Archive 5, Vol.10

Posted on March 27, 2024 by badblokebob

I have a backlog of 520 unreviewed feature films from my 2018 to 2023 viewing. This is where I give those films their day, five at a time, selected by a random number generator.

Today, we’ve got quite the variety, from Oscar nominees to straightforward action entertainment; from super-timely recent documentaries to pioneering animation from almost a century ago. But they’re all connected by… the fact I wrote some notes after I watched them. Thank goodness, otherwise reviewing some of them years later would be bloomin’ impossible. (That’s not much of a connection, I know, but it was on my mind after In the Mood for Love last time.)

This week’s Archive 5 are…

A Star Is Born (2018)

Boss Level (2021)

Coded Bias (2020)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

A Star Is Born

(2018)

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.

Boss Level

(2021)

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.

Coded Bias

(2020)

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.

Shadow of a Doubt

(1943)

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 Adventures of Prince Achmed

(1926)

aka Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed

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.

Archive 5, Vol.9

Posted on March 15, 2024 by badblokebob

I have a backlog of 525 unreviewed feature films from my 2018 to 2023 viewing. This is where I give those films their day, five at a time, selected by a random number generator.

Today, a couple of Agatha Christie adaptations from very different eras; plus a heist, a horror, and a Hong Kong love story for the ages.

This week’s Archive 5 are…

Evil Under the Sun (1982)

Sneakers (1992)

Us (2019)

Crooked House (2017)

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Evil Under the Sun

(1982)

The third in the run of Poirot adaptations that began with Murder on the Orient Express and continued with Death on the Nile — no, not the recent Branagh ones: this is the first time they did exactly that. But, funnily enough, both third films in their respective series (i.e. this and Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice) take a UK-set Christie and relocate it somewhere more exotic, to fit with the style of the rest of the series. So, rather than a small island off the north Devon coast (which likely stretches the definition of “under the sun”, based on my experience of Devon), here the action is located to the Adriatic Sea, although actually filmed on Mallorca.

All of which is incidental when the rest of the movie is, at best, fine. It doesn’t help that the storyline is ultimately very similar to Death on the Nile, making the whole affair feel like more of a rehash than it needs to. Guy Hamilton’s direction underwhelms, giving a TV movie-ish feel, which is only exacerbated by the less-starry cast — there are recognisable names and faces here (James Mason, Diana Rigg, Maggie Smith), but, in totality, it’s not in the same league as the previous two films. It rather prefigures where Ustinov’s Poirot would appear next: literally, TV movies.

Evil Under the Sun was #2 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

Sneakers

(1992)

I never paid Sneakers any attention (not that it came up often) — I think, because it’s an American movie called Sneakers, I assumed it was about shoes — until indie magazine Film Stories announced a Blu-ray release (long since sold out, I’m afraid). I’m always keen to support small/new labels doing interesting things. And thank goodness for that, because, turns out, it’s actually very much my kind of film and good fun.

So, turns out, in this context, “sneakers” are not an Americanism for trainers, but good-guy hackers who test security systems. When the team are hired to steal a code breaking device, they get suspicious about the setup and, of course, it turns out they’re right to be. Thus unfurls a tech-based heist thriller with a strong vein of humour, but without tipping over into being an outright comedy. Stylistically and tonally, that’s right up my street — I love a heist movie, and that kind of tone (funny without being silly; what I think of as a ‘real world’ awareness of humour) often works for me. It’s the kind of film that’s just a lot of fun to watch. I can imagine it being highly rewatchable; a go-to favourite for people who do that kind of thing.

Sneakers was #132 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021.

Us

(2019)

Part of what made Jordan Peele’s debut feature, Get Out, such a success was the way it chimed perfectly with the cultural zeitgeist of 2017; indeed, of the whole decade (time may yet add “of the whole century”). This immediate followup doesn’t benefit from a similar boost, but it’s a strong work of horror cinema in its own right.

Us follows a family who are attacked by a group of doppelgängers. That’s the most basic version, anyway — Peele seems to have a lot of ideas he wants to mix in here; almost too many. It seems to operate on the level of a home invasion/slasher kind of movie much of the time, but having more on its mind means it’s a bit too slow to satisfy as something so viscerally straightforward. Thus, all the Meaningful stuff ends up crammed into the third act, which perhaps leaves it feeling back-heavy. There’s also a big twist, naturally. On one hand, it seems really obvious, pretty much from the beginning; but on the other, it does cast the rest of the movie in a different light, which is quite interesting.

If all that sounds rather negative… I blame my notes (I’m writing this review over four years later based solely on what little I wrote down at the time). Us is imperfect, but it’s also great in places, and is at least passably interesting to reflect on in light of the final reveal.

Us was #23 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

Crooked House

(2017)

Despite a moderately starry cast (Glenn Close, Terence Stamp, Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks fresh from Mad Men; plus Brits of varying degrees of recognisableness) and a screenplay by Julian “Downton Abbey” Fellowes, this Agatha Christie adaptation was virtually dumped straight to TV here in the UK (apparently it did have a theatrical release, but the TV premiere was less than a month later — and on lowly Channel 5 at that). Of course, some of the best Christie adaptations have been made for TV; but when something’s designed for theatrical and ends up skipping it, it’s never a good sign.

Fortunately, Crooked House isn’t a disaster, though it’s far from a resounding success. Quite what attracted the big names I don’t know — it’s a reasonable setup (big dysfunctional family), but the screenplay isn’t exactly sparkling, aside from one or two moments or scenes. There is, at least, one helluva resolution. It also feels disjointed thanks to poor editing and/or direction. If the aim was to keep the pace up, it failed, because it begins to drag after a while. All of this is only partially masked by decent cinematography from Sebastian Winterø, which is the only thing that saves it from looking very TV-ish. Maybe it found its rightful home after all.

Crooked House was #1 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

In the Mood for Love

(2000)

aka Fa yeung nin wah

If my four-years-late review of Us was hampered by largely-negative notes, my four-years-late review of In the Mood for Love is in even worse shape: no notes at all. Some trivia? I can do that! An interesting quote from the director? Got it saved! But anything on my own thoughts beyond settling on a five-star rating? Nope. I would try to repurpose my Letterboxd review, but all I wrote was: “I mean nothing but respect when I pithily describe this as Brief Encounter in Hong Kong.” Accurate but, indeed, pithy.

On the bright side, this is a widely-acclaimed film, so if you’re after in-depth writing I’m certain you’ll find some somewhere else. Indeed, even if I did have more fulsome notes, I doubt I’d contribute anything more insightful. This is a subtle, almost delicate work, and that’s the kind of thing I feel I often struggle to properly get to grips with in my short, usually spoiler-averse reviews. Suffice to say, I concur that this is a very good film indeed; although, as with any understated work, some might prefer if the feelings and emotions were more overt. Each to their own.

In the Mood for Love was #200 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020. It was viewed as part of Blindspot 2020.

Dune: Part One (2021)

Posted on February 29, 2024 by badblokebob

aka Dune

Trying to write about a film like Dune in a critical context over two years after it was released feels a bit… pointless. I mean, the film was a hit (albeit by mid-pandemic standards); and if you did miss it first time round, the hype around the sequel has surely already piqued your interest and/or left you cold, in which case what I say isn’t likely to be a deciding factor. Of course, yay/nay recommendations are not the only reason for critical writing — far from it — but, if you’re looking to do more than that, you better have something to say. So I confess here and now, for the sake of any readers looking for that kind of article, that I don’t think I have a unique or revelatory or even particularly insightful take on Dune — or Dune: Part One, as I’ve insisted on calling it ever since the wonderful surprise of seeing its opening title card (and sites like IMDb have finally got on board with too). All I can offer is how the film struck me personally, from my particular perspective; which is not nothing, but is what it is.

