with the film offering some solutions (primarily: regulation in law) and highlighting fantastic people (almost all women, incidentally) doing great work to combat these things.

Ultimately, the areas the film explores are interesting and it’s sometimes informative about them, but it’s also unfocused and disorganised in its structure, which is a shame.

Coded Bias was #243 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

I feel like Shadow of a Doubt sits in a certain tier of Hitchcock film; one where it’s not one of his very best known (Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, etc), but regarded well enough that it definitely has its fans, for some of whom it probably is Hitchcock’s best film. Hitch himself repeatedly said it was his favourite of his own work, chiefly because he enjoyed how it brought menace into the surface-level perfection of small-town America. One critic has even described it as Hitchcock’s “first indisputable masterpiece”, which I would certainly dispute considering its predated by the likes of The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and Rebecca. Well, taste is relative.

Personally, while Shadow of a Doubt definitely has a neat premise and strong moments, overall I felt it lacked any of the truly exceptional elements that mark out Hitch’s real classics. Sure, if most other filmmakers had made it, it’d probably be one of their best; but you’re competing with an incredibly strong body of work if you’re a Hitchcock film and, for me, this one is definitely second-tier. Of course, as I just intimated, being a second-tier Hitchcock film is still some achievement. It’s a shame the relative hype for this one is leading me to focus on the negative. Heck, maybe I’ll like it even more when I rewatch it someday. Until then, I feel it missed the mark of my expectations in places. I even thought it was the kind of movie someone could remake and possibly get something really great out of. (Blasphemy!)

Shadow of a Doubt was #90 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2023. It was viewed as part of “What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?” 2023.

The earliest (surviving) animated feature film is an ‘Arabian Nights’ fairytale about… well, the short version is in the title.

But story schmory, because the real star here is the medium itself: Lotte Reiniger’s animation. There are so many wonderful little bits of work, it’s impossible to list. Consistent throughout, it’s remarkable how much character and personality Reiniger manages to convey through her ‘simple’ cutout silhouette puppets. Then there’s little naturalistic details, like boats bobbing on the water. Some of it even feels surprisingly modern. Not massively so, perhaps, but it doesn’t have that staid, stilted formality you might expect from a hundred-year-old rendition of a fairytale. And that’s not to mention the homosexual subplot. Plus, there’s so much more to the style than just silhouettes on plain backgrounds. There are shades and effects, to add depth or style: the wavy lines of a river; a mountain range fading into the distance; and subtler and clever things, too. It’s a visual feast.

The restoration could be better, mind. There are a lot of dirt and scratches, which I can live with (there are so many of these, it would have to be manually patched up frame by frame, which would cost a fortune), but more egregious are stability and alignment issues. For example, during one scene, the top part of the next frame keeps appearing at the bottom. Surely that could’ve been fixed?

Better is the soundtrack. The BFI Blu-ray offers a choice: the original 1926 score by Wolfgang Zeller (recorded in 1999) or an English narration (with effects), based on Reiniger’s own translation of her German text (recorded in 2013). Having watched the film with both, I’d say the narration adds nothing of value to the experience, especially as it sounds like narration from a preschool storybook. Just stick to the original music.

But however you watch it, minor technical issues can’t distract from the artistry on display. This is truly the work of a master of her craft. Magnificent.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed was #35 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021.