So what is my perspective? Well, I’m far from a newbie to the world of Arrakis, though I can’t now remember in what order I first encountered the various texts related to it that I’ve experienced. So, going chronologically, I have read Frank Herbert’s original novel. Famously, it’s a doorstop of a tome, so I must have been relatively young because, for whatever reason, I’ve struggled to get through long books for the past couple of decades (I’ve tried Lord of the Rings two or three times and never got much further than Tom Bombadil; I started Shogun over four years ago and my bookmark still sits about halfway through it — and I did enjoy both of those! I just don’t have the staying power to get to the end). But I can’t have been that young, given the book’s subject matter and style, and the fact I enjoyed it. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say it’s one of my favourite novels. I’ve never read the sequels. I’ve long intended to (see: previous comments about lack of staying power when reading).

I’ve also seen the 1984 David Lynch film, naturally — an interesting but fundamentally flawed endeavour — and the 2000 miniseries (and its 2003 sequel), which I remember being widely acclaimed — and I would have agreed with that sentiment — but it does look rather dated now, and so I’m somewhat wary of rewatching it (though I recently bought an expensive Blu-ray edition imported from Australia, so I certainly intend to at some point). The point of listing all that is this: I do not approach Dune free of expectation. Quite the opposite. And yet, I also didn’t have a specific vision in mind. And when you’ve got a director like Denis Villeneuve in charge — a director with a very definite and particular style — you know you’re going to get his interpretation of the material, so the more open-minded and receptive you are to that, the better. I mean, unless you’re on his exact wavelength, your imaginings are not likely to be the same as his, especially if you’ve allowed them to be shaped by one of the previous films, or even the concepts from unmade versions, like the one so interestingly documented in Jodorowsky’s Dune.

All of this a very long-winded and self-centred way of arriving at my point that, on first viewing, Villeneuve’s Dune took some adjusting to, because it wasn’t quite… right. Having said I went in with no expectations, clearly I had some, buried somewhere in my mind. And yet, the film also felt like exactly what one should have expected from Villeneuve if you’d seen his previous work, not least the sci-fi film he made immediately before this, Blade Runner 2049. The worlds of Blade Runner and Dune are very different, but, as filtered through the mind of Denis Villeneuve, there are distinct aesthetic similarities, most apparent in the brutalist influence in much of the world design. That starkness is quite at odds with the fanciful, sometimes even downright weird, takes on the material that came from the minds of creatives like David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky; or even the miniseries, which, while I little more staid and constrained by a TV budget, is seemingly as influenced by fantasy TV of the period as by its science-fiction stablemates. With most previous visualisations of Dune leaning into such fantastical choices, Villeneuve’s (for want of a better word) realist take was, initially, a shock to the system.

That’s a slightly disorientating feeling to be dealing with when watching a film for the first time. Thanks to the story and characters and scenes being so familiar, the mind is freed up to focus more on the surrounding decisions. Even when trying to be open-minded about them, there’s then some kind of disjunct between things that are very recognisable being presented in a very unrecognisable way. There’s also a kind of tug-of-war going on between the feeling that Villeneuve has been allowed to interpret the text exactly as he sees fit, and that’s a good thing because we’re getting his vision across the project, and the sense that it’s something of a shame to miss out on the craziness present in previous interpretations. After all, Dune is set 20,000 years in the future (you may recall it’s set in the year 10,191, but that’s not AD, it’s numbered from an in-universe event — look, let’s not get into the backstory here; but when you see articles mindlessly parrot “Dune is set 20,000 years in the future in the year 10,191”, know that the article writer is mindless because they haven’t bothered to query the maths, not because they’ve done the maths dramatically wrong) — think how different technology has made our world from three or four thousand years ago, so how much wilder and weirder could things get if you multiply that by a factor of five or six? None of which is to say Villeneuve’s choices are wrong, or even that I don’t like them, but they took some getting used to. On my recent second viewing, with the benefit of awareness of what I was about to see, I was able to enjoy the overall experience much more; it settled the qualms I had from my initial viewing and made it easier for me to appreciate the magnificence of the achievement.

Another point of contention (if we can go as far as calling it that) was where the film broke off. I’ve read some retrospective reviews recently that expressed their disappointment when the film suddenly ended mid-story, which I guess goes to show how not all marketing and information reaches all people — I thought it was well-known that this was to be Part One, and that a followup conclusion was dependent on its box office success (hence my pleasant surprise when the film so brazenly declared it was just Part One on its opening title card, not even saving that fact for a ‘surprise’ reveal on a closing title card, a la It), but there were definitely people who went in not knowing that and found it frustrating. Should it have been made even clearer? Should the film have formally been titled Part One in its marketing? Well, the reaction to various “Part Ones” released this year (like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Fast X, and Across the Spider-Verse) suggests that audiences don’t really like only getting “Part One” ever; but, conversely, their acceptance of it depends on how it’s handled — how satisfying the movie leading up to the break is, and how the moment it stops is handled. But this is a whole side debate that I’ve stumbled into without adequate preparation (I’ve not even seen two of the three films I just mentioned), so I’m going to swiftly redirect us to Dune.

Where Dune: Part One ends is, frankly, where I always thought it would. Other fans were more surprised by its choice, so perhaps it’s just too long since I’ve read the novel or watched another version and I just couldn’t remember a better break-point at approximately the halfway mark. The screenwriters could, though, because apparently the film originally carried on a little further in the story, before the endpoint was moved in the edit. It’s not the most dramatic place to pause the story or end a film — it doesn’t come after some big action sequence or major plot twist, nor on a cliffhanger of any kind — but I think it largely works. It reminded me of The Fellowship of the Ring, possibly the greatest “Part One” film of all time, in that in no way whatsoever does it feel like the end of the story — we’re definitely only in the middle somewhere, and there’s clearly a whole lot more to come — but it feels like a solid place to pause; like we’ve experienced the whole of a part, if that makes sense.

There was some minor brouhaha the other day during the press for Part Two when someone asked Villeneuve about telling the story over two films — I didn’t pay it too much heed and it didn’t really blow up, so I forget the precise question and answer — but, as many pointed out, adapting Dune in a single film has been attempted before and famously didn’t work out, so doing it in two on this re-attempt shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Certainly, as a fan, I’d rather a two-part adaptation that gives the story the necessary screen time, even if that means a somewhat limp end to Part One, rather than have the whole book in a rushed three-hour single shot. And if early reviews of Part Two are to be believed, it’s paid off overall.

But more on that ‘next time’, when I see Part Two myself and offer my verdict — hopefully in a more timely fashion than this, rather than waiting several years until the hoped-for Dune: Part Three, aka Dune Messiah (I’m not sure which title I’d rather they go with if/when it happens…)

Dune: Part One was #176 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021. It placed 5th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2021.

Dune: Part Two is in cinemas worldwide from tomorrow and will be reviewed in due course.

The Kid Detective (2020)

Posted on February 22, 2024 by badblokebob

Sometimes a movie (or a book, or a series, or whatever) comes along with a premise that you wonder why someone hasn’t thought of sooner (with the inevitable caveat that, sometimes, someone has and you’re just not aware of it). The Kid Detective is one of those occasions (or was for me, at any rate) — what would a ‘kid detective’ (you know, like the Hardy Boys or the Famous Five or whatever) be like when they grew up?

There’s a few different ways you could spin a setup like that, and here writer-director Evan Morgan takes a fairly realist approach: the “kid detective” in question, Abe Applebaum, was a quirky story for the local paper when he was a child, investigating “mysteries” of the schoolyard variety; but when a real crime takes place and he (unsurprisingly) fails to solve it, that’s the end of the fun and games. Nonetheless, as a 32-year-old adult (played by Adam Brody), Abe has tried to keep his childhood fantasy going, running a real detective agency. Except there’s not much to actually investigate in a small town, and the fact he’s never grown up leads to derision from all around, rendering him a miserable washed-up has-been. So when a high schooler (Sophie Nélisse) asks him to investigate the murder of her boyfriend, Abe sees a chance to finally prove himself.

When I say “a premise you wonder why someone hasn’t thought of sooner”, I suppose what I also implicitly mean is “something I am interested in”; something that scratches an itch I didn’t even know I had. Of course, that automatically creates expectations — even if you can’t state them exactly, you now have a notion of what you want out of this thing; of the itch that needs to be scratched. Fortunately, The Kid Detective was everything I expected it to be and more. It’s a successfully amusing extrapolation of its premise. It kind of has to be a comedy, because the basic idea is too silly to take seriously in the ‘real world’, and it manages that without tipping over into farce. But, somewhat remarkably, it’s also a solid mystery in its own right, with a surprisingly moving conclusion. It’s a balancing act that shows the validity of comedy-drama (aka dramedy) as a tone. It’s a mode that’s sometimes dismissed as “not funny enough to be a comedy, not affecting enough to be a drama”, but when it works, it’s arguably more like real life than either of those extremes.

It also doesn’t mean the film has to play broad. Take Brody’s performance, for example: he balances the sardonic humour and introspection just right, rendering Abe believable as someone who is actually pretty darn clever but has lost his way and self-belief. Or there’s the ‘big denouement’, which is just two characters sat at a table talking. It’s both relatively understated and means the finale arrived at a point where I (at least) wasn’t quite expecting it, making it all the more effective and powerful. With hindsight, maybe I should have seen where it was going, and so maybe you could argue the film suckered me. But, you know what, I’m glad it did. It’s nice to be surprised by a mystery’s resolution. It happens too rarely as you get older and become narrative-savvy and everything’s predictable. One moment even gave me goosebumps, and you’ve got to love anything that can elicit such a physical reaction.

Clearly, I was the target audience for this. I couldn’t have told you I wanted it, but when I heard about it I was eager to see it. As I said, that has both pros and cons: to the former, I’m ready to be won over; to the latter, raised expectations can lead to disappointment. Fortunately, The Kid Detective aces it and I loved it.

The UK TV premiere of The Kid Detective is on Film4 tonight at 9pm, and available to stream on Channel 4’s catchup service for 30 days afterwards.

It was #147 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021, and placed 4th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2021.

The Best of 2023

Posted on January 7, 2024 by badblokebob

My review of the year reaches its end in the way it always does: with the best films I watched for the first time in 2023, plus a few honourable mentions, and a list of notable new releases I missed.

For almost a decade now, my annual “top ten” has actually been my “top 10%”, the final total of entries taking its cue from how many first-time watches there were that year. Well, this year there were 103, and 10% of 103 is 10.3, which rounds down to 10 — so, for the first time since 2014, my top ten is actually a top ten. Huh.

The Ten Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2023

As alluded to in the previous paragraph (but I’ll spell it out again), all the movies I watched for the first time in 2023 are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. In the past I’ve also provided a yearly rank for the films that were released during the previous year, but in 2023 I only saw 17 such films, and less than half of them were what you’d call “major” releases. More to the point, only one of them appears in my top ten, so there’s not much point providing a “2023 ranking”.

So, let’s crack on…

10 Confess, Fletch

Once played by Chevy Chase in a couple of ’80s films I’ve never seen, here Jon Hamm takes over the role of Fletch, a journalist who seems to have a habit of getting embroiled in mysteries. Hamm is one of those guys that Classic Hollywood loved but we don’t see enough of anymore: typically handsome fellas who can also be hilariously funny. That makes him perfect to lead this comedy thriller, which manages to be consistently bouncy fun while also unspooling a pretty decent mystery storyline. We deserve a whole pile of sequels, but I suspect we won’t get any. I guess I’ll have to see if those two earlier flicks measure up, or maybe even read the books.

9 Night and the City

The basic plot — small-time hustler with big ambitions gets in over his head — feels familiar from many a noir, but the devil’s in the details, which here include an absolutely superb performance from Richard Widmark as wannabe-somebody Fabian and first-rate direction by Jules Dassin, plus a post-war London setting that brings a different flavour than the genre’s usual LA/NY locales. Fabian may have only been “so close” to greatness, but Dassin certainly achieved it.

8 Elevator to the Gallows

Louis Malle’s debut tells a film noir narrative with a dose of French Nouvelle Vague style, which results in an unpredictable thriller with a kind of tragic beauty and casual existentialism you don’t often get from the genre’s hard-boiled American counterparts.

7 The Killers

The first screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story covers the original work in its opening sequence — and what a sequence it is — before spinning off into an entirely original narrative to explain the backstory to that opening. Following an insurance investigator as he pieces together one man’s life, it’s like noir’s answer to Citizen Kane; and, at its best, that’s a comparison it stands up to. Burt Lancaster’s swagger belies this being his screen debut; screenwriter Anthony Veiller juggles a nonlinear storyline to revealing effect; and director Robert Siodmak gets to show off with scenes like a single-take heist — and that opening, of course, which was so good, the two hitmen characters who briefly star in it earnt their own (radio) spin-off.

6 In a Lonely Place

One of the great things about film noir being a trend that was observed retrospectively, as opposed to a genre that had been codified and its makers were aware of, is that you can come across well-established and widely-agreed noir films that don’t feel much like anything you’d expect of the ‘genre’. That’s true of these next three entries in my top ten (yes, from #9 to #4 is a straight run of noir). In a Lonely Place starts out like a Hollywood-insider screwball comedy, with wry observations of the industry and amusing rat-a-tat dialogue. But then there’s a murder — suddenly, oh so noir. But kinda not really, because what follows is more of a character study. To say too much would be spoilersome, other than to add that Humphrey Bogart’s performance starts out as fairly standard fare for the star, but develops into something incredible.

5 Mildred Pierce

Even more so than In a Lonely Place, here’s a noir that’s almost (almost) one in technicality only. James M. Cain’s novel about a housewife struggling to make her way, while contending with a self-absorbed and demanding daughter, has been described as a psychological thriller, but plays on screen as a familial melodrama — except screenwriter Ranald MacDougall’s adaptation adds a murder investigation framing device, sliding it sideways into noir. The end result runs all three simultaneously, to magnificent effect.

4 Sweet Smell of Success

At first blush, this might not look like your typical noir: it’s centred on a grifting New York talent agent (Tony Curtis, in what feels like the role he was born to play) and an influential newspaper columnist (Burt Lancaster, also excellent), the former desperate for the attention of the latter to promote his clients. Hardly the world of private dicks and gangsters and femme fatales that you’d expect of the genre. But, really, noir is about the dark side of the American dream, and that can play out as well in the cutthroat world of Broadway as anywhere. Like every great dystopia, it’s made to seem so appealing you want to be part of it, even as we’re shown that to actually live it would be horrid.

3 Oppenheimer

There’s been a sense from some quarters that Oppenheimer represents writer-director Christopher Nolan finally realising his potential as a Serious Filmmaker, making this clearly his best film. I don’t know about that (I love Bond-type films at least as much as Nolan himself, so my taste still errs toward The Dark Knight and Inception and maybe even Tenet, and we can’t disregard The Prestige or Interstellar either), but there’s no doubting this is his most “mature” work to date. It is, to be clear, a stunning achievement — a three-hour partially-black-and-white character-driven drama, mostly told through scenes of men (and occasionally women) sitting in rooms talking, that is gripping throughout. But even that description is reductive, because there’s so much more going on in the way Nolan tells this story — the juggling of time; the use of montage. He’s always done that kind of thing to an extent (Memento, Inception, and Dunkirk foreground it), but here it feels less formalised, more intuitive, and that pays dividends.

2 Everything Everywhere All at Once

It took me a long time to get round to this, meaning it had been through multiple praise/backlash cycles, so I approached it with an odd mix of hype and trepidation. As it turned out, it’s very much My Kinda Thing: science fiction with big ideas; character drama with big emotions; action with a sense of fun; all cut with enough comedy and bizarreness to take the edge off any earnestness, but without undermining the heart. And when I say “bizarreness”, I truly mean it — it’s not just “ooh, a little quirky”, but tossed through with crazy, random concepts. I’m sure some people find that kind of thing off-putting, but for me, it just makes it all that much more fun.

1 Glass Onion

If Knives Out felt zeitgeisty in its pillorying of rich people, Glass Onion is full-on prophetic: the character the plot revolves around is a thinly-veiled spot-on parody of idiot-billionaire Elon Musk, but the film was only released as the depths of his stupidity were beginning to be publicly exposed. His disastrous reign at ~~Twitter~~ X has only further clarified the parallels. If Glass Onion has a problem, that may be it: its cast of influencers and wannabes are sometimes more caricatures than characters. Or maybe that’s just the fault of the vapidity of the modern world. Either way, it offers a murder mystery narrative full of clever reveals and reversals, rewarding both if you try to second-guess it (good luck) or just allow yourself to be swept along. [Full review.]

As usual, getting the 103 new films I watched in 2023 down to a top ten proved a challenge. Indeed, as the statistics ultimately revealed, this was a year of high quality, so it follows naturally that it would be hard to narrow it down to just a small number of favourites. Now, while I always include some “honourable mentions” at this point in my “best of” post, I don’t normally just list films that almost made it in to my top ten. I figure if I’m going to do that, I may as well just expand the list. But I’m making something of an exception this year, simply because the final list ended up so dominated by noir that I watched for WDYMYHS. Maybe that was inevitable when I put specific effort into watching a pile of highly-acclaimed movies from a genre I love, but it also feels kinda unfair.

So, other films that made it as far as my “top 20” list, but didn’t quite go all the way, included (in alphabetical order) The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cléo from 5 to 7, John Wick: Chapter 4, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, The Pied Piper, Remember the Night, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Shiva Baby. There were also a couple more noirs that didn’t quite make it: Nightmare Alley and Scarlet Street. All great films, but there’s only so much room.

Indeed, if my top ten was based on films’ best individual sequences rather than, y’know, the entire movie, there are some “almost made it”s that would actually top the chart — films like Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (for Revolting Children, a proper anthem of a song by Tim Minchin that Matthew Warchus directs the hell out of) and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (for the whole train climax… or the Rome car chase… or even just the absolutely perfect cut into the opening titles) and John Wick: Chapter Four (for… oh God, I can’t even decide: it’s wall-to-wall extravagantly fantastic action set pieces). Some films from the actual top ten would feature in such a list too, like the opening diner sequence from The Killers, or the finale of Oppenheimer (so good, even the Linkin Park meme version is a banger).

Moving away from the top ten itself, let’s recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month — some of which have already been mentioned in this post, but some of which haven’t. In chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Glass Onion, Ace in the Hole (another great noir!), Everything Everywhere All at Once, Scarlet Street, The Shiver of the Vampires, In a Lonely Place, Night and the City, All the Old Knives, The Pied Piper, Alien Love Triangle, The Killers, and Mildred Pierce.

Finally, as always, a mention for the 17 films that earned a 5-star rating this year. All ten of my top ten made the grade this year, but the other seven were (again, in alphabetical order) Ace in the Hole, The Banshees of Inisherin, Cléo from 5 to 7, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Pied Piper, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Scarlet Street.

With the caveat that I’ve inevitably forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films designated as being from 2023 that I haven’t yet seen. They’ve been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, representing a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

Anatomy of a Fall
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Asteroid City
Barbie
Bottoms
The Boy and the Heron
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Cocaine Bear
The Creator
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
The Exorcist: Believer
Expend4bles
Extraction 2
Fast X
Ferrari
Five Nights at Freddy’s
The Flash
Godzilla Minus One
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
The Killer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Knock at the Cabin
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
The Little Mermaid
Maestro
The Marvels
May December
Meg 2: The Trench
Napoleon
No Hard Feelings
Past Lives
Plane
Poor Things
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
Saltburn
Saw X
Scream VI
Silent Night
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan
Wish
Wonka

So, that’s it for 2023. All wrapped up within the first week, same as last year. I feel like I’ve got this down to some kind of science. (Oops — fate: tempted. Next year I’ll probably wind up having to post this stuff throughout the whole of January.)

And with a new week — the second of the year, already — beginning tomorrow, I feel like there’s no time to waste: onwards to 2024!

2023 | Weeks 3–4

Posted on February 4, 2023 by badblokebob

“Wait, did I miss Weeks 1 and 2?”, you may have asked yourself upon seeing this post pop up wherever you see my posts. And the answer is: no, I missed them, because I failed to watch a single film in either Week 1 or Week 2 of 2023. Most extraordinary.

Anyway, I wrote about that in January’s monthly review, so let’s get on with reviewing. I will note that I’ve skipped a couple of films from these weeks. Normally I only do that when I’ve already written their review and it’s long enough I feel it should be posted solo. I haven’t formally started writing about either The Girl Who Knew Too Much or Black Girl yet, but I have an inkling they’re both going to be quite long (the latter, definitely), so I’ve set them aside for the time being. Which leaves us with…

The Magician (1926)

Glass Onion (2022)

My Year of Dicks (2022)

Shotgun Wedding (2022)

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

The Magician

(1926)

Rex Ingram | 80 mins | Blu-ray | 1.33:1 | USA / silent

Based on W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, itself inspired by the antics of real-life occultist Aleister Crowley, The Magician concerns a mad scientist, Oliver Haddo (Paul Wegener), trying to complete an alchemical spell to create life by kidnapping a pretty virginal sculptor, Margaret (Alice Terry), so he can cut out her heart and use her blood. But why just kidnap a young woman when you can hypnotise her into marrying you? And why just kill her when you can use your hypnotic control to, er, take her gambling in Monte Carlo and make lots of money?

Wait, what?

Yeah, The Magician is kind of an odd film. Whether that’s due to Maugham’s original work and his desire to write a takedown of Crawley, or if it was the impetus of director Rex Ingram fancying a jolly around Europe with his wife, who he’d cast in the lead female role, I don’t know. Either way, the varied asides (before the eponymous Haddo even turns up, Margaret is paralysed in a sculpting accident and goes for experimental surgery to get it fixed) slow the pace, possibly to pad out what is really quite a slight story. On the other hand, there are some atmospheric sequences scatted throughout, like a demonstration of Haddo’s powers at a snake charming show, or a devilish orgy (yes, you read that right; no, it’s not at all shocking by modern standards). Plus, as if to balance out all the stuff with dark magic, Ingram finds room for dashes of humour, giving a bit of texture and stopping the film from becoming too self-serious.

However, The Magician remains most noteworthy today as a stylistic precursor to Universal’s initial run of horror movies in the early ’30s — James Whale’s Frankenstein, in particular, seems to have taken some cues from this film’s climax. It’s a fairly entertaining melodramatic fantasy-horror in its own right, but is primarily worth a look for those interested in the early development of the horror genre in Hollywood, or for silent movie fans who’d like something with a supernatural edge. General audiences are probably fine sticking to the established classics it influenced.

The Magician is the 1st film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2023.

Glass Onion

(2022)

aka Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

In some respects, Glass Onion delivered a movie closer to what I’d been expecting from the first Benoit Blanc mystery, Knives Out; that is to say, a proper murder mystery that is also unabashedly a comedy. Don’t get me wrong, I found Knives Out amusing — even more so with subsequent rewatches — but it has a kind of dry humour, with a wit more likely to raise a wry smile of acknowledgement than a guffaw. Glass Onion surely has such moments too, but it also has big, broad laughs that stand out more on a first viewing.

The mystery at its core remains a true Christie-style puzzler, with enough about-turn twists to keep you off balance — you can try and guess what’s going on if you want, but it’s just as much fun to be swept along for the ride — but the surrounding material is satirical almost to the point of parody. Kate Hudson’s airhead influencer is more caricature than character, for example, while there’s no doubt that Edward Norton’s billionaire is a merciless pisstake of Elon Musk. That’s annoyed certain right-wing commentators. The rest of us can just enjoy the accurate pillorying.

This overall shift in tone will, I think, dictate which of the two movies viewers prefer — i.e. whichever one hews closer to your personal taste. On the other hand, maybe you’ll be like me, and enjoy them both for their own particular quirks. I’ve already watched Knives Out three times, so I’ll have to watch Glass Onion a couple more to make any kind of fair comparison. Fortunately, I intend to.

Glass Onion placed 1st on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2023.

My Year of Dicks

(2022)

Sara Gunnarsdóttir | 26 mins | digital (HD) | 1.78:1 | USA & Iceland / English

One of the standout moments of this year’s Oscars nominations announcement was when Riz Ahmed read out the Best Short Animation nominees, thus having to proclaim “My Year of Dicks” to the world — especially as it was immediately followed by “An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It”. Only one of those is currently available to watch online, so I did.

The autobiographical story of screenwriter Pamela Ribon trying to lose her virginity in early-’90s Texas, My Year of Dicks unfolds across five vignettes, each telling a different (but connected) story of sexual misadventure. The chaptered structure gives away that this is kinda five short films strung together; but they’re also a series, with a definite through-narrative (if you’ve ever watched any narrative film before, you’ll easily spot the early supporting character who’s destined to have greater significance). So, while it doesn’t fully work as a single ‘film’ (it feels like binge-watching a series of short episodes), there is at least a reason to lump them all together as a unit.

The parts are further differentiated by employing a variety of animation styles to depict Pam’s fantasies and inner feelings. It’s an effective use of the medium to help overcome the fact that the actual stories are relatively rote “coming of age” tales. The most successful of all is the excruciating “sex talk” with Pam’s dad, in which a bombardment of animated self destruction reflects the desire for escape we’re all feeling at that point.

As a story based around female sexuality, My Year of Dicks has an air of timeliness about it. Equally, it feels like such barriers have been continually been being broken down for the past 20 or 30 years now; in which case, one does wonder if its success has as much to do with the amusement value in seeing that title on the Oscar short list as it does the film itself.

You can watch My Year of Dicks for free on Vimeo.

Shotgun Wedding

(2022)

Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel are about to get married in front of their family and friends at a remote tropical resort when pirates turn up demanding a ransom. Action and hilarity ensue. How exciting the action and how hilarious the hilarity is where opinions may differ.

For my money, the end result is a perfectly serviceable star-driven action-comedy. It’s the kind of middle-of-the-road, made-for-date-night fare that people keep bemoaning we’re losing thanks to Marvel’s box office dominance, even though Hollywood actually seems to keep making them (for another example from just last year, see The Lost City), and they get fairly widely slated every time one actually comes out.

Okay, the vast majority of the film’s funniest ideas and moments were in the trailer (heck, the way the first promo was edited to make the film look like a rom-com, only to about-turn into an action movie, is probably the best gag associated with the entire project), but the film itself has held back a couple of laugh-worthy moments, and even a few plot twists. No wheels are reinvented, but it’s fine as bit of non-demanding, Friday-night, never-going-to-watch-it-again, easy viewing.

Shotgun Wedding is the 5th film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2023.

The Banshees of Inisherin

(2022)

The new film from the writer-director of Three Billboards reunites the star pairing from his first movie, In Bruges, for an altogether different — but equally as hilarious — tale of two Irishmen. Here, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play lifelong friends on a small island off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s; that is until one day Gleeson decides he just doesn’t like Farrell anymore. Cue a serious of escalating encounters as Gleeson tries to get his former mate to just leave him be.

After the quite heavy, discourse-provoking narrative of Three Billboards, Banshees feels somewhat like McDonagh heading for smaller-scale, less contentious waters. Not that I think he’s running in fear — he doesn’t seem like one to avoid confrontation or provocation around his art — but I think that Banshees feels more of a piece with Bruges, in that it’s focused on just a handful of characters and their fairly everyday lives. That said, things do get a bit… outrageous; and the Irish civil war is ticking away on the mainland, suggesting at least one thematic interpretation of the friends’ fallout. That’s not to mention the subplots involving Farrell’s sister outgrowing her place on the island, or the woes of the local village idiot (played superbly by Barry Keoghan) and his abusive father, who happens to be the island’s policeman.

All of which might begin to sound a bit serious. But then, juggling life-and-death issues and hilarity is almost McDonagh’s trademark. Indeed, the film’s biggest laugh is related to the story of a woman’s death; meanwhile, its saddest moment involves not the abuse or self-mutilation of any of the human characters, but rather the fate of a beloved animal (that might read as a spoiler, but I consider it fair warning for animal lovers). In viewing, it’s consistently very funny, but creeps up on you with Stuff To Think About, too. I enjoyed it a lot; maybe not as much has In Bruges or Glass Onion (no relatable comparison there other than I watched them both this month), but enough that my score rounds up.

The Banshees of Inisherin is the 6th film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2023.

Archive 5, Vol.6

Posted on January 25, 2023 by badblokebob

Hey, wouldja look what it is! After getting off to a fairly strong start back at the beginning of 2022, I allowed my Archive 5 strand to fall by the wayside while I made a concerted attempt to stay up-to-date reviewing my new viewing (with mixed success). But now it’s back, hopefully on a more permanent basis. And I guess going forward it should include what’s left of 2022, because otherwise I’m stuck trying to catch up on those reviews before I can even begin 2023. But not just yet, because I selected today’s five films back when Vol.6 should originally have been posted (last February, gasp!)

For those who’ve forgotten, I have a backlog of 421 unreviewed feature films from my 2018 to 2021 viewing (448 if we add in 2022 too). This column is where I give those films their day, five at a time, selected by a random number generator.

Today, some films sizzle with heat or tension, while others fizzle into disappointment. This week’s Archive 5 are…

Paris When It Sizzles (1964)

7500 (2019)

The Rhythm Section (2020)

Carefree (1938)

The Lie (2018)

Paris When It Sizzles

(1964)

William Holden and Audrey Hepburn are clearly having a whale of a time in this marvellously cine-literate romp about a struggling screenwriter (Holden) and the secretary (Hepburn) hired to type up the script he hasn’t actually started. With the deadline just two days away, the pair rush to put a script together, which plays out as a film-within-a-film, also starring Holden and Hepburn, and allowing them even more fun as they get to overact extraordinarily. The “inside baseball” feel of the thing is furthered by a handful of surprise cameos.

Perhaps it’s me just misjudging the era, but the whole thing feels somewhat ahead of its time. In the way its such an insider’s riff on the movie industry, it feels like something you wouldn’t expect to have emerged until maybe the ’90s (The Player being an obvious point of reference). How well that worked for audiences at the time, I don’t know — maybe it did come across as too esoteric — but, viewed today by anyone with an idea of the history and inner workings of the Hollywood machine — it’s a lot of madcap fun.

Paris When It Sizzles was #129 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020. It placed 20th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2020.

7500

(2019)

After a title sequence that uses security camera footage to follow some shifty-looking blokes around Berlin airport, the film fades up in a passenger airplane cockpit as the crew arrive and begin their regular pre-flight routines. It’s a location we won’t leave for the next 80 minutes, as the unremarkable flight to Paris takes a turn when the aforementioned shifty-looking blokes attempt to invade the cockpit mid-flight, leaving it up to copilot Joseph Gordon-Levitt to try to rescue the situation.

A tense thriller set entirely in one confined location and told in (near-as-dammit-)real-time? This film could have been made just for me. Suffice to say, I was suitably pleased. This kind of style and pace clearly won’t be to everyone’s taste (I mean, the first 15 or so minutes are almost entirely about watching the pilots just doing their everyday job), but there’s something about the format that does it for me. I think it’s something to do with the inescapability of real-time — that what’s happening and what will happen is going to last as long as it lasts, no shortcuts — that serves to underscore the tension of a thriller storyline. That said, in this case the final act does lose some of the momentum and tension, as much as it tries to maintain it, meaning it feels like it limps to the end, with the really suspenseful stuff having expired a little after the hour mark. It’s not that this final act is bad, just that it feels like a comedown from what’s gone before.

Still, Gordon-Levitt is great throughout, carrying a large chunk of the film singlehanded, and there’s ultimately a more nuanced treatment of the terrorists than you might expect. I saw someone criticise it for trying to humanise one of them, as if that was problematic. Sure, terrorists are bad guys, but they’re still human beings underneath, and they’ve been plenty demonised enough in plenty of less thoughtful media — I’m not sure it should be considered controversial or a step too far to suggest that one of them (out of four) might be a misguided teenager rather than Evil Personified. On the flip side, I read another review that trashed the film for “featuring brown terrorists again”. I imagine those two reviewers would have a lot to disagree about…

7500 was #144 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

The Rhythm Section

(2020)

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I watch movies with a bad rep in case I see something in them that everyone else* missed — because that does happen. In that vein, The Rhythm Section isn’t some overlooked masterpiece, but I don’t really get why everyone hated it so much.

Blake Lively uglies up and forces an English accent to star as Stephanie Patrick, a drug-addicted prozzie who used to be a pretty Oxford student until her family died in a plane crash three years earlier, which a journalist now tells her was a terrorist attack that MI6 have covered up. Events lead her to a disgraced agent (Jude Law) who agrees to train her to hunt down the people responsible.

Hardly the most plausible storyline ever, but it’s no more ludicrous than many a thriller. So, as a genre piece, well, it’s certainly not the greatest action-thriller ever made, but it’s decent overall with a couple of neat twists on the usual formula. The primary one is that our heroine isn’t actually very good at being an action hero and keeps fucking up. Normally these films are about highly competent super agents (Jason Bourne, John Wick, etc), or newbies who take to it like a duck to water. Stephanie’s borderline incompetence is not only a mite more realistic, it makes a refreshing change, and at times is even successfully used to heighten the tension.

Unfortunately, other aspects were stale on arrival. For no reason, it begins halfway through and then does the “8 Months Earlier” thing. This is a personal bugbear of mine, because it’s a trick that’s been used to death at this point, routinely trotted out to no real purpose. Usually it’s used as a cheap way to deliver some action upfront because otherwise there won’t be any until somewhere in Act Two, which is just an insult to the audience’s attention span. In other cases, the film just got unlucky. I imagine when they conceived of a single-shot car chase it seemed like an original idea — as it probably did to all the other filmmakers who attempted the same thing around the same time; not least Netflix’s Extraction, which did it bigger and therefore better. Oh well.

Ultimately, I suppose The Rhythm Section is fundamentally derivative, with only fleeting moments of originality. But I still thing everyone else was overly negative — it’s not bad, just not strikingly fresh. I think if you enjoy Bourne-esque action-thrillers, you should enjoy this.

* It’s never everyone else, but you know what I mean. ^

The Rhythm Section was #138 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

Carefree

(1938)

Fred Astaire is a psychiatrist prone to misogynistic views and unethical practices who mimes playing the harmonica and performs dance routines with golf balls, and Ginger Rogers does a song & dance about yams (because Astaire thought it was so silly, he refused to sing it. He was right). Yeah, I think it’s fair to say this isn’t the couple’s finest hour. The public agreed: this was the first Astaire-Rogers film to lose money on its initial release.

That said, it’s not without the occasional charm. Rogers still shines — the sequence where she goes around playing naughty pranks with a cheeky grin while under the influence of anaesthetic is a delight — and there’s a slow-motion dream-sequence dance that is rather lovely. But these are fleeting pleasures amongst the distasteful storyline (see: my description of Astaire’s character) and less refined moments (there’s a song about yams).

Carefree was #97 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021.

The Lie

(2018)

Although it debuted to most of the world as one in a series of eight Blumhouse original movies that premiered together on Amazon Prime in 2020, The Lie is listed as a 2018 film because that’s when it premiered at TIFF under a different title (Between Earth and Sky). The fact it went from being a standalone production to one of a series released en masse provides a clue as to how well it went down.

The film has a solid premise that starts out well enough: a father (Peter Sarsgaard) and daughter (Joey King) are driving to a ballet retreat when they spot her best friend waiting by the side of the road, so they offer her a lift. Later, they stop in the middle of nowhere so the friend can go to the bathroom, but she falls off a bridge into an icy river. Or possibly the daughter pushed her. Either way, presumably she couldn’t survive the fall, and her body has washed away. Fearing how all that would look, they set about covering it up… which is where things go awry, both for the characters and us viewers. The longer the story goes on, the further it departs from actions and consequences that feel plausible. It’s not ludicrously far-fetched, it just doesn’t feel right; like people wouldn’t make those decisions, or those decisions wouldn’t have those consequences. The lead cast give it their best shot, but they’re battling against material that’s below their skills.

Then there’s an inevitable last-minute twist that just hurls the whole thing off a bridge. Kate Erbland for IndieWire wrote that it “should rank among the all-time great fake-outs,” and she’s sort of right: it could have been a reveal for the ages, but rather than eliciting a pleasant “OMG I don’t believe it!”, it plays as “ugh, I don’t believe it.”

The Lie was #245 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

The Best of 2022

Posted on January 6, 2023 by badblokebob

And so my review of the year reaches its end in the usual fashion: with the best films I watched for the first time in 2022, plus a few honourable mentions, and a list of notable new releases I missed.

Regular readers may have noticed there’s no “worst” list this year. As I wrote last year, the idea of singling out a list of bad movies has become highly unfashionable in recent years, especially when big-name publications do it. I don’t think such lists are wholly without worth (they acknowledge that, as a film viewer, it’s not all sunshine and roses), and there’s a big difference between a major publication slagging off some recent releases (which may affect those films’ continued financial success and their makers’ careers) and a one-man blog picking a couple of lesser films from what he happened to watch that year (which rarely includes recent releases, and wouldn’t have an impact on them even if it did). Nonetheless, in the spirit of celebrating what you love and staying quiet about the rest, I’ve decided to ditch my “worst” list. (If you want, there’s still the “Least Favourite” award in my monthly Arbies.)

With that said, it’s on with…

The Eleven Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2022

Continuing with the methodology I’ve used since 2016, this list features the top 10% of my first-time watches from the year. In 2022, the total was 111, which means there are 11 films on this year’s “top 10”.

As ever, it’s not just 2022 releases that are eligible for my 2022 list. Consequently, in recent years I’ve included a ‘yearly rank’ for films that had their UK release during the previous 12 months. However, I watched so few of the year’s big hitters in 2022 that I felt to rank what I did see would be misleading. There are too many acclaimed films omitted only because I’m not able to consider them, not because I don’t think they’re worthy. Hopefully I’ll get back on top of seeing new releases, so a yearly ranking can return in the future.

11 Mona Lisa

Take a noir storyline then run it through gritty “kitchen sink” British sensibilities, and you get this: a film that works as both a neo-noir gangster thriller and a character study of a man revising his views of the world. [Full review.]

10 Prey

Studios keep trying to rehash their ’80s sci-fi/action IPs, and they keep producing mediocre results. Thankfully, someone has finally bucked the trend. Prey works in part because it abandons continuity and takes a back-to-basics approach to its alien menace. Setting it in a completely different time period adds more opportunities for fresh perspectives and developments. It’s such a seemingly simple idea that works so well, and one that’s eminently repeatable. Predators vs knights? Predators vs samurai? Predators vs cowboys? Yes, yes, and yes, please, and anything else you can think of. [Full review.]

9 Ambulance

Michael Bay has always been a divisive filmmaker. His brash, bombastic style isn’t for everyone. But I think there’s a method to his madness (even when it results in trash) and so, when he’s on form, he remains one of the most exciting action filmmakers. Ambulance shows he’s still got the goods. You could imagine the storyline — after a bank heist goes wrong, two crooks escape in an ambulance, along with the cop they shot and a paramedic trying to save him — being from a 1940s film noir; a grim character study of men under pressure. That side of it is still in there, just dressed up with all the wildness of only-semi-restrained Bayhem. [Full review.]

8 The Ghost Writer

A thriller about… writing a book? Ah, but when the book in question is the autobiography of a disgraced, potentially criminal former Prime Minister, and the book’s new ghost writer has been brought in because his predecessor died under suspicious circumstances, well, you begin to see where there are questions to be answered. Pierce Brosnan is perfect for the role of a former politician who is 50% charming and 50% believable as a scheming villain, while Ewan McGregor leads us through the twisty plot as an everyman who needs the money but still has a conscience. Will the truth out? [Full review.]

7 West Side Story

Spielberg, man. If you’d told me a remake of West Side Story would end up in my top ten of the year, I’d have given you a funny look. I didn’t love the original film version, but I also didn’t think it could be bettered — it’s a classic for a reason. Surely any remake was doomed to be lesser? But ah, here comes Steven Spielberg, a director whose style clearly chimes with my taste (in fairness, his work helped define my taste, thanks to watching the likes of Indiana Jones, and Spielberg-produced/-emulating movies such as Back to the Future, at a formative age). His version screams Movie in a way so few films do nowadays, and the changes he and his team have made to the material elevate it even beyond the ’61 film, for my money. [Full review.]

6 High and Low

Toshiro Mifune plays a man presented with a life-changing moral dilemma in this thriller from director Akira Kurosawa. It’s a film of two halves: the first, contained almost to one room in near-real-time, sees Mifune’s business executive grapple with a conundrum that could ruin his career; the second becomes intensely procedural as it follows the police investigation and fallout from Mifune’s actions. With its precision attention to detail and healthy dose of mundanity, Kurosawa conjures an intense realism — the film could almost be a documentary; only, a documentary could never be this finely controlled. [Full review.]

5 Mass

Disappointingly relegated to “Sky Original” status here in the UK (usually a dumping ground for low-quality genre movies), Mass is a film that deserves to be more widely seen (the story of too many films buried on random streaming services nowadays, I fear — how many people have actually seen Best Picture winner CODA when it’s locked away on Apple TV+?) The less you know going in the better to be hit with the film’s full emotional weight. And it is a heavy film, but only in a way the befits its subject matter. Made up almost entirely of four people sat round a table talking, it is nonetheless “a blisteringly emotional gut-punch … but, with that, it’s ultimately cathartic.” [Full review.]

4 Encanto

I do enjoy a Disney animation, but one has never broken into my top ten before (Zootropolis was 15th in 2016 and Moana was 16th in 2017). That’s partly the luck of the draw (I watched over 50% more films in each of those years), but also something about how well Encanto works — which, frankly, I can’t quite put my finger on. I mean, all the obvious elements are there: catchy songs, likeable characters, impressively fluid animation, a strong message about what matters. But there’s something else, too; a sprinkling of magic that, for me at least, elevates the film to be something even more special. I say I like a Disney film, but I don’t revisit them too often. I’ve already watched Encanto twice. In one year? That’s not like me! So, hopefully you see my point. [Full review.]

3 Top Gun: Maverick

I feel the need — the need for actors doing their flying stunts for real! Striking usage of the IMAX aspect ratio! Memorable callbacks to the original movie! Cheesy music that fits the tone perfectly! Actual humour! Proper subplots! Top Gun: Maverick is old-fashioned blockbuster moviemaking done with modern sensibilities (can you imagine them actually putting actors in jets back in the ’80s? For one thing, where would they have put those great big film cameras?) Actor/producer Tom Cruise has spent decades now perfecting this brand of big-screen entertainment, and here he shows the next generation how it should be done — both in-film, as a pupil-turned-teacher trying to get a class of the best pilots to be even better, i.e. as good as he is; and in real life too, rocking up in an era when the box office is dominated by previz- and CGI-driven superhero theme-park-rides-as-cinema, and giving us a done-for-real spectacle that kicked all their asses at the box office. The movies, and movie stars, are only dead when Tom Cruise says they are.

2 Les Enfants du Paradis

According to IMDb, when Children of Paradise (to use its translated title) was initially distributed in the USA, it was promoted as “a sort of French-made Gone with the Wind”. It’s not a bad comparison. Not in a literal sense — this isn’t about a spoilt rich girl getting caught up in a civil war on the wrong side — but as an epic, years-spanning romantic melodrama? There are some similarities. It’s the story of a courtesan-turned-actress and the four men in her orbit — a mime artiste, an aspiring actor, a wannabe crook, and a moneyed gent — in and around the theatrical scene of 1830s Paris. It’s told with a style that feels adapted from a novel — it’s got that kind of scope, with its timespan and array of characters, and depth, which feel more like literature than something conceived directly for the screen. In fact, most of the characters are based on real people, which I suppose is neither here nor there, but does add another layer of interest. Whatever makes it work is enough to keep it thoroughly compelling even with a running time over three hours.

1 Manhunter

I first became aware of Manhunter many moons ago, as a piece of footnote trivia in the history of movies: “did you know there was a Hannibal Lector film before Silence of the Lambs?” What a crazy idea! How bad it must have been to be so thoroughly overshadowed by Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning version. Well, the history of the movies is rarely so straightforward; and as the immediate acclaim for Lambs has died down, and its various sequels and prequels have petered away, Manhunter has been able to reemerge somewhat. And so it should, because this is a great movie. Maybe not a great Hannibal Lector movie (Brian Cox is very good in the role, with less of the ticks and tricks that made Hopkins so memorable, but he’s not the focus of the story), but a superb “hunt for a serial killer” thriller. It’s dripping with ’80s style thanks to a director who helped define what that even meant (via his involvement with Miami Vice), while the hero cop, played by William Petersen, feels ahead of his time, struggling with the mental toll of previous cases as he tries to do the right thing and stop another killer. Such a mix of style and substance makes for an all-round fulfilling film; one that I think deserves every bit to be celebrated alongside Jonathan Demme’s more widely-acknowledged movie.

To celebrate it topping my list, Manhunter is on BBC Two tonight at 11:05pm, and on iPlayer for 30 days afterwards.*

As usual, I’d like to highlight a few other films.

Firstly, I wrote this little paragraph not sure where to use it, but here seems a good place. That’s to say: I love a minor film noir. Just a solid, competently made, usually 60-to-80-minute programmer. The highly-regarded Classics are all well and good — I appreciate their quality; why they’re ‘better’ — but, in many respects, I get more actual enjoyment (certainly in a relaxed, easy-viewing sense) from a run-of-the-mill type film. Not bad ones, you understand, just average fare. And here seems a good place to say that because 2022’s Challenge compelled me to watch a few noirs of that ilk. All of them were on the long list for my top ten, but none quite made it. I’m talking about the likes of Christmas Holiday, He Walked by Night, Killer’s Kiss, My Name Is Julia Ross, and Repeat Performance. (I also liked The Killing, but that’s in no way a “minor” noir.) Mr. Soft Touch grew on me as it went on, too, but that’s probably one to only be watched in December.

Next, here’s a recap of the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month. Some have already been mentioned in this post, but some haven’t… In chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Mass, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, West Side Story, High and Low, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, The Ghost Writer, Ambulance, Repeat Performance, Top Gun: Maverick, The Mission, Manhunter, and Les Enfants du Paradis.

Finally, something I’ve always done in this section is list every film that earned a 5-star rating during the year. In part that’s because there’s normally far too many to include in my list, even if it weren’t for the fact 4-star films usually sneak in too. But this year, there were only six films that received full marks, and all of them made the top 10%, too. Nonetheless, they were Les Enfants du Paradis, High and Low, Manhunter, Mass, Top Gun: Maverick, and West Side Story. Additionally, there were also full marks for my rewatch of the original Scream.

I’ve been creating these “50 Unseen” (as I call them for short) lists for 16 years now, and it doesn’t get any easier to choose what to include — or, rather, what to exclude.

It became a little easier in the past few years, because I was watching so many movies that the number of wide-release titles I’d missed fell, leaving room for more arthouse-y ‘hits’ — films the masses didn’t see but Film People were chatting about. But I watched very few new films this year — just 18 with a 2022 UK release date, down from 30+ in the last few years (with a high of nearly 60 in 2019). Those are small numbers compared to people who watch multiple brand-new films every week, but it had been enough to cover a significant percentage of ‘major’ releases. 18 is… well, not.

With an initial long-list of almost 150 films, I did consider increasing this list to 100 titles. It would be in keeping with the site’s theme, after all. But 100 is such a big number… I mean, history suggests I won’t manage to watch the 50 listed films within the next decade or two, so how long would 100 take? No, 50 simply feels about the ‘right size’ for a list of this type, whereas 100 feels excessive. Besides, something is always going to get left off, it’s just how far down the list that cutoff comes.

So, with the caveat that I’ve inevitably forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films designated as being from 2022 that I haven’t yet seen. They were chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, and hopefully represent a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

Aftersun
All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
Babylon
The Banshees of Inisherin
The Batman
Black Adam
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Blonde
Bullet Train
Crimes of the Future
Decision to Leave
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Don’t Worry Darling
Downton Abbey: A New Era
Elvis
Empire of Light
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Halloween Ends
Jackass Forever
Jurassic World Dominion
Lightyear
Men
The Menu
Minions: The Rise of Gru
Moonfall
Morbius
Nope
The Northman
Pinocchio
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical
RRR
She Said
Smile
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Strange World
Thor: Love and Thunder
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Turning Red
Tár
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Uncharted
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Wendell & Wild
The Whale
X

And that’s another year over.

I gotta say, I’m quite pleased with how quickly I wrapped it all up — I haven’t got my “best” list out by January 6th since 2017. It shouldn’t feel like a rush to get this stuff online, but when many people are sharing their lists before the end of December (or even earlier, in the case of some publications), a week or more into January feels “late”.

Anyway, I’m going to leave a couple of days to let the end of 2022 finally sink in, and then I’ll start waffling on about my targets for 2023.

* Obviously it’s not actually because of my list, just a coincidence. ^

Scream (1996)

Posted on October 28, 2022 by badblokebob

The 100 Films Guide to…

Someone has taken their love of
scary movies one step too far.

Country: USA
Language: English
Runtime: 111 minutes
BBFC: 18
MPAA: R

Original Release: 20th December 1996 (USA)
UK Release: 2nd May 1997
Budget: $14 million
Worldwide Gross: $173 million

Stars
Neve Campbell (The Craft, Wild Things)
David Arquette (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Never Been Kissed)
Courtney Cox (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, 3000 Miles to Graceland)
Drew Barrymore (Firestarter, 50 First Dates)

Director
Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Red Eye)

Screenwriter
Kevin Williamson (I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty)

The Story
In the quiet town of Woodsboro, a mysterious man in a mask starts murdering teenagers, first taunting them with horror movie trivia questions.

Our Hero
Sidney Prescott is an ordinary high school girl… apart from the fact her mother was murdered a year ago, and it was her eyewitness testimony that saw a man sentenced to death. Now, a serial killer seems to be targeting her — could the events be connected?

Our Villain
A slasher movie has to have a distinctive-looking, nicknamed serial killer at its centre, and here it’s Ghostface — although he’s actually only called that once in the film itself. His costume is a generic Halloween outfit bought from any old store, and is technically called Father Death. Why didn’t that name stick instead? Probably because it’s a bit shit.

Best Supporting Character
The film has severable memorable supporting turns, but perhaps the key one is nerd and video store employee Randy (Jamie Kennedy). He knows all the rules of horror films, and when it turns out his friends don’t, he helpfully gives them an explainer — which also works for any audience members who maybe aren’t so au fait with the genre either.

Memorable Quote
“No, please don’t kill me, Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!” — Tatum

Memorable Scene
The opening scene: everyday teenage girl Casey (played by Movie Star™ Drew Barrymore) is preparing to watch a movie when she gets a phone call. It seems like a wrong number, but the man keeps calling back. At first their chat is a bit flirty, but then it begins to get a bit weird, and soon… well, if you haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.

Making of
The movie’s climax takes place at a house party the kids are having to take their mind off the killings, or something. But you wouldn’t guess it was the climax to start with, because it begins a little over halfway through the film — the ‘scene’ altogether lasts 42 minutes. It was shot across a gruelling 21 days of night shoots. After it was finally done, the crew had T-shirts made saying “I Survived Scene 118”.

Next time…
Two direct sequels followed in 1997 and 2000. More recently, the franchise has been subjected to the usual rounds of revivals: it took on parodying the ‘legacy sequel’ with a continuation in 2011, then did the same again with another one in 2022. A sequel to that is on the way next year. In between, there was a spin-off TV series that lasted three seasons. Season 1 and 2 were a reboot, unconnected to the movies; then it rebooted itself for season 3, still with no connection to the movies.

Awards
1 MTV Movie Award (Movie)
1 MTV Movie Award nomination (Female Performance (Neve Campbell))
4 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards (Wide-Release Film, Actress (Neve Campbell), Supporting Actress (Drew Barrymore), Screenplay)
1 Fangoria Chainsaw Award nomination (Supporting Actor (Skeet Ulrich))
3 Saturn Awards (Horror Film, Actress (Neve Campbell), Writer)
3 Saturn nominations (Director, Supporting Actor (Skeet Ulrich), Supporting Actress (Drew Barrymore))

Verdict

By the mid-’90s the once-popular horror genre was languishing in a mire of endless sequels to the same old titles — but then Scream came along and gave it a much-needed kick up the rear end. Originally titled Scary Movie (in some ways, a more apt title), Scream is a horror movie that knows it’s a horror movie — a kind of self-awareness, often (arguably mistakenly) referred to as post-modernism, that was ever so popular in the ’90s. But it worked for a reason: it treated the audience with respect. It said, “you know the rules, so let’s not pretend.” And that facilitates two things: by acknowledging the rules, it can play with them to make you laugh; and it can break them to surprise you. Thus Scream is simultaneously a spoof of the slasher genre and a genuine entry in it. It’s potentially a tricky tightrope to walk (several major directors were rejected because they thought the film was just a comedy), but Wes Craven nails the tone so perfectly that he makes it look easy. So what might have been a last-hurrah commentary on what had already been instead turned out to be the beginning of a new wave; one which has helped fuel the genre for over 25 years since.

High and Low (1963)

Posted on June 15, 2022 by badblokebob

aka Tengoku to jigoku

Akira Kurosawa has a good many classic films to his name, but, according to users of both IMDb and Letterboxd, this is the second best of them all — and, on the latter’s list, the 12th greatest film ever made, to boot. No pressure.

Adapted from the American crime novel King’s Ransom by Ed McBain, the film stars Toshiro Mifune as a business executive who we first meet being wooed to join a potential coup of the company. (The film rattles through a few twists early on to set up its initial dilemma, which I’m now going to spoil, so if you want to go in completely cold, jump to the next paragraph.) In fact, Mifune is plotting his own takeover, paid for by leveraging everything he has. But then, his young son is abducted, with the kidnappers demanding a huge ransom — if he pays, his carefully-laid plans will be impossible to execute; but it’s his son! But then, it turns out it isn’t his son — the crooks took the wrong boy, instead kidnapping the son of Mifune’s lowly chauffeur. But they don’t know that, and there’s no way in hell the poor chauffeur could pay a ransom. What’s a man to do?

Some might power a whole film on that storyline and dilemma, but it’s only the beginning of High and Low. Its original Japanese title (天国と地獄) literally translates as Heaven and Hell, and, as both monikers indicate, this is a film of two halves; of opposing forces; of extreme choices. Without wishing to spoil any more of what goes down, I’ll say that almost the first hour of the film takes place almost entirely in a single room. It feels like the whole thing might unfurl there, a la Hitchcock’s Rope — almost a formal exercise in telling a story from a single setting. But then it moves to an immediately more dynamic locale — a train — for a properly thrilling sequence, around which the story and structure pivots. The rest of the film goes ultra-procedural. A lengthy scene early in this half depicts a police debriefing in a manner that feels almost documentarian, as if we’re witnessing a genuine meeting filmed and presented in real-time, as various detective duos update senior officers and their colleagues on the specific aspect of the case they’ve been working.

This eye for detail, presented with a degree of mundanity, makes the film feel extra realistic. That extends to the final details. No spoilers, but, although you may call this a Thriller due to the type of story being told, it doesn’t climax with a big twist or revelation; no reveal of some super-clever grand plan that, with implausible foresight, anticipated and accounted for everything that’s happened. Rather, the film seems to proceed methodically and logically through every thread of investigation and consequence for its primary characters, until it simply has no more left to tell.

It’s certainly a fine piece of work — although, on first watch, I’d say I’ve seen several better examples of the genre and several better films by Kurosawa. But that isn’t truly a criticism of the film, rather of its high placing on the lists mentioned at the start. Awareness of such accolades has a tendency to overshadow any first viewing of a film that warrants them (just witness how many people are underwhelmed by Citizen Kane), so I look forward to returning to High and Low sometime under less pressure.

High and Low is the 30th film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2022. It was viewed as part of Blindspot 2022. It placed 6th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2022.